Heating

It is that time of year when the heating starts to come on in fits and spurts, both on the boat and at home. Luckily for us Naughty-Cal came fitted with a diesel warm air heating system; it wasn’t standard fit and was added by a previous owner. This greatly improves our comfort levels during the winter months and means that we can spend evenings away from our home berth when some of our cruising companions are heading for the marina so they can plug in and use their electric heaters to keep the cold at bay.

The Webasto heater uses between 0.25 and 0.125 litres of diesel per hour, so a negligible amount of fuel; however the fans also require 12 volt battery power to operate. On initial start up the power draw is quite high at around 10Ah however this quickly drops to around 2Ah once the unit is up to temperature and blowing toasty warm air. This small amount of battery power and fuel used really does make the Webasto a good piece of equipment onboard, as you can leave it turned on keeping the boat warm without fear of flattening or abusing your batteries or using loads of fuel. It has proven time and again to be a worthwhile piece of kit to have onboard extending our cruising season considerably.

These diesel heaters are reported to have reliability issues, however during the three years and three winters we have owned Naughty-Cal, and our Webasto has proven to be faultless, providing us with warm air each and every time we fire it up. A lot of the reliability issues associated with these heaters revolve around dirty fuel, our tanks have a constant turnaround of fuel so we don’t worry about this, or oversized units that cycle in and out far too much. Our 2kw systems is just the right size for a small cruiser like Naughty-Cal. The heater keeps the boat warm regardless of the external temperature and doesn’t cycle in an out all of the time.

Maintenance of the heater comprises a quick vac out once a year to remove any excess soot in the burner but other than that and occasionally cleaning the air intake there is little to do with the unit. At some point it will need a glow plug or other pasts such as fans and burners replacing but up until now (touch wood) we have not had to replace anything.