Quote:
Originally Posted by DeepFrz
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All of us Eber owners wish!
The service interval is far shorter than that.
3,000 hours is the actual designed service life.
I have faced the same question as the OP, and I use my boat in places where working heat might be a question of life and death.
I think there are a couple of viable options for making the heating really reliable enough:
1. Use a pot heater like a
Dickinson, Sig, etc. These things are not low
maintenance, but they have like three moving
parts, and can be maintained without any big trouble. These things have a number of advantages, but on the other hand they have multiple disadvantages so not suitable for everyone.
2. Learn how to service the Eber and acquire the necessary tools and
parts. It would be nice if the heat were fit and forget but it's just not. But servicing them is not difficult -- you have to clean the combustion chamber and glow
plug every year, and once in a while you'll have to replace a flame
sensor or glow
plug. After 1000 hours or so you might need to replace a burner tube, and rarely a
water pump fails. The early ones had control units which were extremely expensive and unreliable, but the MII versions apparently have
solved that. So it's not really such a horrible big deal -- just another thing like a
generator or
engine which requires attention, requires knowledge, skill, tools and parts, to keep running.
3. To make it really failsafe, install TWO of them. If one needs service, just switch over to the other one. That's what I will be doing on my next boat.
4. These units have a limited service life. If you are running them 24/7, then
budget to replace them every few years.
If you want to heat with
diesel, there is no
maintenance free way to do it. If we start from this fact, then it puts everything else into perspective.
And
diesel is the only reasonable thing to heat with on a cruising boat. Solid
fuel is not really practical, and
propane is risky, expensive and hard to source and lug to the boat in quantities needed for heat.
As to other, cheaper types -- the Russian Planar ones have become very popular in the UK and are getting good
reviews. They are cheaper than Eber and Webasto and are apparently rugged and durable. Maybe worth checking out. The parts should be cheaper, too, and the company which makes them is a large enterprise with apparently good service and support. I guess it's logical that the Russians would know something about heat. I would personally avoid the Chinese imitations of the Planars.
I have stuck with Eber, however. I recently replaced my old Hydronic 10, which came with the boat as new built, with a Hydronic MII 12. We'll see how it holds up. The old Hydronic 10 worked, like clockwork, for two years, the way I use it, before refusing to start and needing some kind of service or another. I spent a lot of
money on it, unfortunately, as over the years I have failures of the control unit and burner tube, both a $1000+ failure, besides the small stuff like flame sensors and ordinary maintenance. I finally condemned it after the second control unit failure -- and Eber doesn't even supply them any more.
"The way I use it" is not 24/7. I do need heat year around (home port is above 50N and I roam as far North as 70N), but I don't run it all the time. I use
electric when I'm on
shore power, and off grid typically run the Eber for a few hours in the evening and a couple of hours in the morning, shutting it down at night and during the day time. Even in
Greenland I did not, contrary to expectations, need to run it all the time.
I'm not sure it's actually a good idea to run it all the time, as it will idle a lot, and idling causes it to carbon up faster. Maybe having two of them -- a big one and a small one -- would be a good approach for this. Run the small one all the time if you want, and it it's undersized enough, it might have a good enough load for
health. Set up the big one to come on from time to time as need when a lot of heat is needed.
Another boss Eberspacher tip -- if you want to extend the service interval -- install a kerosene (paraffin) tank and run the heater on kerosene for an hour or two every couple of weeks. This is supposed to burn off all the carbon and keep the combustion chamber squeaky clean. Carboning up of the combustion chamber is the main service item.
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