The heater comes with a nice heavy duty mounting bracket with all the mounting holes punched through and ready to go. It's even painted. I planned to mount this bracket to a plywood shelf that would be attached to the inside of the hull on the port side, aft in the cockpit locker. I chose this location because it provided the most clear distance around for running the ducts with the least amount of restriction. I would attach the shelf to the fiberglass hull using 3M 5200 adhesive and add fiberglass mat with a 4" overlap for strength. This was the plan.
Before committing myself to plywood I made a cardboard mock-up shelf held together with duct tape. The location I had chosen doesn't have a straight flat surface in sight and I want to have a close fit for good adhesion. It's also important to have the heater sitting level once it's installed. Using cardboard I could make all the necessary adjustments with a box knife. With my mock-up held in place I marked corrections, cut, marked, cut and marked some more, until I felt I had it really close to perfection. This sounds like a pretty easy chore until you mix in the fact that you're inside a cockpit locker with a floor that slants at 45 degrees and it's so confined that the only way to turn around is by standing up with your hands over your head and exhaling while you turn. Oh yeah, did I mention that it's 24 degrees out today? Now that I've set the stage, let's continue with the story. I trim up my mock-up shelf to perfection, then take it out to the dock where I trace the parts out onto my plywood and cut them out. Before I screw and glue everything together I decide to stick it together with some duct tape and take one more check, just to make sure I got it right. I climb back into the locker and hold my shelf up in place with one hand and place my level on with the other. I watch in amazement as the level slides off the side and crashes to the floor of the locker before slipping into the bilge. Hmmm, not quite level. What happened to my perfect measurements? As I'm climbing out of the locker the shelf collapses in on itself and falls apart. I take this as an omen and sit down in the cold to rethink what I'm doing. Grrrrrrrr.
Cold air is really good for concentration and clear, level headed thought. It's also good for uncontrollable shivering. I was just reaching this point when I realized that attaching the shelf to the inside of the hull probably isn't the best way to go. The heater weighs about 25 pounds. Take that out in some choppy seas and we'd probably be looking at a hole in the side of the boat and a $3000 anchor rattling around in the bilge. So, in that same cockpit locker is a bulkhead made of 1" plywood that separates it from the aft cabin. I decided to turn the heater 90 degrees and mount it on the bulkhead. Now, instead of facing fore and aft it'll be facing port to starboard. It'll be super strong there but there are several downsides to this location. Sound will be transmitted through the plywood so I'll hafta put in a sound barrier, probably rubber bushings or something. The real problem is that now the heater is mounted perpendicular to the run of ducting which will add a restriction. I'm still within the #10 limit of the heater so it'll be OK but the return side will also have a bend in it and that might put it over. I feel like I've reached one of those "no-win" situations. I'm going to put it together and see what I get. If there's any problems I'll rework the ducts to open them up some.
Right now I've gotta get this thing going. On Friday we woke up to find the creek completely frozen over. Monday, 12/13, when I jumped off the boat to go to work I found the dock was covered with ice and then, just to make a point, it started to snow. So far we're doing OK. The heater project is moving forward. Cheri spent the weekend with some of that plastic foam insulation that's backed with aluminum. This stuff is about 1/4" thick and I didn't think it would do any good at all. She cut panels of it for all the ports and hatches and covered the exposed side of the hull in the forward stateroom. She covered that and the mast with some quilted material which gave it a real nice look. After the first day with this stuff in place the boat stayed very toasty down below and we don't have to run the reverse cycle heat as often. The cabin sole is now warmer too, probably because all that heat is being forced down into the bilge. We opened up some of the storage compartments under the floor and found them to be not warm but definitely not freezing cold either. So now the boat is really comfortable and hopefully that'll hold us until the diesel heater is finished. I can always count on Cheri to come up with the best solution. The real wall we're up against here is the water temperature. It's been dropping like a rock since the end of October. Just last night I sat down and re-read the manual for the Cruisair reverse cycle system. It says in there that if the water temperature gets too cold we stand a chance of the heat exchanger freezing up and causing damage. That might be kinda disappointing.Just as a side note: While I was re-reading the Cruisair manual I discovered that the little booger is totally programmable. Ever since we moved aboard we've been fighting this hurricane type noise when the thing is running. It's so loud we've been turning the system off in the Main Salon when we watched a movie. We've been turning the system off in our stateroom at night because it was keeping us awake....with the fan on low! So now I find out I can re-program the fan speed. I dropped it from 38 (factory setting) to 25 and also programmed it for intermittent running. Now when it runs you can barely hear it and when it gets the room to the set temperature it shuts off and waits until it drops below the preset before turning back on again. This is wonderful! There's all kindsa stuff you can do with this system. I think I'm gonna sit down tonight and re-re-read that book again!
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