Everyone takes it for granted that when you turn on a hot water faucet you get hot water. On a boat it isn’t so. It takes a LOT of energy to heat water from 65 deg in the tank to 120 deg in a hot water heater. Unless we are plugged into a dock, we would let the engine do this job. When the engine was running, hot engine coolant water ran through a heat exchanger in the hot water heater and it would heat up the tank. With the new solar panels, we don’t run the engine any more so, no hot water! To compensate, I decided to tap into our boats heating system and use it to heat the water in the hot water heater. On paper, it’s a simple procedure, remove the engine supply line to the heat exchanger and tap into the boiler lines as a source of heat. Yea, simple. Now, 6 hours later, 2 trips to the store and after taking a “spray” bath in ethylene glycol, the basic plumbing is done. Now, all I need to do is bleed the air out of the lines and give it a try but, that’s for tomorrow.
Tomorrow - Well, it works but not as well as I had hoped for. It turns out that the heat exchanger within the hot water tank does a poor job of transferring heat.
You are underway! I saw the empty mooring ball. Lew had his surgery, is doing fine. But the winds were up last night when I came back to the boat, and I was hoping that you were tucked in, nice and secure.
ReplyDeleteWell better be careful about what you wish for!
ReplyDeleteI was about ready to complain about the lack of data on what is going on down there, but SPOT maybe more information than I need. I can spend all kinds of time calculating useless information, your course, speed, water depth,
weather you went through, currents. I really don't have time to do this,I'm going to have to
get my life back up running.
Be careful and have fun for me!