Active or inert boat heater.?

[ffiill]

Active-needs a power supply-webasto, Chinese etc hot air heaters.
Inert-Refleks, Tay lors, etc
Active Chinese a little over £100 whereas it will cost you £500 upwards for an inert heater.
Which do you prefer?

 

[jiris]

You have to consider your situation. Active heater opens the possibility of a totally automated heating system with a timer, thermostat, maybe remote control. It also offers a better distribution of heat over the boat. The downside is the power consumption. It is actually not that big and on a well equipped boat it may account for only a small part of the energy budget.
So, unless power is your problem, active is the way to go. Funny thing - as you noticed - it also comes out cheaper . I have a long experience with Eberspacher and lately with the Chink cheap machines. Very happy with both, would never go for an inert heater.

 

[prv]

Also a question of where you have space - a blown air heater will typically be mounted outside the living accommodation. Mine is in a protected corner of the cockpit locker, but some have been located in otherwise unused space inside large cockpit coamings, swoopy transoms, and other mouldings, meaning the effective consumption of space is zero (at least for the heater itself, ignoring ducting).

A shiny brass or stainless diesel or paraffin stove obviously needs to be mounted in a suitable - most likely fairly prominent and central - place in the saloon. Nice and cosy if you have the space and layout to accommodate that, but I know I would struggle to find somewhere suitable on Ariam. Also bear in mind the need for a chimney on deck more or less straight above, whereas a blown-air heater will exhaust through the topsides via a pipe you can route as needed.

Pete

 

[johnalison]

Active heaters can give a quick delivery of dry heat around the boat, and in the case on my Webasto, with little noise. They do though need a certain amount of power, and there can be reliability and service issues that would make a dumb heater more suitable for some boats and requirements.

 

[Kukri]

They do different things. But I would be wary of saying that liquid fuelled stove like a Refleks or a Taylor’s is ‘inert’ because you shouldn’t leave them un-watched.

I think a carefully installed solid fuel stove can stay in over night unwatched. But you can effectively get the same result by using a timer on a blown air type.

 

[Kelpie]

Traditionally, blown air heaters have been almost prohibitively expensive compared to solid fuel or drop feed options. But the arrival of Russian and Chinese heaters has changed all that.

The blown air units still do have some disadvantages: power consumption, noise, and complexity. You can't boil a kettle on one either. But for most people they probably make more sense.

Drip feed or solid fuel heaters still appeal if you want absolute reliability and your boat is small enough to be heated effectively by one single heat source (yet big enough to accommodate the fairly bulky heater and its flue).

 

[GHA]

Active-needs a power supply-webasto, Chinese etc hot air heaters.
Inert-Refleks, Tay lors, etc
Active Chinese a little over £100 whereas it will cost you £500 upwards for an inert heater.
Which do you prefer?

Prefer my Refleks, of course Used to stay lit constantly for days on end living onboard up in the freezing UK

Though depends on your situation, tied up in a marina with power wanting a warm boat if you pop down on a saturday night would push the choice towards blown hot air, on the hook reflecks is great. Nice hot plate on top for a pot of stew on a cold and wet winters evening is lovely, nice dry heat as well.

 

[scruff]

Prefer my Refleks, of course Used to stay lit constantly for days on end living onboard up in the freezing UK

Though depends on your situation, tied up in a marina with power wanting a warm boat if you pop down on a saturday night would push the choice towards blown hot air, on the hook reflecks is great. Nice hot plate on top for a pot of stew on a cold and wet winters evening is lovely, nice dry heat as well.

If we are tied up on a pontoon with electric - we use a small £10 electric fan heater. Much quieter and faster acting than the eberspacher. I do hanker for a nice coal burning stove on a boat - sailing along in winter with the glow of the fire on down below and then enjoying a whisky by the fireside at anchor with snow capped mountains surrounding the anchorage. Would need to be glass fronted mind you. Suspect it will never happen as far less convenient than the modern equivalents.

 

[geem]

We had a Dickinson diesel heater in the last boat. Worked very well. Enough room on top for a kettle. Would love one again if we are ever in a cold climate. Current boat has a blown air heater. Does the job but its like central heating or a log burning stove. Totally different solitions.

 

[Stemar]

If we are tied up on a pontoon with electric - we use a small £10 electric fan heater. Much quieter and faster acting than the eberspacher. I do hanker for a nice coal burning stove on a boat - sailing along in winter with the glow of the fire on down below and then enjoying a whisky by the fireside at anchor with snow capped mountains surrounding the anchorage. Would need to be glass fronted mind you. Suspect it will never happen as far less convenient than the modern equivalents.

+1 for the fan heater - or an oil filled radiator - it's quieter - when you have mains available, but there is something about a coal stove down below. Just can't see it on a modern boat, though. An old pilot cutter, or a Vagabond, with a rich wood interior. Now you're talking...

 

[lw395]

A stove type heater is a key feature of the definitive smelly old man's boat.

 

[pvb]

A stove type heater is a key feature of the definitive smelly old man's boat.

I sense a new acronym - the SOMB, one stage on from the MAB.

 

[BabaYaga]

Drip feed or solid fuel heaters still appeal if you want absolute reliability and your boat is small enough to be heated effectively by one single heat source (yet big enough to accommodate the fairly bulky heater and its flue).

You can have distributed heat also with a diesel drip feed heater, although cost and complexity will increase, of course.
I have a Refleks type with a copper coil for circulating water and five convectors around the living space. There is a small pump for circulating the water, but power draw is miniscule and it is virtually silent.

 

[geem]

I sense a new acronym - the SOMB, one stage on from the MAB.

Interesting that my current Eberspacher is smelly but my drip feed Dickinson on the last boat wasn't. The Eber heats up the ducting to such a degree that I think its the dust in the ducting. I only ever run it here to test it so it never gets used in anger. I think if you look at Canadian boats a lot use drip feed heaters as they can be run for days or weeks at a time with no need for power. I think the ultimate set up would be a drip feed heater in the saloon and blown air heating to the bow and stern cabins and shower area.

 

[lw395]

A good drip feed heater 'should' only be smelly for the unfortunate people downwind.

 

[steve yates]

With the chinese stuff so cheap, get both blown air for convenience and solidfuel/dripfeed for simplicity and dry heat?

 

[BabaYaga]

Out of curiosity, could someone please explain the concept of ”dry heat”?
In what way is blown air heat different?

 

[Plum]

Out of curiosity, could someone please explain the concept of ”dry heat”?
In what way is blown air heat different?

If you burn a fossil fuel to heat your cabin the gasses from the combustion process contain, amongst other things, water vapour. If those gasses stay in your cabin, like if you used your gas hob to heat the cabin, you are increasing the moisture content and will get more condensation. If the heater has a flue so all the combustion gasses end up outside, like with an Eberspacher or Taylors type heater, then you get no additional water vapour, hence a relatively "dryer" heat.

Now, we humans give off water vapour so if your heater recirculates the air in the cabin that vapour stays inside such as in a Taylors. If you have an Eberspacher that draws the air to be heater from the outside which in turn pushes some of the heated air that contains your vapour, you will get "even dryer" heat.

www.solocoastalsailing.co.uk

 

[geem]

If you burn a fossil fuel to heat your cabin the gasses from the combustion process contain, amongst other things, water vapour. If those gasses stay in your cabin, like if you used your gas hob to heat the cabin, you are increasing the moisture content and will get more condensation. If the heater has a flue so all the combustion gasses end up outside, like with an Eberspacher or Taylors type heater, then you get no additional water vapour, hence a relatively "dryer" heat.

Now, we humans give off water vapour so if your heater recirculates the air in the cabin that vapour stays inside such as in a Taylors. If you have an Eberspacher that draws the air to be heater from the outside which in turn pushes some of the heated air that contains your vapour, you will get "even dryer" heat.

www.solocoastalsailing.co.uk

One advantage with drip fed diesel heaters is they give off a high component of their heat as radiant heat. This means they heat up anything In line of site so the boat surfaces fell warm. This is harder to do with air based heating.

 

[stevie69p]

With the price of the Chinese knock off blown air heaters, if you are on a budget, it's a bit of a no brainer really. You could even buy another just for spare parts.

I had an Eberspacher in the previous boat and it was a bit on the small side really, so I dipped my toe in the water with a 5kw Chinaspacher... it transformed the boat from only having the ability to get about 10 degrees C above ambient before, to being cosy warm. I didn't find it all that noisy unless on the high setting, and I found that rather than trying to set it by temperature on the display which will ramp it up and down, I would set it in Hertz mode instead, and with a bit of experimentation, had a rough idea of what setting to use depending on how cold it was outside. This means that it just ticks away at one setting. Some complain about the noise of the pump, but mine was in the engine bay and not heard from inside the cabin area.

The latest boat is about to get the same treatment, as I continue to sail all year round and at anchor it is great to have some heat in the evenings.

I do love the look of the Refleks, but cutting a hole in the coachroof for the flue, and not really having somewhere suitable to site the heater itself means that it's not really an option for my boat.

You pay your money and take your choice I suppose...