Marine Water Heaters / Calorifiers Utilise Your Engine S Free Waste Heat

Marine Water Heaters / Calorifiers Utilise Your Engine s Free Waste Heat

by

Captain Jack

If your boat has a sink in the galley or you have a shower on board you can definitely benefit from installing a marine water heater, also known as a calorifier. After a hard days boating it s great to be able to jump into the shower. This is even better if the hot water you re using has been provided free of charge by the engine.

Without a marine water heater fitted the waste heat from your engine exits the boat through the exhaust pipe, and is lost. Marine water heaters have a secondary heating coil fitted in addition to (generally speaking) the electric immersion heater. The secondary coil is there to circulate hot water from your engine through the water heater, before returning the used water to the engine. The engine heat is transferred through the coil in the water heater to give you a supply of hot water.

There are very few things in life that are genuinely free, but hot water produced this way is. You are only going to be running your engine when you re going somewhere, so the engine would be running anyway. Tapping in to your engine s hot water while it s running does not use more fuel, and the fuel that is being used could destroy your engine if the excess heat it produces wasn t dissipated. All we re doing is helping your engine to lose the excess.

Some water heaters, like ours, have a second coil. This coil can be connected to certain diesel heaters that are capable of heating water, or, can be connected to a multi-fuel stove. Although not allowed in some places, the multi-fuel stove is brilliant. The fuel we use in winter is a type of smokeless nugget, but we always mix this with free wood from the river bank. Hot water produced from fallen trees through the stove and secondary water heater coil is also free.

Another benefit of having the water heater on board is that if you use a marina as a home base you will probably have an electrical hook-up. Most marine water heaters are designed to take an immersion heater. Our own has a 1KW immersion heater and the water tank is about 55 litres or about 12 gallons. It is quite surprising how quickly the small immersion heater gets the water up to temperature. Water heaters do have different individual fittings. Ours came supplied with immersion heater, twin coils, non return valve, pressure relief valve and a water pre-mixer to reduce the water temperature on the output side to a level that will not result in hospital level scalding.

We live on our boat all year round and find that the 55 litre calorifier that we have easily provides enough hot water to do what we want on a daily basis.

There is no doubt that having hot water available all the time is excellent, a little bit of luxury. Go on, treat yourself. You can see my

Marine Water Heater-Calorifier

in situ on my boat. You ll find anecdotes, pictures and products, both good and bad, that we ve discovered over the years. http://www.stuhaynes.com/calorifiers/calorifiers.htm

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