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[Music] a little bit about my self i'm jeff cote with pacific yacht systems a big passion for boating i mean if i had to describe myself in one word it'd be a boater some of you might care to learn more about this topic we write two columns every month uh one in pacific yachting one in northwest yachting all those articles are actually published and available for download on our website for free they're all up there there's you can find any article that we've ever written ready for download so you don't need a subscription as a boater i'm a big fan here in the pacific northwest of going a little further afield and in the summer that means being in places that aren't all that warm as soon as you pass sort of a place called the discoveries right past isolation sound it goes from summer to spring or fall instantly within 10 nautical miles five nautical miles the water drops in temperature from mid 70s to low 50s and suddenly the weather pattern is completely different even in july or august and so as a boater here in the pacific northwest having a heating system is a way for some of us to go in places where it's not warm and it might be the shoulder season it might be the winter or it might be summer further north or on the outside of vancouver island i was on the outside of vancouver island in the summer most of the weekends i was there in port alberni it was 28 degrees and in tofino our eucalypt was about 15 degrees there's almost a 15 degree difference between inland temperatures and outside of vancouver island temperatures there's no summer there i mean there is but it's not it's not insane heat so we're actually turning on the heat in july and august on the outside of vancouver island to take off a little bit of the cold in the morning and sometimes even at night our business specializes in electrical electronics and heating systems uh we're predominantly we do servicing and installs here in the british columbia just because of distances in the border and we got invited over a thousand boat projects last year really proud of that so the team made that happen and we also do a lot of design that's our fastest growing product or product line is doing design for international clients figuring out what they want helping them make decisions so we did over 200 of those projects last year now one other important point i'm a big believer in sharing and we've got over a hundred and three right now today 165 videos on youtube and we're probably going to have another 50 within a couple months so we've got about 30 in the backlog so if you're curious about any sort of these topics and you want to geek out and you want to geek out in your own time and not just add a boat show all those presentations are on our website and also on youtube all available of course and i chose to do no ads i could have made a little bit of money with youtube but i thought it's such an annoyance and it's not worth it so all the all the videos are without ads on youtube realistically when you're thinking you've decided and this is a good point i mean you've decided that it's going to make sense for you to do heating on your boat and you're going to use a diesel-powered heating device on your boat you really have two choices at this point and i'll show you a slide that helps you make selection but you're really going to look at either hair heating so you're kind of like using diesel you're warming air and then you're just pushing that hair directly from the heater through ducting big ducting to a location you can do that but there's limits in terms of the boat size and we'll talk about that or you're going to do sort of what's called a hydronic heating where you're actually warming water and via pump you're circulating that warm coolant water throughout the boat and then you're taking the warm water and running it through heat exchangers right with fans on them that are blowing and converting sort of like household heating back in the 1900s there'd be a boiler downstairs you'd send water throughout the home you'd have radiators that would emanate heat same idea the only difference is these heat exchangers throughout the boat are also going to have fans to help the air circulate because we're trying to get a small radiator effectively maybe this big and so we'll be blowing air across these pipes to send dry heat and then the good news with hydronic is you can start having multiple of these heat exchangers far away from the heater itself so we've done we just did a boat just recently an owner from alaska brought his boat from ketchikan brought his boat to prince rupert flew a team up to prince rupert and we installed on a big 55-footer a big heater that had actually heat in the flybridge there's three cabins two heads the salon we even put heat in the engine room so we actually put all these different heat exchangers and we couldn't have done that with a forced air system so at one point there's an upper limit to a forced air system and so that might be a reason why you're going to consider a hydronic heating system so those are sort of two charts to show you um how you go choosing a hydronic system versus a forced air so the top section is hydronic the bottom section is forced air okay and you can see that generally we end up doing forced air probably in the cutting cabin 25 footers 30 footer maybe 35 foot sailboats right but again the problem is you might have the air coming out in the salon but how are you going to have a heater installed in the af lazarette for example and having ducting that's three inches or four inches pushing air all the way forward to a cabin in the v-berth you won't so in those situations owners are compromising they're saying you know what i'm okay in the cabin we'll have sleeping bags we'll stay warm we won't get a lot of heat and we'll have the heat from the cabin maybe sort of slowly emanating towards the cabin but we're not going to have my own sort of eating outlet in the cabin up at the front of the boat so those are limitations of the forest air and every time you sort of put a y or you put a bend it restricts the flow right because it's another bend and that's going to slow down the airflow so you just have to be realistic with a hair tronic system aboard a boat okay here's a little bit of a picture of what an airtronic heater forced air heater looks like i mean at the end of the day sort of what are the inputs well one of them first of all is diesel fuel right so you need clean diesel fuel so if your fuel is really lots of sediment in it right or your tank hasn't been cleaned in a long time and you're in really sort of bad seas that can clog your fuel filter we'll talk about that but you need diesel fuel you're also going to need battery power those heaters need some battery power to run especially forced air the blower right and with hydronic you're going to need battery power to run the coolant pump right that circulates and then to run all the fans so there is an element of power consumption from running a diesel heater the heat generation is from diesel but the circulation of that heat throughout the boat is electric okay you also need a clean air supply input right so on some installs we're actually going to take the air outside the boat so that we're actually and in some instances we're taking it from inside the boat but those are dilemmas that you have to ask where am i going to get the air to run that heater okay both for the combustion chamber and also for the source of air that's going to be especially with the forced air where that air is going to be blowing out the output of that besides warm air is also the exhaust there's an exhaust component so you need to worry we're going to talk about how the exhaust has to be routed in a certain way and where that exhaust you're generally going to want to have it more at the aft after the boat we'll talk about that a little bit too so here's a little bit of a recap of what we saw so the inputs are clean diesel fuel with no sediments even though there's a filter the filters do get clogged if you've got really bad diesel fuel battery power 12 or 24 air supply and then your outputs are warm air and which is heat and an exhaust okay so those are sort of the inputs outputs of the force air system here's what an image of aerotronic system looks like we've got here on the slide on the top left you've got the heater itself and here just beneath it you've got an exhaust you can see all the different type of hose clamps there's even a sort of a little drip pure drip loop at the bottom so if ever there's condensation that builds up in the exhaust it can actually drip down you've got a double wall exhaust outlet so that the outlet itself goes through and doesn't you can see it there's a little bit more thickness here than inside so there's sort of an air gap so that your fiberglass doesn't get tarnished as it's leaving the boat here's the fuel pump itself and the orientation we're going to talk about that a little bit later but the orientation of the pump is very important there's a there's a filter on the inline and then the out of the this is very important we'll talk about that and there's also a fuel pickup and that's the wiring harness and that's the example of the ducting so the challenge with a force air eater in some instances is where am i going to be able to run uh air ducting that's maybe three inches or four inches from the heater to the few multiple locations i've decided to have like maybe i want to run a defroster i want to have one go in the cabin and like i've got a cuddy like a 28 foot you know fishing boat i want one to go in the cabin want to go outside beneath the feet of the operator the driver i want one to go inside the windows i just want three outlets that's reasonable right not too big of a boat makes sense but the challenge is how am i gonna get three outlets from one unit with four-inch ducting there's not a lot of walls this is not a house right there's not like double there's not a lot of places that have four inches of space between the outside hall and the inside hole so you've got to take those considerations before you do an aerotronic system you got to think about how the hell am i going to route these big air ducts throughout the boat in some situations it absolutely works and some other ones it's just not possible even though you want to you just can't do it okay so we talked about the heater itself right here we talked about uh the air ducting the exhaust which is right in the middle the fuel pump the harness right and what we didn't talk about was the thermostats so there's two choices of thermostats sort of an analog digital thermostat pretty straightforward to use on off and this is sort of the warmer the further you go the warmer it gets or you can actually have this one which actually not only gives you dial in exactly the temperature you want so you can say 72 degrees but you can also have uh alarms and codes helps for diagnosing figuring out what's going on my heater's not working why is it not working this thing is actually outputting error codes and if you've got one of these analog thermostats you won't know that you'll need to have someone a technician come on board with the gear or bring the heater to them and they'll put it on the bench and they'll tell you what the issue is here's sort of the different types of hydronic heating you've got basically the d2 d4 look like this the d5 looks like this you can there's a long formula and i didn't decide not to share it there's a there is a formula in deciding how many ducting you're going to have and what the path is going to look like and what your bends are going to look like when you do an aerotronic system hope is never sort of the best approach right in anything so you want to take the time to make sure that it's realistic to have that heater not have too strong of a bend i've heard recently that some heaters actually feel so much back pressure when they're blowing air that they're thinking that there's a problem and they'll reduce the heater output by 50 percent because there's so many tight vents to get to the outlet and there's so much back pressure that the heater is like i can't output full capacity and so the heater runs continuously at 50 percent of capacity so when you're installing a air hydraulic heater on board make sure that you go through the time of thinking what are going to be all the bends and that the airflow can go unimpeded to the outlets okay here's some a little bit about the reality is that unfortunately over time there's always a sort of a water layer that accumulates in our water heat diesel tanks through condensation it's just a reality right the tanks aren't always full you're going to have condensation inside the tank the condensation the water and the fuel where they meet there's going to be a layer of sort of microbes that live there and over time they die and that's that sort of sludge that comes at the bottom of the tank i remember years ago my heater would stop working on a crossing really bad crossing 30 knots like it was like a laundry mat and when we got to the anchorage in the middle of winter december 23rd the heater wouldn't work it worked at the dock before we left but didn't work when we got there and i was like well that doesn't make sense why would the heater stop working it was working this morning last night when we slept on board but now it's stopped and it starts but it just sort of there's an issue and sure enough i was like oh my god we were sloshing around all that sediment in the tank and i went to the fuel filter and it was completely clogged up i felt like such a hero saved the day and then my partner reminded me why do we have so much sludge in the diesel tank weren't you supposed to clean it before last year i was like yeah you're not supposed to remember that i had a i had a win for a moment there so that's another unrelated to diesel heaters but you want to make sure if your tanks haven't been cleaned in a long time and you're thinking about adding a diesel heater make sure that the fuel pickup line doesn't go to the bottom of the tank and if in your really bad sea state and you're being bounced around and you're running the heater you're gonna probably end up having sediment going up clogging the filter and then you're gonna have to undo the filter clean it out and let the sediment go back to the bottom okay or what you should do is clean your tanks more often than we like to do it's expensive to do that right but there are services that do that i've done my boat i've done my road for 14 years now and i've had my tanks cleaned twice and i always keep my tanks as full as possible but it's just a reality there's always going to be some sort of water in your diesel tank and water with diesel fuel causes these microbes to live and then they die create a sludge and then they're in the bottom of your tank so the rule is when you're installing a fuel pickup the distance between the fuel pump and the heater is it can pull for six can push for 20 and it can rise three feet the other thing too that i've heard from service technicians is that people will end up buying a bigger heater looking at the pump they look the same leave the pump there thinking don't need to change it this becomes a spare but what they don't realize is every single pump is tailored for a specific flow it's a metering pump it's the exact flow rate that the heater needs so when you change the heater change the pump okay here's another big takeaway especially for heaters as well a heater is one of those things that breaks the rules for electrical systems meaning it's an always-on battery connection on a boat there's not too many things that should always be on meaning that when you turn the battery switch off things are still working bilge pumps would be an exception to that right bilge pump should be on even with the battery switch off your carbon dioxide if you have one on board on board would be unswitched meaning even with the battery switch off that's still going to be powered stereo memory unswitched otherwise every time you turn the battery switch off you lose all your settings in your stereo another one of those devices that is unswitched as well is and that's really important is your heater your heater can never ever ever black and white be disconnected from power suddenly without cooling down it needs to go through a cool down process so all heaters should bypass the switch and go directly to the battery via an inline circuit breaker so even if you are having your heater you're on for your boat you're running your heater you're doing maintenance you decide to shut off the battery switch your heater cannot be powered from the switch side of the battery switch if you do that the heater is not going to go through a cool down process and you're probably going to permanently damage your heater okay honestly most techs that install heaters know that i'd say 99 so it's not an issue but if you're ever rewiring your boat and you're like well that's stupid why is my heater on the unswitched side let me put it on the switch side of the circuit and you accidentally one day turn off the switch while the heater is running your heater's not going to go through the cool down process and then you're probably going to damage your heater the other thing too a big takeaway and i see this all the time it's not so much related to heater but it's related to magical heaters what's a magical heater a magical heater is a heater that does not draw power and i get this all the time people say to me jeff look at my battery monitor my battery monitor i don't draw any power when my heater's on i'm like listen i i i want you to have what you want but there is no such thing as a magical heater your fans aren't powered by diesel you know the thermostat is not powered by diesel there are electrical components on your heater what you mean to say is that the person that installed your battery monitor didn't understand that the negative from the heater should not bypass the battery monitor shut generally i get called on those boats and the batteries are dying prematurely and they're like i don't understand my batteries are dying prematurely but luckily they tell me my heater doesn't draw power i'm like it's actually related your heater draws power you don't count it in your battery monitor your batteries are dying because you're drawing them down but you don't know that because your batter your heater bypasses the shunt so it's very important to have the positive connection go directly to the battery but the negative connection has to go on the load side of the battery monitor shunt and i cannot tell you if you have a battery monitor and a heater on your boat eighty percent of you have the shunt not properly wired because people just are following the directions from the heater manufacturer and the heater manufacturer doesn't now know you have a battery monitor and so they're like well they're both doing what they're being told to do but they're not understanding that both products are working together okay so make sure if you have a battery monitor on board or you have a heater installed on your boat make sure that it draws power when you're running your heater if it doesn't it tells you right away that someone bypassed the shunt okay here's what the exhaust and i wanted to show you see how it's double walled you have sort of that's the exhaust that's going to get really hot but the hall is never going to see that because there's actually an air gap between the really hot exhaust and actually what's going to be touching or near touching the fiberglass in the past they weren't doing that and the exhaust you would actually see tarnishing on my boat that's what happened my heater was probably installed in the 1990s and you had actually yellow tarnishing of the fiberglass you couldn't see it but as soon as you remove the haul fitting you actually saw that the the fiberglass got really smoking hot nowadays what they're doing is they're putting these double walled outlets now here's another thing too you'll notice there's sort of an angle there especially if you're a sailboater the exhaust should actually go up and have a goose neck and come down again right you never want water sometimes waves come even on a power boat you know waves are not always sort of below the water line waves do hit our boats and when they hit our boats we hear them and sometimes it's scary well that force of water coming in if you've got your outlet the highest point of your hall right but not the superstructure but and it's this high and you simply have it going down you could literally flood your heater so you have to have it go up and down again so you need a goose neck on your exhaust and that's why this exhaust has already sort of that bend to it because it's already coming in you face that going up and then you have it going down again okay and then you're probably wondering well how do i have make sure that exhaust doesn't move around you have offsets that you install throughout the boat to make sure that the even though it's pretty rigid you never want a warm exhaust even though it's wrapped touched fiberglass right because they got pretty they get pretty smoking hot especially the hydronic ones um i was trying to get i couldn't get a really high rest picture but it gives it a drift of you see sort of a y right so that's sort of how you get one heater outputting one outlet because a hyetronic only has one outlet pretty big three inch four inch you get it and then you start separating it out right to two outlets three outlets but again remember hard bends are a big problem right it's like anything it's like a river this moment a river hits a 90 degree i mean there's huge amount of erosion on that side of the river right hard bends are hard for everything so generally you want to have a soft event as possible now that's easy to say but on a boat hard to do i mean we have all these physical constraints on our boats and so it's a challenge again with those ducting right of getting these soft bends to not limit the rate of airflow coming out troubleshooting tips if you've got lots of grey smoke coming out of the exhaust then it's probably a sign that you have actually a combustion problem which is generally a sign that you probably have the fuel filter flog which is generally a sign that you had too much sediments in your tank check the fuel filter fuel filter is actually right here little screen now here's a really important thing never ever ever ever black and white especially on the espar ones loosen this at the top if you loosen the outlet of the pump you're actually gonna need to have it brought back to the shop they'll need to change it it's actually done at the factory and that's what decides precisely the flow that's coming out so when you loosen the bottom never loosen the top if you do loosen the top then the metering the exact metering that you need for your pump won't happen okay another thing too that happens a lot of times is people remember our battery voltage is not perfectly steady right and over time it drifts and it goes lower and lower and lower the longer red anchor or if it's a bad battery it goes there quickly quickly what that means for you as a boater is a way to troubleshoot is if your heater runs no problem when you're connected to shore power which means you're connected have a battery charger on that's generally a problem of your battery's becoming weaker right and the heater dies it's not that the heater's problematic is that your batteries are being drained and if your battery monitors onboard and it's being bypassed because it wasn't installed properly it's sort of like making decisions in the dark right so it does happen where people are blaming the heater but what it comes down to is that the battery that's powering part of the heater is getting weak and if you have bad connections long lines then it makes it worse and worse because the voltage drop so try it at the dock if everything runs well at the dock with the battery charger on and you're at 13 5 13 6 volts on a 12 volt system then that tells you that the problem is a battery problem it's not a heater problem it means that your batteries are either weak or there's too much voltage drop on the line okay and a big warning never disconnect power on a heater when it's operating so even if you have you'll see a little circuit breaker generally close to the battery never press that on or off or disconnect the heater when it's running ever because i said it's going to cause there's no cool down process if there's no cooldown process the heater is going to be permanently damaged so next what we're talking about is hydronic this is the d5 you can see the 17 000 btus british thermal units up to three heat exchangers five heat exchangers well i'll show you examples of that here's an example of uh an m2 d10 here's a you see that's the coolant pump at the bottom i'll show you a little bit this is a breakout of what it looks like so you got this water pump right some of them can be external so with a hydronic system what you're doing is you're saying okay i'm realizing the constraints of having airflow on my boat i've got a bigger boat and i need to have my all these different places on my boat warmed up at different temperatures maybe you on the salon warmer than your i know you're the vip cabin or another cabin on the boat or the galley or the fly bridge so with a hydronic system you can start having multiple thermostats multiple zones like i've ensemble we have four zones five zones and what you're doing is you're circulating all that heat throughout the boat via coolant via these sort of pipes about this big in diameter and it's a loop right goes one in one out one end one out and uh again same sort of fuel fuel coming in air coming in exhaust now this sort of i'll show you what the exhaust looks like in the marine it's a little bit you can't really put those in they're about this big in diameter so you'll have a silencer and again going it's very important that those outlets for exhaust are at the aft of the boat ideally facing half so that there's wind coming but again be careful here in the pacific northwest a lot of us end up stir tying right we stir and tie so you stern tie but sometimes the wind's not always coming from the front when you're stern tying you could have the wind coming from the aft if you've got an exhaust coming from the back of your boat and the wind's coming from behind you it's very likely that that one's going to go through the companion way through the door and you're really going to have carbon monoxide points sitting inside your boat i never ever like i am super paranoid like i will never run my heater on my boat at night when i'm stern tight i'll control it in the daytime because i know where the wind's coming from but sometimes there's wind shift changes your stern tide and now suddenly in the middle of the night it wasn't supposed to happen the wind's coming from being behind and now the wind's blowing in your boat from your cockpit and that's blowing literally exhaust fumes inside of your boat and it's a silent killer so as a rule of thumb i never am stern tied and running my heater at night and as much as possible if i'm running my heater i want to be swinging an anchor so the wind's always coming from the bow the wind comes and it's blown away from the boat sort of a little hydronic you've got an exhaust simplified a little bit here you got a header tank and there's also missing here there's also an expansion tank these fan matrix have different names we'll talk about that too these hydronic fan heaters right and this is how coolant is plumbed in and out and then you have some heat exchangers or fan heaters have one outlet two outlets three outlets and they're all made for different sizes some of them have crazy btus like for example on my boat you know i've got a bigger heat exchanger for my cabin like my main salon and galley than i do for the place where we sleep in our sleeping cabins right i only need a small heat exchanger for there because i don't need it that warm but in my main cabin i've got a big spookum heat exchanger when i turn it up i can warm up my cabin very quickly right so i have a catalina 36 i have four heat exchangers on my boat right i have some that i have only sometimes i only use to warm up the boat really quickly and then after that they're just during so much heat i actually put them i put them to sleep i turn them off coolant's still going through them but i'm not drawing heat from them because sometimes i want to warm up the boat quickly i don't want it to take two three four hours to warm up the boat i want the boat to be warmed up as fast as possible all these fans can be controlled obviously via thermostat and also individual fan controls like high off low right so there's a little bit to control some of the the heat coming off of there the other big important thing to notice and why a lot of people end up doing these hydronic systems is that you can actually integrate them directly into your existing hot water tank marine hot water tanks can be powered by ac right with an ac circuit breaker meaning the generator or shore power is available or you can actually there's actually an in and out for coolant you can have those plumbed to your engine right via the auxiliary so you can actually have a coolant loop so when your engine is running for propulsion you're also warming water in a marine hot water tank not via ac but via coolant or you can run them through a hydronic heating system meaning you could be in anchorage and literally have your hydronic system on the engine hasn't been on for three days and you're literally having the coolant that's coming from there go through your basically hot water tank so you have hot water pretty much in the winter i've got hot water all the time because my heater's running all the time and so there's always cooling going through the heater okay and you don't need to have the main engine to be connected to the hot water tank if you want both you'll need valves because you can't have two things connected to one thing so you'll need to have y valves decide am i going to run hot am i going to warm my ace my marine hot water tank via my engine propulsion engine or via my hydronic heating so these hydronic fan eaters you're going to choose them based on btu size physical size means remember this is a boat you don't do what you want you do what you can right there's a lot of places you can't fit that heat exchanger you want to fit a heat exchanger this big in your head it's not where are you going to mount it right you end up doing what you can so there's sort of the wishlist and then there's reality right and you can get creative but you can only get creative so much it's a physical space that has tons of constraints on some boats we can only fit a heat exchanger fan heater like this big that's it some other places we can get a big one like that it depends on where it's going to be mounted sometimes you don't mount it where you want it you mount it where you can okay and the number of vents that you have also a big takeaway there is because power is limited on a boat especially battery power you also have to remember that you'll want to make sure you get fans that are efficient with power consumption on my boat if i have all my fans on high and i'm running everything at the same time my heater can draw up to 15 amps at 12 volts that's a lot my fridge only takes like four that's four times the power consumption in my fridge to heat my boat now my heater doesn't run 24 7 it comes on and off and then sometimes i might make my fans in low if i'm really sort of being draconian i might turn off some heat exchangers like if we're out in anchorage for three four or five days i might not warm a cabin that we're not gonna spend time in you know like for example we sleep in the aft cabin my ford cabin has a heat exchanger i'm gonna turn that off i'm not there there most of the time i close the door i'm not going to heat a room i don't need and have a fan turned on drawing power because i have maybe i have a lot of diesel i'm not too worried about diesel but i don't have enough battery power so that's what basically a single fan heater looks like right and you can buy them in single double triples here's one another one two here surface mount i have one like that in my boat literally there's i've got a cutout it's about this big and the heat exchanger is right behind it and it's blowing fan there's not a small outlet the outlet is literally i'm almost that size right in the in the main salon here's a dual fan heater right so you could for example very commonly like we did that on another boat we'll install one in between let's say a cabin and a head and one outlet is going to go in the head and the outlet is going to go in the cabin on my boat i have one beneath the aft cabin one goes in the galley one goes in the in the aft cabin right because you can't put i mean ideally you'd want to have a heat exchanger for every single room but again it's not money it's where you're going to put all this stuff like even if you have endless money if you have a normal sized boat you're like and even a 70-foot boat it's still hard to put extra where are you going to put them there's not these cavities everywhere that are just oh here you go there's an empty cavity that nobody ever thought about using on a boat that doesn't happen it's like empty cavity there's a drawer empty cavity there's storage people are thinking about using space all the time so remember in the other slide this is an essential part of a hydronic heating system and you've got this expansion tank you can buy them either vertical or horizontal and you'll notice here this is where you're going to have an overflow tank you see this little nozzle here and here that's connected to this overflow tank remember with exact anything hot there it says on the cap but you can never open that up when it's warm of course it says right on the cap so you got to wait if you're going to service your heater you got to wait for it to cool down right because this is going to get pretty high pressure in here when it's running overflow tank this is a picture of a coolant some some heaters have the coolant pump integral part of the unit some have it external right but that's because remember your diesel heater warms up coolant but i mean it's one thing to warm up something you have to then start circulating throughout the boat and so you do that with a coolant pump okay and that's the pump that actually circulates all the coolant throughout the boat same with the hydronic you've got different thermostats but here's where it gets interesting you have these aftermarket sort of boards right the ability of controlling multiple zones so you could say i want my head to be warmer than my cabin but i want my flybridge to be so and so temperature you can actually have the heater turn on and off individually for different zones so if all the zones are off the heater's off you turn one zone and you say i want this zone to be at 72 degrees fahrenheit i want this zone to be at 78. if no heater is on the 78 is going to see i need heat at 72 the other one said now i'm going to only turn on the fan the heater's running and i'm going to have the fan running so they're both deciding if they should turn on the fan and if there's not enough heat in the system they're going to turn on the heater as well so you're literally controlling all these different zones on your boat which is nice that means that you don't have to have everything warmed up all at once at the same temperature because what happens is you might have a thermostat in one part of the boat right and then that place gets hotter sooner than somewhere else and so you might have cool spots and hot spots the way to do that is to have multiple thermostats sounds great downside is it costs more money it takes more time right so it depends on what you want to do easy is one thermostat and whatever temperature is at that thermostat is the temperature that the heater is going to stop working so you might increase the temperature there and have it warmer in some places and to make it less cold than others right so that's why i like to have multiple thermostats on a hydronic heating system so that everyone can have the temperature they want where they want it so the takeaway here is you know when we're installing the first conversation let's say for example for that alaska owner never saw the boat got blueprints of the boat we said okay well how many heat exchangers we're going to put on board right that's the first question what do we need to warm up do you want to warm the fly bridge you know are you do you want to warm up both you've got three cabins on board are we warming up all the three cabins yeah are we warming both heads yeah are we going to warm up the galley the salon yeah then you start okay all right so now let's where are we going to put those heat exchangers and there's what you imagine and what's going to fit because before you start and then you've got to measure okay here's the one i'm speccing out oh yeah where the hell am i going to put that can't do that that's not going to work and then that's where you got to go back to the drawing board and start getting creative in your selection of these hair antlers right to figure out which ones are going to work and then you decide okay well then where am i going to put the thermostat because if you've got a heat exchanger that's doing the head and the cabin where is the thermostat is it in the head or is it in the cabin it can't have a thermostat in both places right because it's controlling one heat exchanger the other thing too that can be very frustrating with a coolant base or a hydronic-based heating system is the reality that you've got this coolant loop but if ever there's air locks in that that can give you a lot of grief i learned years ago the best way is to not hope for that coolant pump to be able to remove all those air locks what we end up doing before we even put any cool in it we actually connect city pressure water like 50 psi literally in the system and we blow literally just simply normal water right through the system we get all the air locks out at this point it's going to work i can get remember in life there's hope and there's reality hope never pans out that's why i don't play the lottery i don't hope i just plan i'm like i got people installers are like oh no we're going to try with the cooling pump like you're wasting your time remove the air locks connect it to city water right run make sure there's water everywhere once it's out then what we end up doing is we run a separate pump not even the coolant pump and now we got a big bucket and now we start pumping coolant via separate pump through the system make sure that everything's good coolant's coming in it's all even right mix and then we hook it up to the heater and to the existing coolant pump and then when we light it up it works hope there's no place on a boat don't do it you're just gonna just like no shortcuts you try to do a shortcut you bang your head against the wall two three days and you're like oh maybe i should have done that at the beginning okay so bleeding is a big issue and what we'd end up doing too is we end up putting valves everywhere at the high points so like really good heat exchangers are going to have bleed valves everywhere and at every high point in a hydronic system we put a bleed valve so that you can actually if there is an air pocket there you can actually bleed it out we talked about a little bit about the gooseneck for the heat exhaust right to make sure that before it goes outside of the hall it's got to go up and then down and out and then the length of the exhaust can only about be six and a half feet so that's a challenge that means the heater can't be in most cases installed in the middle of the boat right it's got to be installed on port or starboard and you got to figure out your exhaust run right and the other thing too is if there is a little bit of water that's going to get in and there's normally some water that gets in just from condensation it's actually going to drip through this little contraption here okay and that's at the bottom of all the exhausts so with that i'm going to open the floor to questions anybody have any questions on marine heating systems yeah go ahead yeah i don't think it's that much it's maybe about six amps depending on the size i don't know yeah six 10 amps not that much uh the airtronic five six thousand eight hours uh generally uh ceramic glow plugs i've heard uh fuel pumps yeah and you know what there's depending on the company you choose it from there's people that actually have service departments like roton for example they do their own servicing of espar and there's a guy that full time just does some heating or 20 year old heating systems they come back you bring them to the bench they'll be able to change some parts right yep the question is what's the typical temperature of a hydronic heating system oh my god it's really warm i i don't even know but scalding hot like it's like freaking hot like you can't like you would get burnt so 200 c or something i don't even know i have no idea i'm guessing it's freaking hot freaking hot it's definitely over 100 i don't even know what it is yeah okay thank you anybody else any other questions anybody here in the room have a heating on board thinking about it s bar you have a heater not yet thinking about it i mean just in closing i i think the consideration is if you want to extend your boating season beyond the really warm months or you want to go further north here in the pacific northwest it's for us and for the motors we've done it it's a way to sort of extend the cruising season you know like sometimes in may and april it's gorgeous sometimes in september and october it's gorgeous without going crazy like not that many people boat in december like i do but even the shoulder months before the peak season those would be the arguments and also if you're going up north if you're going up north and you pass desolation sound where the summer ends once you go in discovery islands or browns or outside vancouver island then the weather drops by about 10 degrees celsius even in the summer and that's where there's an argument to consider heat but you don't have to yeah oh yeah that's a really good question really good question what is the correlation or relationship between heating a boat and condensation in a boat and that's that's a great question um most of our boats are not really well insulated right i mean it's a haul and uh to avoid condensation on a boat you should avoid eating it the moment that you increase the temperature of your boat beyond the temperature of the water around our boat so if the water is at let's say 50 degrees fahrenheit or 10 degrees celsius or whatever that is the moment you warm up your boat beyond that and you don't have really good insulation your bot your boat will weep it will be crazy crazy amount of condensation the water temperature is 50 degrees and you're heating your boat at 75 that's 25 degree is going to cause your hall to weep like there is no tomorrow so on our boat when we do that because in the winter time the water temp might be 50 degrees fahrenheit and inside is 70 we actually open the windows dramatically on our boat you have to let it out otherwise it becomes almost a sauna like it the the amount of condensation that happens is everywhere if you don't see it open somewhere and you'll find like literally i'll have pools of water so there is no way around that because we don't have our halls well insulated hence when i'm not on my boat i don't keep my boat at 70 degrees fahrenheit if i'm not on the boat i keep it slightly warmer only slightly warmer than the water temp so i warm it but just not by much otherwise what you're doing is you're losing a battle if you're keeping your boat at 70 degrees fahrenheit and the water temperature's at 50 the very thing you're trying to avoid which is condensation is what you're creating you can't you'll never be able to solve it because the water around you is at 50 and you can't warm the ocean and it's cooling your boat faster than any heater than anything you could ever do and it's condensating condensating and then you'll have water pooling everywhere and that pooling is causing moisture and then you're fighting that moisture by heating and it's just you just can't win you can't win any other questions thank you everyone for taking the time to be here and if you've got further questions i'm going to be upstairs at our booth thank you you
Boating Tech Talk
Boating Tech Talk
2020 Boat Show Presentations
2020 Boat Show Presentations