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Trying to make a heater for my garage, so I decided on an 8" set up. I found a gallon of sodium silicate for $15 and I'm wondering what ratio you recommend for fireclay, perlite, sand and sodium silicate for the burn chamber?

Welcome Whitefire, glad to have you with us. I have only played with sodium silicate in the form of Furnace Cement, so I can't give you an exact ratio. I did read elsewhere of a build using my core casting mix, and 4 oz. of sodium silicate was added to 2 qts. of mix, plus tap water as needed, and it cured hard. I think there's a pretty broad range that will work here. If I were you I would do a couple small test blocks and start with a very small ratio of the sodium silicate. I discovered my mix when I mixed a bit of fireclay up in a wheelbarrow that had some furnace cement residue in it. The next morning that fire clay was quite hard, and there was barely any furnace cement in there to start with. If you do experiment, I'd love to hear what you find so we can put some figures on it for folks.