Duran Duran
29 August 2008 | Brighton of course
warm/cloudy skip
Well all, Following retirement it has been busy busy busy. You were right Dean!
We had a mad 700 mile dash to Northern England to pick up a second hand little beauty like the one pictured here.
We were very pleased indeed with our purchase. All I have to do is install it now!
We have a plan to put a radiator in the aft cabin, and change out the calorifier for one with a double coil, which will allow us to have hot water when the stove is running, when the engine is running or when at dock via an electrical immersion heater.
At first we'll install it with the radiator and water tank only. then we'll see how that does during the winter. we may add a towel rail in the head and a warm air blower in the fore cabin, but let's see first how well it heats the space without these.
As in previous blogs, we have been REALLY disappointed with the ESPAR heater, every liveaboard I know has had problems and is thinking of getting rid of theirs.
However the Refleks (hence the duran duran reference) (i know very thin!) was used aboard every boat in the Antarctic during the early 90's and has a great reputation. You still need to clean it every so often, but if i plumb it correctly then it will need no power to run (the fuel is gravity fed from a header tank, which can be filled from either fuel tank and will last about 2 weeks running 24 hrs a day), no power to circulate the water (though we'll have a bolin booster pump) and will just sit there and keep us warm, whilst making the coffee, as it has a little hotplate on top.
I would have installed one of these originally but they are really expensive, but we saved a lot of money by buying second hand.
Well that's all, today I'm painting some lopoight mounts for the mast, I'm re-mounting the spinnaker track and I'm hopefully going to rivet and mount the sail track as well.
That means then this weekend we'll try and get a lot of the mast finished if possible. So might even be in a position to restep in about 3 weeks time! that would be a result!
slainte
skip
PS Spencer, great website, everyone check out www.sailvicarious.com