Take a look at these two YouTube Channels
I'll be rewiring the boat first so can arrange that, any suggestions or do's and donts on that front? The heater will prob be within 2m of the fuseboard anyway.
Sorry I was meaning more how are you going to keep up with the consumption? I'm guessing your Bradwell has an outboard, so limited charging available, and in the kind of weather you want a heater the solar panels might not be producing much. You could be on shore power but then your just run a fan heater!
ah I see, I will have 2 120ahr leisure batteries and 120w of solar. Not sure yet how it will operate in the real world but I think I should be ok to be able to run it for a couple of hours of an evening and an hour in the morning for a few days without too many problems, assuming I start fully charged.
Thats a good steer, how long have you had yours running? still happy with it? Do you have any idea of how many a/hrs yours is using when running?
Peltier cells are pretty inefficient; you'd actually get very little electricity back. And, of course, the Laws of Thermodynamics mean you can't recover anything like the energy you put in - and if you did, you'd get no heat out! As you describe it, you're proposing a perpetual motion machine - and they're impossible.
No I'm not, the energy comes from the diesel.
Which has been converted to heat. Trying to regain energy from that heat is counter-productive because a) it will cool the output hot air and b) the amount of energy recovered will be trivial anyway; Peltier effect devices are very low efficiency. So to gain enough electricity to run the fan and pump, you'd end up with a much lower heating efficiency. Better to burn the same amount of diesel in an engine at much higher efficiency to charge batteries.