How I remember the days when
air conditioning was the main
HVAC issue on
boats for me -- in
Florida.
Now my home port is above 50N and my favorite cruising grounds are even above 60N -- the Arctic Circle itself is 66.56.
So now obviously heat is the main issue, not aircon. I use heat year around, and I have a lot of space to heat. My
boat was built with an Eberspaecher 10kW central furnace which circulates an ethylene glycol mixture around the
boat to run three fan coils, plus domestic hot
water heating. The Eberspaecher is not user-serviceable (big minus) and requires a bit of attention on a regular basis, but in general I can't complain too much about it -- after the last
service almost two years ago it has been running perfectly, starting on the first attempt, etc. It does make some
noise and does consume some precious
diesel fuel -- unpleasant when you're paying full
taxes on it -- and for that reason, I rarely leave it running all night. I tend to warm the boat up with it in the evening and shut it down when I go to
bed, unless the temp outside is near or below freezing. Then run it for a couple of hours in the morning.
In the
Baltic, berthing is incredibly
cheap (as
cheap as 13 euros for a 54' boat), and the
marinas ("guest harbors") are mostly in beautiful and interesting places, and outside
Germany, the
electrical service seems to be all 16 amps. So here I have been spending much more time in
ports and less time at
anchor than I usually do. With the good
electrical service, I heat with
electric fan heaters most of the time. Two kW of heat (two heaters running on "low") have been keeping the boat nice and toasty (and dry) even in temps of 5 or 6 degrees.
The cheap Chinese fan heaters are a real KISS solution, but I find myself thinking about something more elegant.
For example, about heat pumps. I have no aircon on my boat and don't need it anywhere I have cruised the last five years, but at times like this (air temp 10 degrees;
water temp 16 degrees) a heat
pump would be fantastically efficient.
Has anyone ever spliced a heat
pump into a central
heating system on a boat? I have trawled the CruiseAir site and see that they do sell central water chillers/heat pumps, but there is no information about whether they can be used in an existing central heating system.
It seems to me that electrical resistance heat could also be added to the existing central heating system, and this should be quite simple, compact, and cheap. But I have been unable to locate suitable
equipment.
Lastly, I still dream about getting
engine and genset waste heat into my central heating system (there was a thread about this last year, where I got a lot of useful
advice, but still couldn't come up with a satisfying conclusion).
Anybody have any practical ideas? Experience to share?
Linear Mode
Recent Discussions