Questions from the Class - Heater

Al Thompson asks in response to It Just Gets Worse: OK, fess up: What brand of heater are you being tortured by? Guess: Espar, or perhaps Webasto.

He's not the first to ask the really important question: What is that heater that's causing so much trouble and how can I avoid ever purchasing one by the same company?

We have a Eberspächer Hydronic 10* installed by the previous owner. It's a specialty heater mostly used by buses, RV, boats, and trucks -- basically any 12 Volt system. It's a diesel burner with a circulating pump which circulates anti-freeze into each cabin. At the cabin, there is a little radiator with a fan which goes off when it hits a certain temperature.

Now for the first year and half or so, it worked like a charm. The only problem we had was the first time we ran out of fuel and didn't realize it. Very embarrassing to call a mechanic to explain to us that we were complete idiots. Turns out the heater has it's own, dedicated 12 gallon tank of diesel. In the future, we're going to use this as a spare jerry can.

This recent series of breakage is due to air in the water pump. The original highly engineered Germanic beauty of a pump -- also sold to BMW for gorgeous finely tuned and ridiculously expensive cars -- decided that it didn't know how to function without water in the system and promptly self-destructed. The impeller simply melted.

Of course, even enterprising do-it-yourself cruisers can't fix this problem because you can't buy the impeller by itself. No, you can only buy the entire water pump. So we bought a new water pump.

The second pump lasted 48 hours. Not having another $360 to throw at the problem and clearly recognizing now that the impeller was a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself, we decided to find a less perfectly designed, robust and cheap Ahmayreekcan pump. The new pump has the advantage of being poorly designed, clunky and not pretty at all, costs a mere $170, and is designed to stop gracefully in the absence of water in the system. It also has the stellar advantage that you can purchase each and every part separately from each and every other part.

Let this be a cardinal lesson to cost conscious cruisers. If you can't order the component parts, do not buy the assembled device.

I can also vouch for the fact that it does fail as gracefully as designed. In fact, it has done so repeatedly. What it does now is blow warm lovely air for about 5 minutes and then with a sign and a clank, it stops annoyed with our inability to consistently feed it water.

So then we started doing clever things we should have started with like completely pumping out all the existing coolant and replacing it with fresh. We also installed air bleeders at every bump and turn. Air bubbles in the system are bad news. Air bubbles result in locks of the pump. We also defensively installed resisters because apparently this good ole boy USA pump sucks amps like a vacuum and can potentially burn out the fine, sensitive and delicate brain of the Hydronic.

DrC and the mechanic still think it's air in the system - even though DrC purged the system so it ran nothing but pure water. We would purge it again, but the marina turned off the water this afternoon due to the sub zero temperatures plaguing the city.

Which brings us to tonight wherein we are officially in a Catch 22. We can't get heat until the marina turns on the water to the dock enabling us to flush the bubbles out of the system again. And we can't get water on the dock until the temperature reaches a point where we don't care if the heater works.

And before you ask, we have also discovered to our dismay that despite all math to the contrary, you can not run two 15 amp radiant space heaters on a 30 amp plug. I suppose that's another story.

* Points to Al, BTW, as Espar is the American branch of German Eberspächer.

The Quarter Quandary

Dinner on DQ
Uploaded by toastfloats

I do not know how it works in the rest of the world, but here in the Pacific Northwest you will find that ports and marinas offer a very limited set of services for your nightly slip fee. For your one-dollar-per-water-line-foot, you get the privilege of tying your gorgeous hunk of plastic goodness up to their nasty, tar-covered, rotting wooden dock. If you have a very, very long electrical cord, you can drape it like a popcorn string across the dock to a plug somewhere south of Olympia and leech power off the land grid. If the sea godz are with you, you might also find a water hose somewhere within a hundred yards of your location. Everything else costs money.

Basically, I am not particularly impressed with the variety and quality of services available to us in most of the marinas we would like to casually tie up to for the night. In fact, I'm so unimpressed that most of the time when we're out and about, Don Quixote doesn't bother. Oh sure, we like the amenities of the small coastal towns and island villages as much as the next cruiser. But rather than spend $38 just to stop moving for a few hours, we prefer to drop our anchor about 50 feet off the marina entrance.

Yes, we're that big, French two-hulled wonder blocking your way in. We are the poor white trash with the laundry dangling next to our feet on the rails as we sip box red and comment about the quality of your boat and rigging as you slowly motor your way into the exclusive yacht club docks. We are the loud family attempting to wash five filthy bodies in two-minute bursts in the women's shower, screaming at the cold water, and laughing hysterically at bizarrely creative soapsud hairdos. We fill your washer and dryer with towels, throw rugs, and blue cloths, hog the newspaper while we sip lattes in the marina cafe, and generally devastate the free book table wherever it might be found.

Yes, we are the freeloaders.

Initially, we were very quiet – even sneaky – about this. We would park the boat someplace just out of sight... perhaps behind some 40-foot legacy of the sailing dark ages slowly rotting into oblivion on a mooring ball within site of the marina. Rowing our dinghy softly to the guest dock in the dusky hour when sensible sailors are firing up the grill and pouring out the martinis, we would sneak into the laundry room, the shore head, and the local grocery.

But then we discovered probably the most important bit of information about marinas: Nothing is free. Nothing. Your slip fee is really just that – a slip fee. To do laundry, you pay. To shower, you pay. Even to pee, you pay. And the universal coin of the realm is the quarter. Two quarters to shower, four to wash, six to dry. The marina is a beast which consumes quarters faster than an SUV sucks gas.

And the quarters are unidirectional. This isn't like Vegas or Reno. At least in those venerable cities, you pour silver dollars into the machine and in return you get bells, bings, beers, and the occasional lapful of silver dollars. If you break a $20 at the 7-Eleven, you receive a handful of shiny silver coins in return.

Quarters in a marina, however, disappear. They go into the machines and are inexplicably never seen again. You can ask the harbor master, but he'll tell you to use the coin machines. You can try the coin machines, but they are – to a machine – busted. The grocer can't help you, and the bar won't. The bank is in town and is either closed or requires that you walk up a steep cliff roughly the height of a small skyscraper. And when you get there, odds are you will find that they won't sell you quarters unless you have an account. Or they don't have any quarters left because every other mariner within a mile has already cleaned them out.

Wild Thang
Uploaded by toastfloats

I don't know where the quarters go. It's one of life's mysteries, I suppose. It ranks up there with hanging chads, the Bermuda triangle, and the popularity of Rush Limbaugh. All I can do is recommend that before you ship out, you invest in a metric ton of this precious metal.

The long and the short of it is that fee for service marinas stripped us all modesty and discretion. Now we don't bother sneaking around. We drop anchor just outside whatever seems a reasonable boundary of “marina water” and load down the dinghy with dirty laundry, smelly children, and a suitcase of quarters. Then we roar into town, guns blazing, coins flashing, voices raised, “Your clean water, or your lives!”