gear test: heating

Jepp, it´s getting cold and wet outside. After a nice day of sailing in spring or autumn you might like  to have a warm cabin, allowing you to warm up and dry up things.
If you a lucky you have a Diesel heating onboard, but how do you heat in a small boat or a boat without central heating
In a marina you have your shore power to power a electric fan heater. But the problem with electric heating is that you get warm air quite quickly, but it is still wet. You don´t get rid of the humidity.
And what do you do if you are out at sea, at anchor,......?
So here is what the market offers:

1.  Heating bonnet for gas
For cooking I use a Origo 3000 alcohol cooker. For example at compass24 you will find the heating bonnet for gas cooker for 20€. I bought mine somewhere in a nice chandlery in England.

 

It works with the Origo cooker. It is able to heat up the main cabin of a Delanta 80 from 8°C up to 20°C in nearly 25 minutes. If you want to sail you can fix it with the clamps of your cooker and you have nice, warm cabin in next to no time. What abot the humidity?? Well this doesn´t help if you are using  an ethyl alcohol cooker, but it is warm and it keeps the heat for a little while after you turn off the cooker. 

2. A petroleum heater.

A very cheap offer is this petroleum heater. You can get it at compass24 or awn.

But man, this is a hulk of a petroleum heater. My parents use it on their boat, a Dufour 31, and it is masive! My father is always complaining, when he has to set it up, because it it stored somewhere in the front cabin under their bed. But it gives you heat quickly, and you can actually feel how the humidity gets less. 

A couple of years ago in winter, we had a broken water pipe at the house of my grandparents while they were both in hospital, because the central heating failed. Well we ended up in a really frozen house and we used this petroleum heater to heat a large dining room, while we worked to get rid off the frozen carpets. It was excellent, the room was really warm in no time and we had a point of refuge in the house.

To use it on a boat, well it is quite big and you have to make sure that you have a good ventilation because of the petroleum smell and the potential for carbon monoxide poisoning. It has a very big petroleum tank (5,2 liters) so it should give you a couple of warm days. 

There are also smaller petroleum heaters on the market, you just have to search online to find a few examples.

3. Gas heater

Since a year I also use the small gas heater from compass24. 

And I really love that thing. It is powered by small butane gas cartridges which give you heat for nearly 2 hours at maximum setting. My first trail of thie neat little gadget was to heat up the winter garden of my father-in-law in winter, and for it´s size it did a really great job. 

You can feel how the humidity vanishes and the cabin gets really comfortable in no time. My wife also loves it, because it is really a pleasent heat. This gas heater gas a C02 guard, so it switches of if there is insufficient ventilation. But I do not operate this at night, because it an "open fire".  An, get a good slepping bag and you should need little extra heating overnight.

I´m working on constructing a mechanism for clamping it down so we can set up and use it during sailing, similar to cooker heating bonnet.

Wehn I´m done, I will post it to you.