Practical Boat Owner — January 2018

I

was talking with a friend of mine

recently who is looking to spend

the winter months living aboard

his Jaguar 27. Although he has

access to shore power, he isn’t

overly keen on the bills for running any

form of electric heating during cold

spells. We discussed the alternatives,

including the most common brands of

diesel heaters, but he decided they

would be out of his price bracket.

We then discovered a unit made by a

company called Planar. A complete

package was available for about £500. On

the face of it, this appeared to be very

good value, but would it be any good?

There was only one way to find out.

Installation

As the only suitable space on the Jaguar

was at the rear of the engine bay, where

access is somewhat restricted, I decided

to assemble the unit with its mounting

bracket and fuel pump onto a board that I

had pre-cut. Once this was complete I

clamped the board into the position I

hoped to use, allowing me to offer up all

the necessary pipework to check for fit.

One thing to bear in mind is that the fuel

pump outlet should be above the inlet.

This entails either mounting the pump

vertically, with the outlet at the top, or at

the minimum angle of at least 5° above

the horizontal.

Fortunately, the supplied length of

exhaust pipe just reached through the

hole that we had cut in the floor of the

stern locker. We used a 44mm diameter

hole-cutter, which allowed us to fit a short

length of hose into the hole to protect

against any ingress of water. This hole

was then just big enough to take the

exhaust pipe after it had been tightly

wrapped in exhaust bandage. We then

connected the supplied silencer and the

extra piece of exhaust pipe required to

reach the hull fitting.

You will find, as we did, that the exhaust

Heating that does

not cost the earth

Ross Farncombe thought that fitting an onboard unit was prohibitively

expensive until he sourced a system that didn’t exhaust his funds

The constituent parts

PRACTICAL