Tuesday 19 February 2013

Is fitting a Heat Exchanger to Waiouru a financially viable option?

I’ve just completed some interesting cost benefit calculations on the financial viability of fitting a heat exchanger to Waiouru in order to utilise the waste heat from the engine to warm the interior of the boat. The calculations look like this
Hurricane Heater
  • Used every day for 15 hours
  • Fuel consumption is 20 litres/week
  • Hourly consumption is 0.19 litres
  • Heater used 4 months (120 days) pa
Heat Exchanger
  • Estimated installation cost £400
  • Cost of diesel is 90p/ltr
  • Cost of installation in litres is 444 ltrs
  • Hurricane running hours for 444 ltrs is 2333 hours
  • Normal daily engine hours is 4
  • 1 hour warm up. 3 hours daily available heat
  • Days to recover cost is 2333÷3 = 778
  • Years to recover cost (778÷120) = 6 years @ 90p/ltr (but price of diesel will rise)
From a cost benefit perspective the heat exchanger doesn’t appear to be a viable option.

Jan and Graham of nb Whistler walked past Waiouru on their way back to Frouds Bridge Marina after looking at the river conditions downstream at Ufton Nevet.  They accepted an invitation for a cuppa and we had a great discussion about many things “boatie” before they had to depart.
Jan, Graham & my Jan

After a significant amount of reconfiguring the connections between Blogger and Picasa I’m hoping the problem with the link to the photos on Picasa has been rectified.  I concluded the problem was Google+ and removed it.  Then I had to go back into our Google account and change the url link to Picasa.  So if you click on a blog photo it should now load the relevant Picasa Album.  Please let me know if it doesn’t!

I’m still attempting to resolve the problem in the blog comments where some of you who leave comments receive a “noreply@blogger.com response.  The “fix” as reported by Blogger isn’t working <grrrr>.

5 comments :

KevinTOO said...

Yeah.. the Picassa links are working now... well done!!

Tom and Jan said...

Thank you for the advice Kevin. Can I ask if you also receive the "noreply@blogger.com" message?

Unknown said...

Great job! :) Proper installation is very important so that you can enjoy using it.- cgthermal.com

nicknorman said...

Hi Tom

I recently fitted a heat exchanger system to our boat. Not the Aldi one. I got it from Ebay, around £30-something for a German plate exchanger such as might be found in a Combi boiler. Plus a pump from SolarProject, total cost including fittings around £100. Beta engines dont run very hot but it keeps the rads a bit too hot to touch, but not as hot as they are with the CH on. Anyway, I'm very pleased with the results - its on CWDF if you are interested.

Nick

Tom and Jan said...

Hi Nick,
That's very interesting. I've found the relevant thread (I think) and will read it thoroughly tonight. I've also searched eBay and found a Plate Exchanger for £35. At this price it makes the idea financially more viable.
Oh, and I'm still working away at the configuration of the GSM module on the Empirbus system.