Heating (and "free" aircon!) for electric boat

[IanD]

5 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

I'm not a liveaboard, like you I am a leisure boater! I do however have a canalside house with an end of garden mooring.

So if your boat heating fails in the winter because of a dead generator, in extremis you can go home like I could... 😉

 

Power failure is a problem on an electric boat just like it is in a house, and I'll do everything reasonable to stop this happening -- for example, picking a reliable generator and maintaining it regularly. Whether a backup suitcase genny is worth is will probably be decided on the same basis that most people back up their computers properly i.e. not at all until it goes wrong :-)

5 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

Something like @Biggles put on his boat

Be interested to see that.

Edited July 25, 2021 by IanD

[cuthound]

11 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

With most modern houses its electricity, no electricity = no cooking, no hot water, no heating, no communication

 

However mains electricity is much more reliable than a small generator, by around a couple of orders of magnitude.

6 minutes ago, IanD said:

So if your boat heating fails in the winter because of a dead generator, in extremis you can go home like I could... 😉

 

Power failure is a problem on an electric boat just like it is in a house, and I'll do everything reasonable to stop this happening -- for example, picking a reliable generator and maintaining it regularly. Whether a backup suitcase genny is worth is will probably be decided on the same basis that most people back up their computers properly i.e. not at all until it goes wrong :-)

Be interested to see that.

 

I could but my heating is unlikely to fail complety, as I have two independent systems of which only one requires an electrical supply.

 

If a sudden cold spell freezes you in for a coue of days it may not be that easy to leave the boat and go home.

[ditchcrawler]

12 minutes ago, IanD said:

So if your boat heating fails in the winter because of a dead generator, in extremis you can go home like I could... 😉

 

Power failure is a problem on an electric boat just like it is in a house, and I'll do everything reasonable to stop this happening -- for example, picking a reliable generator and maintaining it regularly. Whether a backup suitcase genny is worth is will probably be decided on the same basis that most people back up their computers properly i.e. not at all until it goes wrong :-)

Be interested to see that.

https://boatbuildblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/mud-box-mods.html

[Alan de Enfield]

12 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

However mains electricity is much more reliable than a small generator, by around a couple of orders of magnitude.

 

Not in the wilds of rural Lincolnshire :

 

We have :

LPG cooking (6-burner + Ovens)

LG "log fires"

Electric lighting, and if needed electric 800/1600w 'portable fires'

Oil fired central heating

 

The oil central heating does depend on an electric supply, hence the LPG 'log-fires'.

 

Also have 2 generators that can run the freezers / fridges and a few table lamps.

 

As a back to the back ups I also have my camping equipment :

 

7x single burner gas stoves and dozens of gas cartridges

1x Paraffin stove

2x Gas lights

15x USB 'tent lights' (run off 'power banks')

Small 5v solar panels to recharge USB power banks, phones etc.

 

We genrerally have a power cut a couple of times a year. Rarely for more than a day - usually a max of 12 hours, but with all these severe storms who knows what the future holds.

Edited July 25, 2021 by Alan de Enfield

[cuthound]

8 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

Not in the wilds of rural Lincolnshire :

 

We have :

LPG cooking (6-burner + Ovens)

LG "log fires"

Electric lighting, and if needed electric 2kw 'portable fires'

Oil fired central heating

 

The oil central heating does depend on an electric supply, hence the LPG 'log-fires'.

 

Also have 2 generators that can run the freezers / fridges and a few table lamps.

 

As a back to the back ups I also have my camping equipment :

 

7x single burner gas stoves and dozens of gas cartridges

1x Paraffin stove

2x Gas lights

15x USB 'tent lights' (run off 'power banks')

Small 5v solar panels to recharge USB power banks, phones etc.

 

We genrerally have a power cut a couple of times a year. Rarely for more than a day - usually a max of 12 hours, but with all these severe storms who knows what the future holds.

 

Up until the privatisation of the then electricity boards, they used to be obliged to publish availability statistics for the previous year and the 10 year average.

 

As a designer of critical power supplies for BT I was interested in failures of 1 hour or mores duration.

 

For the last year these were published, a rural (predominately overhead) supply could expect a failure of an hour or more about once a year and about once every 10 years for an urban (predominately underground) supply.

 

Since privatisation my perception is that electricity suppies have become less reliable but it is no longer possible to obtain data from the electricity supply industry to confirm it.

Edited July 25, 2021 by cuthound
Spillung

[IanD]

34 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

However mains electricity is much more reliable than a small generator, by around a couple of orders of magnitude.

 

I could but my heating is unlikely to fail complety, as I have two independent systems of which only one requires an electrical supply.

 

If a sudden cold spell freezes you in for a coue of days it may not be that easy to leave the boat and go home.

I'm not arguing with your premise, if you want to have a backup generator for this unlikely case then feel free.

 

I'd say the chances of a sudden cold spell freezing me in at the same time the generator fails are small, but we all know what Murphy's law says... 😉

28 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

https://boatbuildblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/mud-box-mods.html

Thanks, that's the kind of thing I was thinking off. The Frigomar system has an inline filter before the pump which is cleanable from inside the boat, I'd be looking for something like you posted to stop the crud getting into it in the first place.

 

Especially given what Keith M said earlier (thanks!) I'm now leaning more towards a properly-filtered freshwater-cooled solution like this instead of keel cooling...

Edited July 25, 2021 by IanD

[IanD]

Actually worrying about the generator as a single point of failure is probably looking in the wrong direction...

 

An electric boat like this has several possible sources of power, generator and solar (in summer) when cruising and shore power when moored (if this is available e.g. marina, serviced mooring, charging points in future), and with 35kWh of batteries at least a couple of days running off stored energy even with no generator in winter (much longer in summer, panels should average about 8kWh/day) -- but it has only one inverter to generate 230Vac which is needed to run everything onboard (fridge, appliances) including the aircon/heating.

 

So if this dies, everything stops working, just like a normal house when the mains disappears -- CH heating systems need mains to ignite the boiler and run the pumps.

 

Worth considering using 2 x 5kVA inverter/chargers in parallel (master/slave) instead of a single 10kVA one, so if one dies it can be disconnected and the other one used until it can be repaired/replaced...

[IanD]

On 25/07/2021 at 07:09, Keith M said:

From personal experience I have fitted two of these systems. The first was using a skin tank, the supplier wanted us to use a water intake but the owner insisted on a skin tank it did not work. 

The systems was totally reinstalled within the year. The second did not use a skin tank worked first time. 

Had a long chat with Keith about this (thanks!), have decided to go with freshwater cooling and a properly designed mud box/filter system. The benefit of hindsight is that you can learn from other people's mistakes... 😉

[David Mack]

On 25/07/2021 at 12:42, ditchcrawler said:

https://boatbuildblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/mud-box-mods.html

Fulbourne's direct engine cooling has a mud box with a perforated screen similar to the one shown. But we did have problems, particularly in autumn, with leaf debris getting through the screen and into the cooling water pump valves. Problem was solved completely by putting some pieces of aquarium filter foam on the upstream side of the screen. 

[IanD]

1 hour ago, David Mack said:

Fulbourne's direct engine cooling has a mud box with a perforated screen similar to the one shown. But we did have problems, particularly in autumn, with leaf debris getting through the screen and into the cooling water pump valves. Problem was solved completely by putting some pieces of aquarium filter foam on the upstream side of the screen. 

Good idea, thank you. Some perforated metal mesh might do the same job while being less prone to clogging up with mud.

Edited July 26, 2021 by IanD