From all you, experiences of chimney installations of marine stoves

[Snowpetrel]

Hard decision going diesel vs wood. I much prefer the ambiance and smell of wood, but carting wood around, and keeping the fire banked involves more hands on than diesel that will run 24/7 without any attention. Wood is more work, but less fiddly maintenance, even a simple drip diesel needs a very messy clean every month or so.

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[sailor1924]

Originally Posted by Snowpetrel

Hard decision going diesel vs wood. I much prefer the ambiance and smell of wood, but carting wood around, and keeping the fire banked involves more hands on than diesel that will run 24/7 without any attention. Wood is more work, but less fiddly maintenance, even a simple drip diesel needs a very messy clean every month or so.

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I both agree and disagree with Snowpetral; depends on the use of the boat, there are benefits to both systems of heating, but I think diesel heaters are sooo much easier to use and I don't think they are at all difficult to maintain:

Solid fuel devices can usually be made to overburn and produce an almost unlimited BTU output (red hot stove pipe) but are dirty and a real PIA to maintain and hard to carry enough fuel. When I had a 60 foot ketch I was always loading fuel, I even went so far as installing a coal burning stove to reduce bunkerage space. In the early age of steam they towed barges of fuel. They can be cheerful and sometimes smell good and you can burn all your combustible trash. The flue needs to be regularly cleaned to avoid creosote fires in the pipe (uncontrolled red hot stove pipe) depending on the fuel used. They are dirty, plenty of soot and ashes to dispose of and need to be carefully watched to avoid sparks on deck and have a spark preventer smoke head and proper spark arrester below. Re-reading the above; I guess I really don't like solid fuel stove except on the dude schooners which are huge and have plenty of crew to share the work load, and are resupplied weekly, and maybe, on a day sailor where the heating is occasional and used maybe a couple of times a year.

Diesel, I wouldn't consider any other liquid fuel on a diesel powered boat, has a specific BTU output and can and should be designed to produce the expected climatic conditions. With a drip feed, when you get past the learning curve in starting and flame/fuel/draft balancing they are very clean and easy to maintain. I only mess with the burner soot once a year, and only when necessary (not needed this year at all) if necessary, and the drip pot metering, cleaning and testing rate, has been once in three years. You can get a winter's heat out of 20 gallons or less if you're not in extreme conditions. I am strongly in favor of a drip feed diesel system when designed, maintained, and used properly. And it too is very cheery coming below on a cold night.

I'm basing my comments on the US northeast winters where I use the heater in three seasons, part time spring and fall and full time in the winter.

[Hbg1990]

Sailor 1924, thank you for the post: i too will be using the boat and living aboard in the northeast. Are the dickenson diesel wall mounted stoves drip fed? Any recommendations on drip fed stoves? Did you happen to instal a seperate day tank?

[CarinaPDX]

Modern diesel stoves are not drip fed. The old army water heaters, and the now-defunct Hi Seas diesel heaters, were drip fed. The Hi-Seas are no longer available because they started fires aboard (I nearly lost my boat from using one). Modern diesel heaters have "carburetors" which typically use needle valves to control diesel flow, and in turn are fed with fuel from a chamber filled by a float switch. This decouples delivery from supply line pressure - the pressure on fuel flowing through the needle valve is from gravity only. Also, if the flame goes out the diesel level in the burner will rise to the level of the float valve which then shuts off supply. Modern safe installations use thermal cutoffs which shut off supply if the heater either gets too hot or too cold (flame out).

Greg

[Snowpetrel]

Originally Posted by Hbg1990

Sailor 1924, thank you for the post: i too will be using the boat and living aboard in the northeast. Are the dickenson diesel wall mounted stoves drip fed? Any recommendations on drip fed stoves? Did you happen to instal a seperate day tank?

If you are living aboard in the NE over winter its going to be hard to beat a (commonly called drip but normally now carburetter supplied) diesel stove.

Wood is great in more temperate climates. Sailer1924's points about the amount of wood needed to heat a boat 24/7 in a cold winter are very valid unless it is very small and well insulated. and then with wood it can be harder to regulate the heat.

Ive lived aboard in winters down in Tasmania and Central NZ with wood stoves. But we never really get snow at deck level, and the fires could be allowed to go out overnight without freezing water tanks!

We used to run a Dickinson Lofoten 24/7 down in the Antarctic Peninsula. It kept the boat warm and dry, dryed clothes and we often cooked on the top plate. The only issues were occasional downdrafts (very unpleasant acrid diesel smoke instead of nice aromatic woodsmoke!)and occasionally once every month or so we would clean out the base, with nasty black sooty stuff (rather than the much more pleasant ash from a woodstove!)Otherwise it started smoking and was more likely to blow out in a downdraft. Once we needed to clean the carby, this was messy but no worse than doing normal diesel maintenence. Fuel was fed by a small electric pump from the main tank which gave us no problems.

My remarks about the complexity more refers to the carby, fuel system and fans that are often fitted to aid startup. Compared to this a woodstove is incredibly simple, put wood in, light it, take ash out... an occasionally clean the chimney with an old bit of wire.

[sailor1924]

Originally Posted by Hbg1990

Sailor 1924, thank you for the post: i too will be using the boat and living aboard in the northeast. Are the dickenson diesel wall mounted stoves drip fed? Any recommendations on drip fed stoves? Did you happen to instal a seperate day tank?

CarinaPDX is correct, it is not drip fed, and he has provided an excellent description of the metering valve system used in these stoves. I've owned two of these units, one wall mount #170 and one floor #180, both manufactured by Sig Marine of Canada to be clear they are metering valve fed pot burners.

I have used a gravity feed from an existing day tank on the floor mount and a small dedicated fuel pump off the main tank on the wall mount.

I bought the floor mount around 1990 and was convinced then that Sig had the best burner available. I guess Dickenson thought so too because they bought the company and it looks like all their products now incorporate the Sig design in their burners.

I wonder if Snowpetrel would have the same maintenance issues now, though I've heard the same complaints from other Dickenson users. There is also a Danish made heater line that is trouble free, though expensive and, the name escapes me.

The real breakthrough in a clean burn for me is the use of both the fan for startup and the Vac-u-cap, it has solved all the clean burn and downdraft problems. In the past a really strong down draft could cause an acrid odor and even blow out the flame, in a hot burner the flame disappears and then boom it explodes in the combustion chamber.

Dickenson has downloadable manuals on their site which are very clear about installation and operation. They also have the Sig line listed along with the Dickenson. The last time I checked the Sig was slightly cheaper.

On my old boat I made a copper water coil and installed fin tube radiators throughout the boat, warm feet. I'm thinking about doing it this boat too, hot towels.

Sorry I didn't notice what kind of boat you're trying to heat. As stated by others insulation and how tight the boat is are important, but with a natural draft heater there must be sufficient combustion air provided.

Good luck and happy heating. This winter was very mild but the one before was a bear.

[CarinaPDX]

IIRC Sigmar was founded by ex-Dickenson employees, who thought they had some better ideas (I think they did). But now just one happy family I guess.

The Danish heater is Refleks. I have long suspected that some of the design ideas for Sigmar came from Refleks. Anyway, Refleks and the Swedish Glembring are great products for those in Europe; their chimneys are metric so less convenient to get here.

Greg

[sailor1924]

Thanks for the Refleks nàme, my memory is, what was I saying?

[Schooner Chandlery]

We have both a diesel (bulkhead mounted Dickenson Newport) and a coal/wood burning 6 burner Shipmate cook/heating stove. Our actual daily-use cooking stove/oven is a Taylors model 30 kerosene two burner stove with oven though. And just to throw in some confusion, in milder temps we heat with two Aladdin brand mantle lanterns that put out a lot of heat.

Per the OP question about thru-deck, in our case for both the diesel 3" pipe and the wood/coal 6" pipe (7" thru-deck moat) we cut a hole thru-deck with sufficient air clearance from the deck moat which, itself, is intended to provide isolation from the deck.

On the topic of various fuels and uses of heating appliances--each one has its purpose. The simplicity of the modern diesel heaters really is great--also the density of the BTU storage on the boat for diesel-- you just can't beat it with wood or coal. Hard anthracite coal is the most cost effective if you live on the east coast and can store it in bulk somewhere (besides your boat) and it is clean burning (really) compared to other coals, other fuels. However, coal has its smell and it is no more pleasing than diesel. Wood smells OK but wood is dirty, bulky, hard to come by good hardwood and hard to store it.

While we usually have a reason to turn it off for days or weeks, we once ran our Dickenson bulkhead heater constantly for several months. That was from mid-April 2014 'til Sept 5 2014 while we were underway most of that time. We left San Francisco in late Mar 2014 and because of gale winds over 40 kts steady we had the heater off for much of the time between Mar 2014 and mid-April. But once we got into Alaska's (cold but) protected waters in mid-April we left the heater running until we anchored back on the California coast outside the Golden Gate on Sept 5th. I turned off the heater and cleaned it periodically but it was just great to keep it running so long.

During that same trip, in late March-early April we ended up holed up waiting out full storms in two different Canadian anchorages--one for 2 days in a steady cold rain and 40F temps, the second Canadian anchorage for 9 cold, sleety (and snowy) days waiting for the weather to ease and the tides to line up so that during daylight we'd have both sufficient depth for our keel and water flow in the right direction (against us) to maintain steerage through a very tight rocky narrows/rapids of the entrance to the anchorage...so we could cross the Dixon Entrance to Alaska. The first time, we were barely into Canada and worried about diesel fuel use, so we pulled out our two Aladdin kerosene lanterns and used the kerosene heat to keep the boat in the low 50F range.

In the second anchor/wait period, we were worried about the performance of the diesel heater in the downdrafts of the 30-40kt steady winds there in our anchorage and we were keen to conserve our diesel fuel. So with that uncertainty, we were not using the diesel for 9 days and instead we used both wood and coal that I had stashed in contractor trash bags bundled into the bilge. The big Shipmate coal/wood stove has no problems with draw and downdrafts were no issue. We ate well, baking breads and cookies, brownies and pizza on the stove as it heated the boat to a cheerful 75 or so inside while the outside was often white or glistening with ice. We went through all the hardwood we had stashed aboard (if you stacked it, it would be a solid block of mahogany and oak offcuts 2'x2'x2') and 100 lbs of the coal we had stashed aboard.

Once that storm was over and we were within a day of the Dixon Entrance, we did start up the diesel heater and kept in running as stated until our return down to just outside the San Francisco Bay 5 months later.

For occasional use, yes, but for heating during winters I think it is not worthwhile to have a teeny-tiny solid fuel stove. The stove should be large enough (firebox at least) that you can go several hours w/o feeding it. Our firebox on the 6 burner Shipmate is bigger than many solid fuel marine stoves I've seen. at 10"x10"x22" the firebox can hold enough wood that it doesn't have to be constantly stoked and it can burn for 6 hrs with a load of coal before anything has to be done.

About heating appliance size--our boat is pretty large inside and fairly open. it is 54' on deck. Well, really large I suppose compared to most. The Aladdin lanterns that we used 2 of to barely keep the boat 10-15F above outside air (though water temps were a measly 38-40F at the time too) temperatures...that combo would have made our previous 30' boat be 40 or more F above the outside air temps. Similarly, we run through wood and coal at a huge rate when using that big stove. Surprisingly, though, our little Newport (the smallest heating appliance Dickenson makes) bulkhead heater could keep the boat 65-80F the entire time we were traveling while outside waters were between 37-55F and air temps between freezing and 60F. And raining, constantly raining. I can't imagine how nice it would be to have one of the larger diesel heaters combined with a slightly smaller boat size!