Solid fuel heating on a small Westerly?

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OrwellTiggerToo

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Our Konsort is getting expansive to heat, either with blown air (paraffin) or electric fan heater. So we are considering solid fuel.
Has anyone got any reccomendations, tips, experience that may help us decide whether to pursue this notion?
 
I am very happy with my Pascall Atkey Pansey - but I don't live aboard and I have a much smaller cabin. Main advantage is the small flu.


Before I found a Pansey after 1 year of looking I was going to go for a Dickinson Newport. Very good value with the dollar as it is, but you need to install a deck iron. They are usually 6-8 inches wide.
 
I have a Bengco charcoal heater on my seamaster 23 - which is obviously a bit smaller than the Konsort. Can't praise it too highly. When "banked up" it will burn for 14 hours without a top up. Only problem is judging how much charcoal to put in so that I can take off the chimney the next morning and put on the blanking plug without leaving a load of unburned charcoal!

They have an ad in PBO pages or are on the internet. At full tilt they produce about 2kw.
 
I've got a Pansey stove as well, but its a s*d to light- basically you have to leave the lid off 'till its going, and it does produce CO even when shut down. Any tips for lighting the thing would be good. It is near the floor, and I have wondered if this means the flue is too long. It would be great if I could get the thing to work properly because when it is going it does throw off a lot of heat, so I would be a very warm corpse if I didn't have to leave all the hatches open.
 
Lighting a Pansy stove...

I had one of these on our Halcyon 27 some years ago. A very effective heater.

Keep it as low as possible, otherwise you end up with cold legs and sweaty armpits. The longer flue should help 'draw'.

We could usually light ours, lid closed, with a couple of fire lighters. What worked infallibly, however, was a blowtorch held underneath for a few minutes (with the bottom removed, of course).

We found ours was very sensitive to having a dirty flue, so I regularly used a rag on a string with a lead weight, as a pull-through to keep it 'swept'. That made a really noticeable difference to ease of lighting.
 
Am I the only one who feels somewhat uncomfortable about lighting a fire inside a plastic tub? /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif
 
Re: Lighting a Pansy stove...

Funny, I'm just about to install one on my boat. So yes, they still make them: www.islandchandlery.co.uk
Here's some advice on lighting maintainig etc the Pansy. Got that from the woodenboat forum:

[ QUOTE ]
Definitely mount it as low as possible so the heat rises. There are a few tricks to them, as with most stoves. First, they are the only solid fuel cabin heater I know of that has a one inch (maybe inch and a quarter... can't remember) flue pipe. This makes a neat installation. The above deck section is only about an inch and a half high, just right to be capped with a plastic 35mm film can! The stack is another two foot section of heavy gauge stainless (as is the whole stove and pipe). When the stove isn't in use, you can remove the stack and have a near flush cabin top without sheets wrapping around the stack and so on.

Now, what makes the stove work is the draw up the flue. Stoves with large flues draw better, but waste energy and burn a lot more fuel with most of it going up the stack. Not so the stingy Pansey. However, you will find it a lot easier to light and keep going if you preheat the flue. This is done by using about an inch long piece of fire starter stick. These are the three quarter inch square by six inch long sticks of compressed sawdust and parafin they sell to start fires with. You can also use waxy "presto logs," those fireplace logs for people who are too lazy to cut and stack their own firewood. Just cut a hunk off and form it to shape. Or, with the fire starter sticks, cut off about an inch's worth. Put it into the mouth of the flue inside the stove and light it, letting it burn down and heat up the flue. Once that's done, you light the stove and she should draw nicely.

The really great advantage of the Pansy is that you can burn charcoal briquets in it. It will burn wood, and coal, I suppose, if you don't overload it, but it's designed for charcoal. Pascal Atkey used to sell tubes of round, flat briquets that fit the stove, but I've always used plain barbeque briquets with success. The trick is not to overload the stove. You only need about a half dozen at most. Add more as you go. Experiment until you get it right. Remember that the advantage of the Pansey is that it is very efficient. You get a lot of heat out of a surprisingly small amount of fuel... but you have to preheat the flue or you will pay hell to get the fire going.

Because you are burning charcoal, if it's done properly, you won't have any soot to speak of. This makes the Pansey a very clean stove to have aboard. Despite the romance of the traditional wood and coal burning stoves, they are incredibly dirty things to have aboard, getting soot all over everything. Emptying the ashes is a piece of cake, since the bottom ash pit simply detaches from the stove and can be dumped overboard. (DON'T drop it over with the ashes, though!)

Now, there is a limitation to consider. The Pansey is made of stainless steel, with a quarter inch ASBESTOS sheet liner. If you overheat the stove too often, you can burn out the liner. In fact, I expect you will see this frequently, although I have only seen a couple of Panseys in the flesh ever. Asbestos isn't available anymore. (This is how I got mine... her owner burned out the liner and couldn't find any asbestos to reline it and gave up!) I suppose it is possible to find some refactory material or stove cement that you could use to repair or replace the liner, but that would be a tacky job. It took me quite a while to track down parts, but not surprisingly, they are available. (The Brits seem to be the last culture that manufactures things that can be fixed, and keeps the parts to do so available... bless 'em.) Barry Van Geffen at Giles was good enough to find a replacement liner for mine. He ordered it through Davey and Co., I believe. Not a particularly expensive item. Pascal Atkey makes them. They aren't asbestos anymore, but some other equivalent material. They can be ordered still.

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Yes..a very good point, that I had fogotten!

I used to use the blow torch to gently heat the flue on very cold days, to remove the 'bung' of cold air.

Ah... happy days! Now I just flick the switch on the Webasto - no romance.
 
Re: Lighting a Pansy stove...

I have never had any joy at all with briquettes and I would avoid them - American Briquettes might burn more easily that ours. I would strongly recommend using lumpwood charcoal - about a fistfull to get it going. A tip I was given is to use little paper grocery bags with the required dose of charcoal already in it. Saves on mess.
 
[ QUOTE ]
Our Konsort is getting expansive to heat, either with blown air (paraffin) or electric fan heater. So we are considering solid fuel.

[/ QUOTE ]You surprise me that a Konsort is getting expensive to heat with an Eberspecher/Webasto/Mikuni. I had the small Mikuni on my Centaur which is a bit smaller but the usage of diesel (why use paraffin?) was trivial - I wasn't even aware of the usage and we used to start sailing proper in April, and often went out in the winter. Can you still get red in the UK? Unless you are leaving it running when unoccupied? That would be expensive. We used to leave a dehumidifier running all year round when unattended in the UK.
 
[ QUOTE ]
Am I the only one who feels somewhat uncomfortable about lighting a fire inside a plastic tub? /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

No, you're not. Plus what happens to all that CO2 and CO that a solid fuel fire inevitably produces?
 
Well mine is a wooden tub and I have no problem with it at all. People have had solid fuel stoves on yachts for yonks. Infact, there is an argument for their safety and reliability.

I would much prefer solid fuel to say a gravity fed diesel system; what happens when that fails?

Ebberwhatevers seam to constantly breaking down. So if you want a KISS system avoid them.

My Pansy is immune to heeling and if very effective under sail. When stacked in the evening it will burn all night unattended. I would not trust a paraffin, gas, or blown air heater overnight (apart from the annoying noise and battery drain).

As for CO2 you take the same precuations as one does when using the galley stove. Good ventilation. There should be no CO if the fire is lit well.
 
I have a home-made copy of the Bengco bought from a forumeer last year and its a boon on a November night on a mooring.
I have burned driftwood, peat and charcoal, both lumpwood and briquettes but charcoal works best as the other fuels produce tar which has to be cleaned off the deck.
Agreed, pre-heating the flue helps lighting on cold days and dry charcoal is essential. I keep mine under a bunk and made the mistake of not putting it in a dry box, just once. The CO and CO2 shouldn't be a problem with a properly flued installation with a proper H chimney and a decent CO detector.
I find all other types of heater too noisy to leave in all night, save perhaps a drip-feed diesel heater, which would put out too much heat in a Konsort.
In my 30 footer the heater in the forecabin chucks out enough to warm the main cabin with a fore port open and by closing off the vent and banking up it will stay in into the morning.
And its a dry heat.
One last thing... the lining on my heater was pretty will broken up when it arrived. I replaced it using fireclay from a local fireplace retailer mixed with car exhaust paste. Make the shape you need in a mould and stick it in place in the heater with more paste.
 
I had a portugese wood burnig stove ,basically a cylinder with lift of top very basic but large top loading lid made it easy to use driftwood etc,normally advised not to burn coal as they get too hot ad burn out bottom,Ensure good space between stove and surounding wood etc
 
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No, you're not. Plus what happens to all that CO2 and CO that a solid fuel fire inevitably produces?

[/ QUOTE ]

That's what a chimney is for!
 
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