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"outside the box" thinkers only please!!!
Tash and Bex posted a topic in Boat Building & Maintenance
Hi, A little one for outside the box thinkers please. I realise a bath on a boat is a ridiculously indulgent waste of water. I also realise the folly of putting a bath on a boat in terms of the space it consumes. I am installing a full sized corner bath with a capacity of around 200L on Helena during a major refit. I am trying to think of ways to reliably, safely and "legally"(in terms of the BSS) produce enough hot water to fill the bath. Currently I am considering fitting an auxiliary water tank of around the same capacity of the bath to extend our tank capacity enough to allow for it without affecting our bunkering routine too much. and I am considering ways of heating this "buffer" tank before using it to bathe. A few little boaty tech facts about Helena... I have a large (around 700L) water tank, my hot water cylinder is a standard horizontal calorifier, can't remember the capacity, not much! It is currently heated either by a 1kw immersion heater (rarely), the webasto water heater (usually) or the engine. Fairly conventional stuff with exception to the cold storage tank. If i were to sneak in a 250L plastic tank under the new wardrobe floor I could theoretically heat the water that is in it and specifically use it exclusively for our bath. I would obviously have to have it open vented, but I think I could easily add a balance pipe to the main tank to fill it when we bunker, and gravity would refill it as we use it. I am considering a second hand second webasto to this end. My calculations seem to suggest a 5kw heater will take approximately an hour to produce a 30c rise in that kinda volume of water. Other things I have considered are of course an instantaneous gas heater (an 11L morco would only take 20m to fill the bath directly fed with "cold"water, but at what cost in terms of gas) which is certainly still an option. If I choose to heat the tank of water rather than the instantaneous option of course the tank would be insulated and in order to stop convection mixing the water into the main tank a one way valve could be fitted on the fill (necessary?) I have also considered the bonus that, if the webasto/tank option is viable I can install some evacuated tube solar hot water on the roof of the boat and pre-warm the tank or even heat it in summer, via a plate heat exchanger. I realise if I do either of these things there will have to be a way of getting the tank to above 65c weekly to remove the risk of legionnaires. Please understand that I am well aware of the folly of the above, please keep the discussion based expanding on my thoughts and let me know your thoughts on where I would stand with the BSS compliance. Thanks in advance, Bex