Saturday, January 20, 2018

Webasto 5500 heater problems

This week, my Webasto stopped working. I noticed because the temps on my boat started dropping while I was at my house. I have a samsung smart things setup on the boat to monitor for leaks and temperatures in different parts of the boat (bow, aft, cabins, engine, fridge) which sends me alarms when it's cold.
When I got to the boat, there was plenty of diesel (1/2) but there was a flashing fault code on the control unit for the heater. I see 5 fast flashes and one long flash. The long one indicates the fault. One flash indicates "failure to start after 2 attempts". The manual indicates to restart the heater. I did that twice with the same result. Then I rebooted the boat (cycle 12V power) and got the same on the first try but it worked on the second try.
The boat then heated up but today, like 3 days later, same issue I think. Headed to boat today to figure it out and possible see if I need to decoke the heater or replace glow plugs.

Friday, January 12, 2018

Winter arrives

Well,
Winter came. It was down below zero F during the last weekend and I got to test out the heating setup on the boat. I have a dealer installed Webasto 5500 on the boat. The reverse cycle heat that I was using isn't working now that water temperatures are 37F which is too cold to make any heat. So, these are turned off now until the water gets above 40f again.

We knew the Webasto does not heat the boat uniformly. Most of its heat exits in the port AFT bedroom, the main toilet, the rest goes between the starboard AFT bed room and the main cabin. The forward toilet and the forward berth get almost nothing.
So, the forward cabin went down in to the low 30s. The main cabin is around 50 and the rear are around 55F. The engine compartment was in high 30s. I did remove both side inspection panels for the engine allowing some heat to enter the engine compartment.

I want to stay on the boat and this isn't enough heat for me. So, I purchased two Westmarine 1500W space heaters (99 bucks ea), one for fwd berth, one for main cabin.

These pull 10.6A at full power and 6.5A at 3/4 power. The Jeanneau has a single 15A circuit so I can't run both at 4/4 or run a microwave at same time either, its all on the same 15A circuit. I run them both at 3/4 each which is about a 13A draw,

The Westmarine heaters are not putting out the heat on the box, 10.6A is around 1166 watts, not 1500W.

Anyway, with the heaters and the Webasto, the boat is managing to keep 65-68F in the main cabin and 40s in fwd cabin so thats working for me. I sleep in the starboard AFT cabin which is cosy. The boat is warm enough to be in a t-shirt when its single digits outside.

BTW, opening the engine compartment results in a good cold draft (not good) from the rear of the boat in the main cabin. I ended up just removing one panel rather than both panels from each aft berth.