Livaboard heating

[new2boat]

Hi All, 

 

New to hear and i feel i maybe going over old ground but we have a new 60ft widebeam that I'm about to start installing heating/rads/calorifier. We will be living on the boat full time once she's complete and I initially thought putting a webasto/Eberspacher diesel heater with a twin coil calorifier would be fine, however I've seen a few comments about webasto/Eberspacher being more aimed at 'leisure' use and short cycling, not lasting long etc. I've researched bubble PJ/Kabolas (dont like the idea of 230v, we're not on a mooring but equally wont be moving everyday for battery charge off the engine). Also heard about Hurricane but bloody expensive. 

 

Really im looking for anyone's opinion on running a webasto/Eberspacher on a full time liveaboard (thinking about 4 rads). How likely is it to break on me? Any tips for looking after it and extending it's life? I've seen the issuers around short cycles and in summer leaving a towel rad on low to stop the short cycles.

 

Any help much appreciated

 

Thanks!!  

[mrsmelly]

Webasto are fine for secondary heating. Of paramount importance is a solid fuel stove, first and foremost.

[booke23]

Yes you need a simpler solution for primary heating. Personally I find the noise of the Webasco/Eberspacher quite intrusive and unsuitable for using when asleep. They also draw a surprising amount of current, which is the last thing you need mid winter when you're not on a mooring. They are great in the spring/autumn when you just want to heat the boat quickly in the morning. 

 

A solid fuel stove with a back boiler to heat the rads might a better idea. If you don't like the sound of solid fuel stoves then you could get a Refleks diesel stove with a water coil for the rads.....setup correctly it needs no electricity at all, although if you want to heat the calorifier too it might need to be a pumped system....still a lot less power than an Eber though.  

[Richard10002]

I had an eberspacher on a seagoing grp yacht and it kept ot warm and toasty in the icy UK winters, of which 2009/10 was memorable. At 13ft wide, it had a much larger internal volume than my current 45ft narrowboat, where the front half is well heated by the solid fuel stove, but the rear can remain a bit chilly.

 

A particular advantage of the Eberspacher iscthe fact that the heat can be directed anywhere in the boat  rather than having to radiate from one focal point.

 

Fitted correctly, id have an eberspacher over a stove.

[mrsmelly]

If you do go for a stove ensure its big enough. My liveaboard widebeam we had a 20kw stove. It could be shut right down to ticking over all night or blasted out to its full potential, or anywhere in between. On my liveaboard narrowboats also of many years a morso squirrel was big enough. Its a case of horses for courses.

[Idle Days]

We Have a Webasto diesel heater feeding radiators and a calorifier together with a solid fuel stove in our 60ft narrowboat. We plan to get rid of the filthy solid fuel stove during the summer and replace it with a diesel bubble stove or similar. Apart from the dust and dirt generated by the stove we find it difficult to control the heat output, so it has to go.  The Webasto works reasonably well but has proved to be unreliable and very expensive to repair so we don't want to rely on it for a main heating source. 

[blackrose]

Whether you have a solid 

10 hours ago, Richard10002 said:

 

Fitted correctly, id have an eberspacher over a stove.

 

Really? For liveaboard use? I think that view would be in a tiny minority amongst boaters who have lived aboard over several winters.

 

In my view after 16 winters, whether you have a solid fuel stove or a drip fed diesel stove, an Ebersplutter or Webastard should only be installed as a secondary form of heating and for that purpose they are fine. When they break down in the middle of winter which they invariably will at some point even if correctly serviced, you will still have your main form of heating.

[Bee]

Eber and Webasto are great when they work. They also use constant 12 volt (or 24) and a few days of running will flatten batteries, you have to run the engine and use diesel to charge the batts to run a diesel heater! Anything that requires technology or electric is going to let you down and a boat can be too cold to live on in the winter. The one thing that you have to ration and look after on a boat is electricity, it doesn't matter how sophisticated or how many batteries you have you must be charging them constantly, being kind to them, using them as little as possible and generally treating them like elderly and frail relatives. You need a solid fuel stove running radiators via a gravity system. Coal is best.

[blackrose]

11 hours ago, new2boat said:

Hi All, 

 

New to hear and i feel i maybe going over old ground but we have a new 60ft widebeam that I'm about to start installing heating/rads/calorifier. We will be living on the boat full time once she's complete and I initially thought putting a webasto/Eberspacher diesel heater with a twin coil calorifier would be fine, however I've seen a few comments about webasto/Eberspacher being more aimed at 'leisure' use and short cycling, not lasting long etc. I've researched bubble PJ/Kabolas (dont like the idea of 230v, we're not on a mooring but equally wont be moving everyday for battery charge off the engine). Also heard about Hurricane but bloody expensive. 

 

Really im looking for anyone's opinion on running a webasto/Eberspacher on a full time liveaboard (thinking about 4 rads). How likely is it to break on me? Any tips for looking after it and extending it's life? I've seen the issuers around short cycles and in summer leaving a towel rad on low to stop the short cycles.

 

Any help much appreciated

 

Thanks!!  

 

What you have to understand is that on boats it's not about either/or. It's about having multiple systems. So the answer is to have a solid fuel stove (or drip fed diesel stove) and an Eberspacher or Webasto.

 

Just as most liveaboard boats have 12v and 240v electrical systems, you're wise to install different systems for heating the boat and heating hot water. 

[Tony1]

When I bought the boat I started off with only an Eberspacher (50ft narrowboat), and that was ok until around early November. 

 

At first I would switch it on in Autumn for maybe 30 or 60 mins, just to take the chill off the boat interior first thing in the morning.

I found that in late Oct and early Nov, I was switching it on for more and more hours during the day, and using a fair bit of diesel. 

And as it got colder outside, the heat of the radiators seemed to die down quicker after the CH went off- and within an hour or so I would be wanting to put the CH back on again. 

 

But the noise can be a constraint on using the CH.

I would generally get up at 7am, and the boat would be pretty chilly, so tried putting the CH on a timer to come on an hour before I woke.

But I found that the noise of it starting up sometimes woke me up earlier than I wanted (and it is situated out in the engine bay). 

 

The other thing about the noise is that if you do get up very early for some random reason (say 4am or 5am), the boat is very cold, and you have to put the CH on immediately, and it still takes maybe 20 mins before it starts to warm up a bit.

 

And that also means if you have neighbours, they are going to also be subjected to the startup noise of the CH at whatever hour of night (or morning) it is.

If for some reason you stay up late one night- till say 1am or beyond- on a winter night you will need the CH on, and that means your neighbours will potentially have that noise late at night. You might just want to put it on before you go to bed routinely, so that the interior stays warm a bit longer through the night.

And then you have that dilemma- what if the person in the boat behind me went to sleep an hour ago, and might be woken up by my CH start up noise?

 

I got a coal stove in the last week of November, and it transformed the experience of living aboard.. 

With a SF stove you leave it ticking over all night, so that whatever time you get up during the night or morning, the boat is very comfortable. 

The other thing I noticed about the SF stove is that it is a much drier heat, and the odd item of clothing will dry out pretty quickly, but without causing condensation.  

Before I got the stove, I had condensation on the windows every morning, and any clothes that were left in the lounge ready to wear felt clammy and cold. 

In fact I had a habit of leaving two of the gas stove rings on for ten minutes or so, just to get some quick heat into the lounge/kitchen area. 

With the SF stove ticking over during the night, I can leave a window partially open and there is zero condensation. 

 

As some have mentioned, the CH also drains the batteries, so if you have got back late from work/day out and not got a full charge back into the batteries say, you might be wondering whether you'll flatten the batteries below the recommended 50% level, by running the CH for a few hours.

I would occasionally switch my CH on at 6am, thinking that the batteries were getting pretty low, but knowing I couldn't start the engine and recharge them until 8am. 

And if you have a serious electrical shutdown of some sort, that could also take out your CH, making the boat impossible to live during winter.

With a SF stove your heat is of course independent of electricity, and so the boat can still be lived on for a couple of days without electricity, in an emergency (e.g. buy candles).

 

There are boaters on here with many years experience who will give much more sound advice than I can (with only being aboard 18 months), but there are some snags with CH, and my personal opinion is that I would not want to live on a boat in the winter with only diesel CH, and without a SF or diesel stove. Not for a moment.

Diesel is great for a quick shot of warmth on a chilly Spring or Autumn morning (or evening) when its not worth building a fire. But in the depths of winter, and with neighbours close by, I have some significant reservations. 

I know some people use diesel CH successfully through the winter, but I'm not one of them.

 

 

[MtB]

1 hour ago, Idle Days said:

We Have a Webasto diesel heater feeding radiators and a calorifier together with a solid fuel stove in our 60ft narrowboat. We plan to get rid of the filthy solid fuel stove during the summer and replace it with a diesel bubble stove or similar. Apart from the dust and dirt generated by the stove we find it difficult to control the heat output, so it has to go.  The Webasto works reasonably well but has proved to be unreliable and very expensive to repair so we don't want to rely on it for a main heating source. 

 

 

I think you might regret this. I don't have a great deal of experience of diesel stoves but a had a GF a few years ago with one, and my experience of this suggests you'll just be swapping one annoying set of problems for another:

 

1) Her stove was prone to going out in windy conditions and flooding itself so she was always reluctant to leave it running when she/we went out. So she would routinely close it down when going out which naturally meant coming home to a cold boat and having to re-light it. 

 

2) If it blew out whilst in use the flooding meant the boat stank of diesel. Possibly just as bad as the ash mess from a coal stove, but different.

 

3) Re-lighting it was not a ten second job. She would first want it to cool, then spend 10 minutes mopping up and cleaning out some liquid diesel from inside, then lighting it and getting it hot again probably took just as long as a coal stove. 

 

4) This stove had a bulkhead diesel tank outside, which needed manually filling with 10 litres of diesel every so often. A right ball-ache. Yes we always planned to fit a fuel line the length of the boat and al electric pump to fill it, but there always seemed to be something more important to do...

 

5) This one was a diesel Squirrel with back boiler running about three rads. Performance at heating the rads was pathetic and even when the electric pump failed, it could barely boil the water in the back boiler.

 

Overall I found the whole thing utterly unreliable and far preferred my Squirrel but you might find this set of issued preferable to all those associated with a coal stove. Just posting this so you know! 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 11, 2022 by MtB
Add point 5.

[Tony Brooks]

10 hours ago, Richard10002 said:

I had an eberspacher on a seagoing grp yacht and it kept ot warm and toasty in the icy UK winters, of which 2009/10 was memorable. At 13ft wide, it had a much larger internal volume than my current 45ft narrowboat, where the front half is well heated by the solid fuel stove, but the rear can remain a bit chilly.

 

A particular advantage of the Eberspacher iscthe fact that the heat can be directed anywhere in the boat  rather than having to radiate from one focal point.

 

Fitted correctly, id have an eberspacher over a stove.

 

Was that a blown hot air or boiler type Eber? For some reason the former seem to  be less problematic than the boiler type.  Yachts seem to typically use the blown air type.

[MtB]

4 minutes ago, Tony Brooks said:

 

Was that a blown hot air or boiler type Eber? For some reason the former seem to  be less problematic than the boiler type.  Yachts seem to typically use the blown air type.

 

 

I have blown air types in all my boats for instant heat and yes I find them very reliable. Two massive drawbacks for liveaboard heating though.

 

1) Noise. They don't run quietly, there is both motor noise and the constant clicking from the dosing pump. I don't mind this at all but the noise of them drives some people to distraction.

 

2) The warm air variety obviously can't heat your hot water so they need pairing with a Morco.

[Tracy D'arth]

1 hour ago, Idle Days said:

We Have a Webasto diesel heater feeding radiators and a calorifier together with a solid fuel stove in our 60ft narrowboat. We plan to get rid of the filthy solid fuel stove during the summer and replace it with a diesel bubble stove or similar. Apart from the dust and dirt generated by the stove we find it difficult to control the heat output, so it has to go.  The Webasto works reasonably well but has proved to be unreliable and very expensive to repair so we don't want to rely on it for a main heating source. 

You'll be sorry!  Seen more Bubble oilies removed than seen installed.

[mrsmelly]

45 minutes ago, blackrose said:

 

What you have to understand is that on boats it's not about either/or. It's about having multiple systems. So the answer is to have a solid fuel stove (or drip fed diesel stove) and an Eberspacher or Webasto.

 

Just as most liveaboard boats have 12v and 240v electrical systems, you're wise to install different systems for heating the boat and heating hot water. 

Very wise words. My widebeam had four methods of producing hot water. It had calorifier off the propulsion engine, Instant gas paloma, Webasto oil and electric immersion for landline. Im now in a poxy house and if there is a power cut Ive got problems 😐

1 hour ago, Idle Days said:

We Have a Webasto diesel heater feeding radiators and a calorifier together with a solid fuel stove in our 60ft narrowboat. We plan to get rid of the filthy solid fuel stove during the summer and replace it with a diesel bubble stove or similar. Apart from the dust and dirt generated by the stove we find it difficult to control the heat output, so it has to go.  The Webasto works reasonably well but has proved to be unreliable and very expensive to repair so we don't want to rely on it for a main heating source. 

Please wait a few more winters, experience will change your mind 😁 A morso squirrel is very, very, very controlable.

Edited February 11, 2022 by mrsmelly

[Jen-in-Wellies]

11 hours ago, booke23 said:

setup correctly it needs no electricity at all, although if you want to heat the calorifier too it might need to be a pumped system

Cauliflowers can be made to work on a gravity back boiler system. Needs to be installed in the right place and using a calorifier with a large diameter (22mm) heating coil for preference, to minimise flow restriction. I used a vertical cauliflower, placed so the top port of the 22mm coil was at the highest point in the system, then the exit port lead to the radiators. It needs to be designed that way, with a suitable place for the cauliflower near the stove, but worth it for the advantages in terms of power use, noise and safety of not having a pump.

Jen

[peterboat]

1 hour ago, Idle Days said:

We Have a Webasto diesel heater feeding radiators and a calorifier together with a solid fuel stove in our 60ft narrowboat. We plan to get rid of the filthy solid fuel stove during the summer and replace it with a diesel bubble stove or similar. Apart from the dust and dirt generated by the stove we find it difficult to control the heat output, so it has to go.  The Webasto works reasonably well but has proved to be unreliable and very expensive to repair so we don't want to rely on it for a main heating source. 

I have a bubble stove with backboiler going cheap at the moment, a friend put water in my front diesel tank by mistake! anyway stove not damaged but cleaning tank out properly will be a nightmare for something I only used a couple of times a month. Its a BB1 PM me if interested

[Alan de Enfield]

4 minutes ago, peterboat said:

I have a bubble stove with backboiler going cheap at the moment, a friend put water in my front diesel tank by mistake! anyway stove not damaged but cleaning tank out properly will be a nightmare for something I only used a couple of times a month. Its a BB1 PM me if interested

 

 

You don't mean that your filler caps were not properly labelled in accordance with the BSS do you ?

 

Shame on you !

[peterboat]

3 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

 

You don't mean that your filler caps were not properly labelled in accordance with the BSS do you ?

 

Shame on you !

Carlo clearly couldnt read!! he saw the filler and filled it,the fact it had diesel written on it escaped him

[Tracy D'arth]

9 minutes ago, peterboat said:

I have a bubble stove with backboiler going cheap at the moment, a friend put water in my front diesel tank by mistake! anyway stove not damaged but cleaning tank out properly will be a nightmare for something I only used a couple of times a month. Its a BB1 PM me if interested

I have never heard one cheep, go whooosh, go pop, and smoke like a volcano but never cheep.

[new2boat]

Wow! thanks for all the comments. To be clear we do plan on having a stove as well as a webasto/eberspacher but i was worried about the webasto/eberspacher being unreliable. It seems some people have had issues right off the bat with them and others have had them installed for years and years with little issue. 

 

Would a hurricane diesel heater be worth the money for a liveaboard?

 

  

[OldGoat]

I have an aversion to ebersplutter heaters (something to do with rag and stick boats), hence I fitted our boat out with a Mikuni heater instead which has been very reliable in the 30+ years that we've been boating. With four large old style panel radiators ** (arranged so that they can be used to dry clothers PLUS a large  vertical cauliflower in an airing cupblard  keep the boat so warm that the Mikuni manages most of the day on low heat. OK - it's a narrowboat but I guess the -splutter would only work a little harder on a wide beam. The secret is to have lot of good insulation everwhere in the hull when fitting out.

For high days and holidays we also have a (smaller than) squirel stove  that chucks out loads of heat as well (nice for evenings when you don't want the sound of the -splutter (even though ours is hidden away in the engine room)  disturbing the TV / whatever.

 

** for clothes drying / fast heaat distribution I think (and without and proof) that H&S has prevailed on the casings reducing the radiation / conduction of these units so mtha the towel rail effect is much reduced.

 

Edit: The problems with 'splutters and mikuni units is often / usially because either the radiators etc are undersized or that the heater gets turned off completely before said unit gets really hot and purges itself. Its' not  'quick warm-up unit' - more a small central heating unit which needs to be on for 3-4 hours (at least) at a time.

Edited February 11, 2022 by OldGoat

[MtB]

33 minutes ago, peterboat said:

Carlo clearly couldnt read!! he saw the filler and filled it,the fact it had diesel written on it escaped him

 

 

How many people died as a result of this disaster? 

 

 

[peterboat]

33 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

 

How many people died as a result of this disaster? 

 

 

It cost me 400 squids buying a secondhand wood burning stove and a day removing and fitting! However I get wood for free the HVO I have to buy so eventually I will break even, Carlo bless him hasn't stopped apologising 

[booke23]

2 hours ago, MtB said:

1) Her stove was prone to going out in windy conditions and flooding itself

 

I think Refleks and Newport stoves have some kind of thermocouple cutoff valve to prevent this.