Martin Direct Vent Propane Wall Furnace Heater for Indoor Homes or Offices with Built-in Thermostat and Glass Panel, 20,000 BTU

This is the second Martin vented wall heater that I have purchased and installed. The first heater is the smallest one. 9,000 btu I believe, and it is the primary heater in my wife's 12 x 16 studio. This one is the 20,000 btu version that I installed in our main living room. Our home is in the mountains in western North Carolina at about 2500 feet elevation. The house is 2 stories and about 1500 square feet. Our primary heating system consists of 2 9,000 btu mini split heat pumps; one downstairs and the other on the second floor. Generally they provide sufficient heat, and cooling in the summer, but during an extended period of sub freezing temperatures, they come up a little short. The additional heat from the Martin gas heater keeps the house warm. An additional advantage is that it doesn't require electricity. It is strictly old school with no fans or electric igniter. The only minor problem was finding the best location for installation. Due to the rather large vent hole required, our options for it's location were limited.Overall my wife and I are very pleased with its looks and performance.I highly recommend it.

I purchased this to replace my parents old propane wall heater. After much research, I settled on this brand, made the purchase and crossed fingers it would work. The install couldn’t have been easier. There was already a vent hole through the wall of the house, so that was done already. When we set the new heater in place, it fit perfectly! We screwed the unit to the wall using the included spacers, trimmed and installed the new vent piping and cover, hooked up the propane and we we were done! The heat output is better than the old unit, that makes my mom very happy. I purchased the glass front, so my parents can keep an eye on what’s going on with the flames. Extremely happy with the purchase, so far.

Not 5 star worthy but close. I would add that this is a pretty good little unit for heating a small space, installation is pretty strait forward if you follow the instructions, there are You Tube videos out there that also do a great job of explaining how to install. I do like the window for seeing the flame, it gives a nice ambiance to my cabin, it heats well and the flame automatically adjusts up and down to meet the thermostat setting. Some on here have stated it is not very good quality, I would have to agree with that statement as far as the outer shell and back is concerned, the front cover is flimsy and held onto the aluminum portion of the front with snap on washers of which half had fallen off during shipping, also, the back was slightly bent mainly due to poor shipping and handling. I was able to find all the washers and reinstall them as well as straiten the back with some hand manipulation, in my opinion, for the money, they should make this unit a little more sturdy. all and all, I am satisfied with its performance. I have about a weeks run time in temperatures near 0 Fahrenheit in a 200 square foot cabin with 14 foot ceiling and a 100 square foot loft at the time of this review, it has easily kept the temperature at 69 Degrees and it is working as advertised.

What I liked best about this product was the smooth ordering and delivery. The heater is in my cabin in the High Sierras in California. After I ordered it but before it was delivered the forest was closed due to extreme fire danger. I went to my cabin to be sure everything was okay and to my surprise there was the heater. It was delivered at the exact time and day that was stated on my initial order. I really thought I would never see it but the delivery truck made it through the security of the forest rangers and today it was installed. The installation took the pro about two hours. I think it looks great! I have not tried it out get so I can not speak to the warmth.

Love this unit. Installed it last Fall (2022) and have driven across the country and back with it and weekend trips up to Maine for snowmobiling. It’s rock solid, self regulates temps well once you have dialed it in, and doesn’t take up much space.My trailer is moderately insulated (maybe R10 overall), about 1,200 cubic feet or 200sq ft, and it has kept up with nights in the negative degrees F.

Very noisy with contraction,Expansion--the thermostat is not calibrated correctly and does not cycle as intended---will send back for warranty work

This is a good unit. I don't know if i'd call the fit and finish PERFECT, but it is pretty solid and worth the money. It has worked flawlessly every day since install. We have the 20,000 btu unit.For those looking for some fuel consumption numbers they can use, we consistently consume about 5.5 pounds of fuel every 24 hours to heat a 330 sq ft well insulated tiny home with 14 ft ceiling to 19 degrees above the outside ambient temperature. A btu is a btu, so doing a little math you should be able to convert that to just about any size or temperature you want. You may have to wing it a bit on how well yours is insulated.An interesting feature i didn't realize - it automatically turns the fire down as it approaches it's desired temperature. So it fires up, gets the place warm, and as it's getting close to it's ideal temp it slows the fuel consumption down. If it's cold out there may be a very tiny little bit of flame on the burners still, just to maintain temp. That seems to save fuel and does a great job for us in making the place pretty consistently comfortable. It holds the inside temperature very steady. Great feature. It does mean that much of the time you can't really see the flame, but oh well. With the temp about 4 degrees celcius outside the unit keeps the place warm with almost no effort.They say it's for a 550 sq ft space - but honestly i think it would have to get pretty cold outside before it struggled to heat that. I would say that if your temps are more like -10 it would have no problem with a space more like 750. At -20 then yeah, maybe 500. At 4 celcius it never reaches full flame again once it's hit it's desired heat - stays on low most of the time and occasionally might go to middle for a bit, maybe high middle for a short while, it's not struggling at all, it's barely working at keeping the temp 19 above ambient. Mind you that's for 330 square ft with very high ceilings, which is pretty close to 500 with normal ceilings.It is a convection style, it doesn't really need a fan. it creates it's own circulation. Because we have high ceilings i use a very small fan to blow hot air down into the living area, and even a very little bit of fan does the job perfectly. If the ceilings were normal height i doubt i'd bother.So far we are very pleased with it. Our daughter had to come home to live for a bit with her baby and we needed heat in the tiny home for them where they are staying. They're very comfortable.We mounted the unit a little higher than some people are, about 4 ft from the floor. We didn't want the baby who's about to start walking to be able to touch the glass. That actually seems to help with the air circulation compared to the electric baseboard convection units i had before.All in all - it's exactly what i expected, it's doing exactly the job i wanted, and it's a very fair price for what appears to be a very solid unit.Important note - while spare parts are available, i was worried that the pezio igniter would die and i wouldn't be able to get a relacement or something. They always seem to go. It's a standard barbeque system that you can purchase lots of places and should be easy to replace if there ever came a day that it wasn't available from the manufacturer.**EDIT TO ADD UPDATE**August 2021 - We installed this in about december 2019 and it's been in near constant use for two winters and the spring/summer/fall in between. The daughter moved back out and i used it for a home office every day (started working from home during covid). It did great and was very consistent for both winters Fuel consumption has not changed and the unit performs perfect. During high winds when the wind hit the unit just right while it was on "standby" it managed to blow the pilot light out - it's only done that 2 times in 2 years and it relit instantly with no problems, and we get some pretty serious wind a lot of the time. The unit stays clean and works well. At this point I've run about 7 tanks (300 litres roughly each tank) through it and it's just not a problem. The thing just works.You do have to chase the temp a bit. It is NOT like setting it to a single temperature and leaving it. The setting to keep it at a given temperature does change a little over the year as the weather warms up or cools off - but that means adjusting it once every month or two, not every day or anything. As expected it's good to about -10 in my application (maybe a little more), but after that a 5000 btu electric space heater will take you down to about -20 and change. And i do keep it pretty warm in there.Still very happy with the unit.***EDITED FOR ANOTHER UPDATE***May 2022, and we just finished one of the coldest winters around here in decades, along with freezing ice and driving winds. The unit still performs just like the day I put it in. I had always calculated that for the space it's in with the vaulted ceilings it'd be good to at least - 10 celcius but it actually did a little better than that, and even down to - 14 it was still quite livable without an extra electric heater. Fuel consumption hasn't changed and the unit isn't even a little dirty or dusty inside. After the daughter moved out the tiny home became my office and i work from home mostly now, and so it's been doing its thing 24/7 .You can't fault it for reliability anyway.

Bought two of these units for an addition being done on the house. I had them professionally installed as we are dealing with propane. The negative (the vent opening is un-necessarily huge - like 12" for a 4" exhaust pipe. (that's a big hole in a new wall with 6" of spay foam) Also during the pressure tests, both units had the same internal nut loose and was leaking gas. (a do it yourself-er might have missed this) as this was a factory screw-up. Overall I'm pleased with the heat output and the ease that it holds at a fairly constant 71 F. They both cycle on and off at a low flame and between the two of them are burning only about 4.5L of propane per day together over the period of the last 52 days. (Oct 15 to Dec 7) These are installed in 2 new bedrooms and heat up the new area including a long hallway, laundry room and bathroom (approx 700 sq ft with 10' ceilings ). They are certainly not working hard and if needed I have lots of dial (thermostat) to up the flame. So in my case, purchasing 2 - 20000 btu units might have been overkill, but if we get some -20 plus days over the winter we have lots of leeway if the heat needs to be cranked up. They do however make some noise as the metal expands and contracts with the heating and cooling down.

This review should be broken out in 2 places. 1) the actual heater itself and 2) the quality control and customer service.1) The heaters are amazing. We run a hunting / camping lodge in Canada with a recent addition of winter access for our customers. We built 2 new 300 sq foot bunkies at R20 walls and R40 ceilings with a 100 sq foot outhouse all fully insulated with heat provided only by the martin propane direct vent heaters. We went with two 20,000 BTU glass viewing window systems for the 300 sq foot bunkies and one 8000 BTU system for the composting outhouse. The entire property is off grid so the only heat source for these units in winter is these propane systems. All 3 of the heaters work great with no real issues other then 1 minor complaint on the 8000 BTU unit being difficult to get the pilot light going. Typical time is 20 - 40 seconds of filling the heating chamber with the gas release followed by spark and BAM it lights perfect. in -18C weather the units heat up the 300 SQ foot bunkies perfectly to a comfortable 20 C. The steel plates that radiant the heat out get hot enough to cook soup on if you want to risk it however we resorted to using a heat power radiant stove fan to help circulate the air. we are getting about 3 days of life off a 20LB tank in -18 weather on a 300 sq foot bunkie and to be completely honest there have been no issues at all in the heaters use on any of the bunkies or the outhouse. All in all i dont think you will have many issues with this product and the install is simple but does require basic knowledge as well as tools that most people may not carry in their jack of all trades kit.2) now moving onto the customer service is where this product fails. On the 3 heaters we ordered 2 of them arrived with missing parts. for one of the areas where parts were missing we ended up fabricating our own protection plates with some thin gauge tin however the other package was missing the entire mounting assembly and penetration plates for inside and outside the cut areas. The mounting plates are absolutely mandatory and the spacers that are used to mount the heater to the wall are specific to ensure no fires happen where proper air flow takes place behind the flame. Long and short you cant fabricate these missing parts without spending serious money and its a fairly custom part that you need from the manufacturer.We first tried phoning the customer support line where we did receive an answer immediately. They informed us to email the sales and support emails with pictures and descriptions of the missing parts. 3 days go by with no contact back. We email them a second time looking for an update and again no response back. We then call the support number again and inform them we are emailing the sales and support emails but no one is returning our emails. They ensure us on the phone to keep emailing them and they will respond shortly. After 3 weeks we had yet to receive any response back and had then resorted to attending a custom steel fabricator as well a having custom spacers 3D printed just so we can get the heater operational. Our 1 bunkie was not usable for 1 month as it had no heat at all and there is zero communication from MARTIN on the issue. In total we ended up spending almost $700 additional in having custom parts manufactured by a outside company where we would greatly appreciate some sort of recognition from MARTIN on the issue.All in all the heaters are amazing and they have a good product, but the fact that 2 out of 3 of our orders were missing parts shows there is clearly an issue in their packaging department and the lack of customer support should be a huge concern to anyone who wants the product but is likely to receive it with missing critical parts. I am hoping these heaters last as long as the other reviews say they have, if so i should be fine but if i do have issues or parts failing in several years and i require replacement i dont suspect MARTIN will be available to send them out or warranty the claims.

I bought that stove in 2020 then after the warranty a few pipes started to leak. I got a repair professional to fix the leaks. After a few months, it started to leak again. The plumber removed to 2 pipes out of the machine a told me to get two new ones because they were damaged. As of today, I'm still waiting for the company that are in Argentina to understand what is going on and send back the pipes. So in 3 years, I could never use the stove. And by the way, the repair guy told me that he is fixing a lot of those stoves and told me that it is not worth buying them as they always break.

Heating an 800 sq foot cabin (2x4 walls, 8 foot ceiling, well insulated) in northern Alberta with 2 of these heaters since October 2022. I only use 1 heater when we are not using the cabin. On the lowest thermostat setting maintains temp at +7c average temp outside is -12c. Looks like we use about 2 pounds of propane a day when running 1 heater. We have seen some days of -25c and heaters are lots of heat for the cabin.The ignitor is a bit difficult to reach - always catch my thumb nail on the thermostat dial next to it. Fortunately, it lights easy.Installed on 2/4 wall with paneling inside and wood siding outside. Determined wall height based on external vent location. I am not much of a handy man - took about 2 hours to install each heater not including propane - gas fitter installed the propane lines. The install instructions use very precise measures but over all the install is a bit forgiving.I put a heat powered fan on top of the heaters – seams to help move the heat out. Looks ok.Over all very happy.