Have you been hearing all the buzz about these cheap Chinese diesel air heaters?
Have you been thinking about maybe putting one in your RV, van or bus
conversion? Well I did, and I'll tell you all about it today. Don't forget to stick
around to the end cuz we're gonna put my heater to the test.
(song) kicking my shoes off
OK, so diesel air heaters. These heaters have been popular for RVs, or caravans as
they say in UK, for years. At least I think they have.I think they've been using
them - I have something black on my finger. Look at that. There's always
something, you know? Something is always weird. See, I painted my nails dark today
so you wouldn't be able to see if there was dirt under them and then I got this
big black spot like somebody - like I just got fingerprinted. Like I just came from
jail. I didn't, I swear. Anyway, back to the topic. I know that Chinese diesel heaters
have been available in this country for about 10 years but you didn't really see 'em in the same quantity that you do now. in fact I remember writing a post on a
forum maybe like a year ago asking about them and people didn't know what I was
talking about. In fact there were people saying, "Sounds like that's a great way to
gas yourself to death or to burn your bus down." You know what they say about
opinions. Yeah. Everyone's got one. A lot of people had plenty to say about it but
none of them had any experience with it. Now you go on the forms and you see all
kinds of people with experience and there's even like this massive Facebook
group of people who just share their information about these things. Basically
what we're talking about here are cheap Chinese knockoffs of Webasto and Espar
heaters. They go for like 800 bucks or so. They're pretty spendy. But these Chinese
ones - you can get them for - some of them I've seen for like a hundred bucks. The
number of people selling them seems to be going up and up and up and the price
seems to be going down and down and down so that's making it a lot more
interesting and a lot more affordable for a lot of people. think one of the
reasons that it was a little bit intimidating is that typically these
don't come with great instructions. They're translated, probably using Google
Translate from Chinese into English so they're not that easy to understand.
Line layout prohibited by extrusion. Respectfully connected heater host.
After the oil way and line are all connected well, the fuel tank is added to
the diesel oil. But now there's a lot of tutorial videos on YouTube where people
install these heaters so now they can go on YouTube, watch a video, and see
somebody else do it. That's great. This is not one of those
videos. I'm not going to show you how to install it, and the main reason I'm not
is because I did not install mine. I bought the kit with the intention of
installing it myself, that,you know, I would just climb that learning curve and
do it. But since then I've learned a few things about myself.
The main one being that I probably should not be trusted with projects that
involve drilling a hole from the inside of the bus to the outside of the bus.
Which is why I still don't have solar panels installed and why it took me so
long to get this heater put in. You know that saying, "Measure twice, cut once?" Yeah,
my mind doesn't really work that way. Eyeballing things it's not a good idea
when you're drilling into a bus wal,l but what can I say? I am one of the most
impatient people in the world. Measuring takes time and a lot of times
I just bypass it. I think, no this- it'll be fine this time. I'm like the jay
Walker in AA, who continually walks in front of cars thinking it'll be OK
this time, and continually gets hit by a car. That's basically what's happened on
the inside of my bus. So here is my heater, right under the driver's seat. It
fits right in here and then as you can see there's a hole at the back which is
where the duct fits through to spread the warmed up air into the rest of the
bus. Oh shoot, what's this doing here? Yeah, mascara, no. That doesn't go
under the seat. So here is my understanding of how this works, and I
probably don't understand so hopefully there's gonna be someone smarter than me
you can explain it correctly in the comments below. On the bottom side of the
heater - and this is where the hole comes in because the heater sits on top of a
hole and then this part hangs down underneath the bus - there's an air intake
and that takes in air, puts it into a combustion chamber where it mixes with
diesel and combust and then that heats up a heat exchanger. Now that air doesn't
come into the bus because you don't want diesel inside the bus so that air vents
out and exhaust to the outside. The piece that's underneath my seat here that you
just saw pulls in air with blower motor through the back and that air gets
passed over the heat exchanger and then comes out the other side through a vent
into the bus as warm air. That almost sounds right maybe I'm right
you can use the separate little diesel tank that comes with it if you are
either driving a gas vehicle or you don't want to tap into your fuel tank
but I have two fuel tanks in here and I very rarely use the rear one so we just
tapped into that. The diesel draws right out of the tank and it barely uses any.
It just sips it. What I'm not so sure about though is the electric power consumption.
I have it wired currently right into my starter battery because I don't have
solar. I will eventually have solar and run it off of that or if I don't get
solar soon I'm probably gonna get a battery isolator just to make sure but
right now I haven't had occasion to use this heater anywhere where I didn't have
shore power. It gets cold at night and this heater has really been my friend. So
how does it feel? Well, it kind of sneaks up on you, that's the best way I can
describe it. The first time I turned it on I was expecting to just get blasted
with heat and it doesn't really operate that way. You turn it on, and I was about
halfway back in the bus working on something and it felt almost like a fan
had come on, like it was cool air coming at me, which I thought was weird. I
thought, hmmm, I don't know about this. I get pretty focused when I'm working on
something so somewhere along there I took off my sweater but I didn't really
think about it and then I kept working and it took me a while to notice that I
was kind of sweating profusely. And I turned it down to about half. I went back
to work and then I thought geez I'm still pretty hot so I turned it down
more and then I basically turned it off. It stayed warm in here for a good two
hours. By then I was done working so I didn't turn it back on.
I bought the version that doesn't have a remote because I'm cheap. My advice to
you is, spend the extra money, get the one with the remote, because if I'm in the
back sleeping and I need to turn the heat down I have to come all the way to
the front and turn it down. It doesn't have a thermostat. The one that has a
remote you can control it with the remote and I believe it also has an
actual thermostat so you can set the temperature that you want. I actually
have to turn the dial up here to turn it up or down. I don't think I've used it in
temperatures too much below 20 degrees. I mean it's toasty warm. If it
were super cold, like - we had a cold spell that was, you know, below zero and I
didn't have the heater installed yet so I can't tell you how it works in that
kind of temperature. When the temperature gets that low I crank up my Perfection
Heater, which is an antique kerosene stove. I'll tell you more about that in
another video. If I fire that thing up in here, yeah, I gotta take off all my
clothes within five minutes cuz it gets really really hot. Through that whole
last sequence had a big black smudge on the side of my nose and nobody told me.
That's the problem with shooting things alone is there's nobody to tell you when
you have a big old thumbprint on the side of your nose. So it's a little weird
because I planned this video a while back and it was cold. All of a sudden the
temperature shot up to like 65 degrees. We'll still test it out. We're just gonna
roast, that's all. OK, so we're starting the heater. The thermometer's at 60
degrees so we're gonna see how much we can heat it up in about half an hour, 40
minutes cuz that's about all the time I really want to spend on this. I got other
things to do The thermometer is at 75 degrees so it's nice and warm
let's see how much further we can go.OK it's a little warmer. The
thermometers now at 85. We're still moving up. Some people complain about how
loud these are but it's really just about like an air conditioner. 90 degrees.
okay I'm gonna turn off the heat now because I'm too hot,I can't do this
anymore. We were able to increase the temperature from 60 degrees to 90
degrees in about 35 minutes so I'd say that's a pretty good heater. Granted,
that's what the heater going full blast. You can run it a lot lower and keep
things a little more mellow. If you are in a colder climate you want to run it
longer and preheat more if you can. I'm gonna call that experiment a success. I
still want to do the battery experiment. That's the number one thing I'm curious
about that I haven't gotten an answer to is how long does the battery last with
the heater going full blast and will I be able to start my bus afterwards. Will
there be enough juice left. So I'll do another video. I think the video would
just be too long and you'd get bored and I don't want you to get bored with me.
Please never get bored with me. OK, look, I know I told you guys that when I hit
50 subs that I would do the tour and we crossed that line this week. We got like
65 now it's fantastic. But... I'm not trying to make excuses, but I'm just, I'm not
ready to do the tour. I have one more video I have to do first cuz I already
started it and this stuff's a lot of work. I promise you we will do the tour.
Do you believe me? Would this face lie to you, of all people? I will never lie to
you. No really, I never will. If you believe that I got a bridge to sell you.
We have links, ladies and gentlemen, right down below. We've got links to my website,
where you can buy vintage stuff, We've got links to Amazon where you can buy anything!
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Hey, is that a catchphrase? I think that's taken. They tell me I'm supposed to have
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week!
get out friends put your phone down let's chase the sun together. (song)