Latest Brainstorm

[Roger Long]

Having experienced the incredible heat gradient in the cabin while testing my new cabin heater, I decided that a prototyping session in the madman's workshop was in order. The 12 square foot radiating surface of my bulkhead water tank makes the upper part of the cabin especially toasty.

I haven't yet been able to identify a space that would be practical and desirable to install a permanent air circulating duct so I'm going to try a portable arrangement. This is a computer fan mounted in a cannibalized heat diverter for a dryer.



The aluminum dryer hose will be hung from a hook in the overhead near the stove and the fan plugged into a jack attached to the power supply to the cabin heater fan. It will suck hot air down from about 6” under the cabin top and spread it around the cabin floor.

There are two or three places I can hang this thing depending on circumstances. There is also the potential to bend it around, say to push some of that heat into the forward cabin.

The aluminum hose compacts down to about 6” long for convenient storage. If it works well, maybe I’ll make up something a bit more elegant looking for the bottom housing. It may also help me figure out the best location for a built in duct if I can find a place to run it.

[paladin]

Woorks great, Roger...I did the same thing, sorta....I ran a small hose inside the back of a couple of lockers, and used a pair of fans (one at each site) to pull the warm air down to the floor. I installed a pair of ni cad batteries at each one, and a small solar panel on the cabin top.....keep the batteries charged and the fan would run for 48 hours even with little/mo sunlight.. Then...in two other places on the boat, I ran pipes into the bilge, and ran them into a closet just under the deck to the input to a pair of dorade boxes, with Nicro solar exhaust units mounted outside...pulling stale air out of the bilge and up inside the dorade boxes and out....fresh air circulating all the time.