Hi all!
Not a someone to type frequently here, but heating onboard is important to us.
We have a kabola diesel pot burner stove (similar to a reflex) as a main heat source.
This works really well with a H-type chimney. We spent last
winter in
maine and new brunswick with temperaures down to -25c and 30 knots of
wind still keeping +20 or more down below.
We see two drawbacks with this heater. The first is that it gets really dry below (<40 percent humidity). This is fairly easy
solved with keeping a pot with
water on a couple of qarters to keep a distance from the top of the stove. This pot gives out enough moisture to keep it comfy and not to dry. (Wooden boat) steams of roughly 6 liters (1 1/2 gallons) in 24 hours, without boiling.
The other drawback is that when sailing in rough seas, typically reaching/running in 25-30 knots and 10-15 foot seas, and the boat is rolling from side to side it tends to get to much
fuel when rolling to one side and to little when rolliing to the other. This makes it soot and sometimes starve for fuel and go out.
For this reason we installed a webasto 5 kw forced air heater which works really well no matter how the boat behaves. The drawback with this is that it uses electricity to run, and don’t give anything near the heat output as the kabola which is rated at 4,6kw. And we seldom run the kabola at more than half speed.
The good thing about the webasto is that it is really good for those days when it’s wet and a little chilly, just flip a switch and it’s nice and toasty within an hour.
Another drawback with the webasto is that you need to run it full speed for a half hour every month. Not so nice if you’re in the tropics...
We also got a hold of a sardine wood stove, but this is not installed yet, so I can’t say how that will
work, but I’m hoping for some nice heat on those chilly wet days when it’s to warm for the diesel stove.
We also have a fan heater for when we’re hooked up to
shore power, which is not very often.
Anyway, this is our experieces with heating a boat, and I hope this is informative to someone reading this.
Maybe I should add that our boat has 2 inches of oak planking and 2 inches of pine
deck. This means a lot of built in
insulation and no
condensation as might occur on fibreglass/steel/aluminium.
Cheers from the
Azores (at the moment)