After looking in the gas locker I think that Speedwell originally had a gas fired heater, but that’s long since gone and when we bought her she didn’t have any cabin heating. We’re planning to live on the boat for extended periods and take her to some out of the way places so a decent heating system will make life much more pleasant.
We’ve decided to have a diesel fired heater that heats the boat through a system of radiators (rather than the more common blown air system). Although more expensive this system has a number of advantages from our point of view:
- Routing small bore water pipes through the boat should be less disruptive than large bore hot air pipes.
- Temperatures throughout the boat should be more controllable.
- We expect the system to be quieter than a blown air system.
- The heater should also provide water heating (we need to confirm this) so we can have hot water at anchor without needing to run the main engine.
The heating system is one of the major items on our refit list that we’re getting Fox’s to install for us. As it’s installed and we live with it we’ll add more details here.