New cabin heater, bilge hoses, windlass batteries and..

Given the sheer volume of projects I pursue at any one time on Aeolus, it is easy to forget them when I sit down to update this blog. But to honor the purpose of this blog, I really should try to include at least a few of the smaller things I am doing all the time to make Aeolus a better boat.

For example, I just installed a new Heater Craft cabin heater that I got from Fisheries Supply. It supplies 28,000 BTU of heat and is overwhelmingly effective. I got the recommendation from Beth and Evans and am glad I took their advice. We have a nice diesel cabin heater for when we are at anchor and so forth, but all that wasted heat from the engine drove my efficiency brain crazy. The plumbing is straightforward, and I bought bulk hose for cheap from Jamestown Distributors. My system plumbs from near the thermostat as opposed to the outlet to the heat exchanger. The hardest part of this job was cutting the hole in the fiberglass near the port settee. Never easy, but it worked out fine.

On his trial run we found out that even with the companionway doors wide open, he ("Ford" is it's name, I'll explain later) heated the cabin from 50 degrees to 70 degrees with heat absolutely pouring out of the cabin and heating the entire cockpit area under the dodger. It was incredible. And this was with the fan on low, with an option of medium and high.

You can see both heaters in the attached picture. Realizing we needed names for them now that there are two, we decided that the bulkhead heater has a certain Dickensonian feel and so we named him Dickens. The Heater Craft is technology straight out of an old Ford and so call him "Ford". Hey, it works for us. It is such a game changer for Amy that she will forever after be asking me the following question when we are under motor in winter: "Will you please go turn on the Ford sweetie?"

I've also been tackling my bilge hoses, which are some of the last original hoses on the boat. To begin, the hose for my manual pump, a Whale Urchin, had been a standard 1" rubber hose that had essentially collapsed in various places due to curves and bends. I put a considerable amount of time into choosing my bilge hose and scoured all the usual places for information. My foremost criteria was that the hose must not ever crush or collapse, and so it had to have some sort of reinforcement.

This really leaves you with a few options: some bad, some good and some best. The bad hose is what is sold as bilge hose, believe it or not, and is the corrugated looking stuff that is unsuitable for below the waterline connections. The problem is that the inside is often rough, greatly increasing the friction of water flow and it is generally flimsy, so that even though it initially resists collapsing, it is easily crushed with any force. Needless to say any softwall rubber hose is unacceptable.

The good option is what I went with, which is a Trident series 148 sanitation hose. It is reinforced with a PVC cord that makes it uncrushable and will not collapse. It is what I use on all my head applications. Turns out it is rather ideal for bilge applications for the same reasons.

I suppose the best option would be a wet exhaust style hose with wire reinforcement, but it is almost three times the price with very little advantage and so I made the choice to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.


So I have replaced all my bilge hoses all the way back to their through hulls. This means the manual bilge pump hose, my 2000GPH Rule electric pump, as well as my 800GPH small electric automatic pump that I run on a 1/2 inch reinforced PVC hose a la Don Casey in This Old Boat. That's another story altogether.

I also just replaced my fiver year old windlass batteries. They were two 85AH Deep Cycle Kirkland batteries that power my 1000W Lofrans Tigres windlass. They were doing alright, but their age suggested I replace them. They still held 12.8 volts, but the clock was ticking. I replaced them with a brand new version of the same battery at my nearby Costco. Love the fact that they were manufactured in 12/09 and I bought them in 2/10. Nothing stale about that battery.

The list goes on, honestly. So many small projects that may not cost a boat unit but sure make the boat a safer and nicer place to spend your time. I've come to be amazed by how many projects I've done on Aeolus, many of which are documented here. It is really starting to pile up! Pretty soon I will have had the boat long enough to start needing to replace some of the things I did when I first bought her. We're only 4 years into this now.