Time for heat

When we bought Callooh! Callay! we knew the heater needed to be replaced. We did our best to delay this project as long as possible, but it is starting to get cold! Since we are not expert heating technicians, and this is certainly not a skill we learned in sailing classes in Miami, we gritted our teeth and expected the worst with this project. Of course, with all projects, there were complications…

Thank goodness Erik is fit and trim, since most of the work involved squeezing into the bilge area in the stern of the boat. We kept asking around the marina if anyone knew a 6 inch man or monkey that could assist with reaching inaccessible items like tie wraps that were on the old wiring in impossible to reach places.

Step 1 complete, removing the old unit that was installed in 1989. It had “Celebration” written on it’s tag so we now know what the previous name of the boat was.

No Karen, put that down. It is not a football! Someone is going stir crazy without her Penn State football games.

The new unit was shipped from the London area to us in several boxes. It was a challenge sorting out what parts and pieces needed to be installed. Espar is a German company and they included all the parts you would need to install the unit in a variety of applications, like heavy construction equipment and camper vans. Trying to figure out what all the miscellaneous stuff was in the boxes and determining what was and was not needed for our sailboat was an exercise in frustration. Ikea should have been consulted by the people at Espar before putting together their parts list and instructions!

Erik finished the installation of the heater unit, exhaust and air intake down in the bilge, then it was on to the wiring. Thankfully, we were able to reuse the duct work that was already in place. Covid masks came in handy when drilling holes for the control unit.

Then it was on to installing the fuel pump and fuel line. The access to the fuel tank was in the quarter berth, which we have nicknamed “the garage”. This required emptying the garage of all it’s stuff: the dinghy, two bicycles, spare anchor, two extra rodes, bundles of line, life jackets, cushions, two water jugs, the crab trap, backpacks and bags, and a box of miscellaneous stuff.

After installing everything, we went to start up the unit and…. no heat. We watched every youtube video we could find, read the directions a thousand times, called technical support, reinstalled the fuel pump in a different location, used our multi-meter to check connectivity, resistance and voltage and ran the start sequence a million times. Still, no go. Then Erik noticed that the fuel pump seemed to be pushing fuel back into the fuel tank instead of out of the fuel tank. We removed the pump and went to disassemble it to check the fuel filter when we noticed that the fuel pump was designed backwards from what the instructions show. Apparently Espar recently redesigned their pump and switched the orientation to be opposite from the orientation in the included instructions. They conveniently did not update their instructions. If I knew any German swear words, they would have been used profusely. Erik turned the pump around and voila – heat!

The final product. Heater unit and wiring complete as well as the installation of a new cover plate at the nav station with two 12 volt outlets. Bring on winter – we are ready! Prost!