Heating and Hot Water
Efforts this week have been ploughed into research. We await the arrival of the struts so that the furniture build can commence! With little physical work to get our teeth into this week and in a bid to keep things moving along, Ben and I concentrated on researching some of the other elements of the build. We are excited about the impending delivery of the struts, but as always there is much to do. We decided to divide and conquer this week, with Ben focusing on finalising the heating while I continue the work in SketchUp. I am hoping that we’ll be ready to order the next round of struts for the remaining structures as soon as the first lot has arrived and been put together.
Diesel Heater
One of the most important features of the build is our heating system. We’d both like to stay warm and comfy in the depths of the Canadian winter, so this is one element that we can’t afford to cut costs on or research poorly. Entangled within the decision of the heating system is how we’d produce hot water for showers and washing up. This area of the build has had a lot of attention, with both of us doing varying amounts of research on the topic throughout the build.
There are so many options when planing for heating and hot water. The standard option for the heating is a diesel heater. These kinds of heaters are used extensively and have been created to use very small amounts of fuel and electricity in order to run. They are an industry standard, being used for example, by the police in their mobile offices, amongst other places. The standard option for hot water is a gas hot water heater. As you know by now we really don’t want to use gas within our build, so heating the hot water in this manner is out of the question. We intend to find a suitable diesel solution and feel this will be easier and more sensible given that we already have a diesel hob. After all, we will always have diesel onboard, as it’s Gandalf’s drink of choice!
With Diesel heating being the way to go it was time to have a look around at what’s available. There are three main competitors on the market with regards to heating: Eberspächer, Webasto and Truma. All three manufacturers offer lightweight solutions for heating and hot water. However, only Webasto and Truma offer any kind of combined solution, where one unit is used to produce both the hot air and hot water.
How does it work?
Don’t be afraid, it sounds more complicated than it is! Essentially, diesel heaters work via a combustion process:
Lovely! So now we’ve got some nice warm air, but what about hot water? In the scenario above, with a simple air heater no hot water is created. There is a certain amount of trickery you can do to use an air heater to heater water. This involves buying a calorifier to hold the hot water, pumps and an additional heating matrix. Whilst this is a solution, it does come with some pitfalls.
For instance, as of yet there isn’t really an efficient way to have it only heat the water in the summer. The last thing you want on a scorching hot day in Texas is the heater on as well just so that you can have some warm water for a shower or washing up. Additionally the installation time will probably be longer and there is more to go wrong with the additional number of pipes and parts. Imagine trying to find a leak from the spaghetti junctions of pipes! You could of course buy the separate water and air heater and try to get both appliances to work together, but these ‘simple’ units cost around £1000 each not including the additional pipes and parts that you’d still need.
Other Options
What else can we do to keep this heating/hot water situation simple and manageable? As previously mentioned both Truma and Webasto produce a lovely all in one unit. They both hold and store around 11 litres of hot water (plenty for a shower), in addition to providing heating. They both come with a ‘summer mode’ which will only heat the water and save us from burning up on summer days. Impressively, for a purely diesel/ electric powered item it only takes 20 minutes to heat the next tank of water once the initial lot of water has been used.
With our desire to be able to live ‘offgrid’ and amongst nature for the majority of our trip we do require a sensible solution. Sure if we are on a camp ground that has showers we’ll probably use those to save our own water and fuel. So with further research into Truma and Webasto we settled on a combined air/ water heater, now all we had to do we decide which one to get!
The Comparison
We were pleased to have narrowed the search down to two units, it was time to do a comparison and hopefully get to a stage of ordering one of the units this week.
The Verdict
It’s been incredibly difficult to make a decision on the heating, and after much research Ben came to a final decision and we got ordering. What did we choose? Well in the end we decided to go with the Truma, for a number of reasons but mainly because of the design of the outputs that it has and the slightly smaller footprint.
The Truma comes with four heat outputs as standard as opposed to two on the Webasto. This is a massive bonus as it’ll help us to duct the hot air around the van much more efficiently. We intend to have one duct going into the cab, to keep that nice and warm for when we start out. A further duct will lead into the shower as on snowy wet days it’ll be our only place to dry our wet clothes and jackets. The remaining two ducts will be placed in the living area. We feel that this will give us the best hot air distribution. We could of course, use a splitter on the Webasto in order to end up with four outputs but this would halve the amount of hot air getting to each area, and make the ducting bulkier.
In addition to the outputs, we also felt that the ability to monitor and adjust the temperature in the van from afar would be a useful feature. In the middle of winter in Canada there can sometimes be as little as two hours of sunshine. During this brief period of daylight we may well be out exploring. This will of course be right when need our solar panels to grab as much sun power as possible in order to charge the batteries. Batteries are delicate items and some can only be charged when the temperature is above freezing, otherwise they risk being severely damaged. We felt that the Truma would allow us to go out safe in the knowledge that the batteries would be kept at a safe temperature if charging.
Another advantage the Truma has over the Webasto is the lighter weight. Any weight saving is crucial to the build.
Ultimately, we have the space for either and with the Truma needing less installation space, plus all the above advantages, we felt that it was the better option. I know that the Webasto can be installed outside, but there is the threat of it freezing when exposed to the extreme weather of Canada. We also don’t fancy having to climb under the van to fix anything should it go wrong.