TESTING: Hydronic Heating & Diesel Fired Coolant / Engine for DIY Truck Camper Expedition Van Build
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ต.ค. 2024
- Adding hydronics to your van build or upgrading an RV or Camper heating solution?
It is now time to test our upgraded heating system by adding a fully featured hydronic heating setup in our DIY flatbed Truck Camper. We added this system for a variety of reasons:
-Improving our cold weather options with inexpensive heating source
-Adding radiant floor heat
-Leverage the free engine coolant to heat water
-Grow our hot water storage
-Improve heat sources in our external bag boxes
This hydronic heating system contains a lot of automation to control heating from the engine coolant or our diesel heat exchangers.
This video is part 3 and shows various test efforts from the shop and reviews live usage on the road.
LINKS
------------
BLOG (Hydronic system schematic & controller manual): www.WorkingOnExploring.com/TechDocs
Hydronic System Design (Build Episode 1): • DESIGN: DIY Truck Camp...
Hydronic System Install (Build Episode 2): • BUILDING / INSTALL: Hy...
calorifier: www.heatso.com...
MUSIC Credits:
Music from Tunetank.com MusicTime - Evening Wind (Copyright Free Music) Download free: tunetank.com/t...
Thanks for this useful series!
Definitely an involved system, but when it’s 0F outside and you’re at an awesome boondocking spot with your radiant floor heat and have warm water running without any frozen pipes you will be happy. Great job!
In order to get it to do the 4 different things I wanted from it, AND to make it foolproof for Cheryl, it is a bit complicated to build but hopefully not complicated to use. Both have turned out to be true. Once I got my mistakes figured out, it has worked fine.....knock on wood.....I'm still not done though so there will be opportunity for more challenges. I still need to add two sub-systems. 1) Two coolant loops to keep the battery and gray tank from freezing and a 2) hot (fresh) water return to the two fresh tanks to keep their temperatures up....These are not likely to be complicated but I do wish the STC-3008 thermal controllers I am using were more robust. I'm not sure if I have broken them or they have been infant failures, but I've had 2 go bad this trip.....lucklily, I had spares.... and didn't really need them to do freeze protection just yet. Thanks for following and commenting...Steve
How many BTU's per hour do estimate your camper needing at 0 degrees C?
The best way to estimate that is by the behavior of our 5kW/17kBTU diesel air heater. There are a lot of mornings at 28F-40F (-2C-5C) where we run the heater. It starts at full power with the fuel pump running 5.6hz. It runs at full power till it reaches 22C (71.6F) then slows to it's slowest speed at 1.6Hz (1.4kW/4.87kBTU) but the temperature still climbs and we eventually have to shut it off. I'd guess somewhere around 3 kBTU we may achieve equilibrium but the air heater can't run that slow. The 5kW coolant heater has a similar behavior in that even running at lowest possible speed they overheat the cabin but I have not used it enough to develop a similar test.
This really is the downside to hydronic heaters. Especially the older models, and the Chinese copy’s of them, are not able to throttle down enough to let the heater run continuously without shutting off. The newest generations of Eberspächer and Webasto is better though. It’s the same scenario as for the mini split, the startups are what’s drawing most power and are the noisiest. The best solution for this is using some kind of accumulator tank in the system, to lower the amount of times it need to start. Not ideal in a moving vehicle as you’d need to add more weight, but the colorifier can also be utilized and instead only heat water as needed by passing it through the accumulator tank.
I have been 'scheming' with a Software Engineer in San Diego who is using the same Hcalory coolant heater on a boat. He believes he can make a simpler control that can work in series with the manufacturers control to alter the 'turndown' temp of the heater (to use the mini-split term). As it is, the heater uses a fixed 'run at full speed till 80C then start slowing to a shutoff at 90C', program that is probably fine for an engine heater but it would be far more beneficial to begin earlier for cabin heating purposes. It's such a simple parameter change it seems like it could be easily done with all current hardware. The 'relight' temp (I use 50C) is user programmable. Just having access to a few control points that are currently not user adjustable could expand the range of use. I've tried to engage Hcalory but they don't appear to be interested in talking.