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Old 12-26-2012, 09:24 PM   #3
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Quote:
Originally Posted by MurrayM View Post
I was wondering what kind of engine compartment temperatures people in other cold regions were seeing, what minimum temperatures they had to contend with, and what they did to hold the cold at bay.
We keep an electric oil heater (the kind that looks like a little steam radiator) in the engine room. It is set to the lowest setting (600w) and the thermostat is set halfway up. It keeps the engine room at 55 degrees no matter what the outside temperature is.

Keep in mind that we do not get the kind of bitter cold that other regions get. If Bellingham gets a north wind coming down from the Fraser River valley in BC we can have nighttime temperatures in the 20s or high teens and daytime temperatures in the low 30s or even only high 20s. In these conditions, the engine room remains at 55 degrees.

However most of the winter the nighttime temperatures are in the low 30s or high 20s and the daytime temperatures are in the higher 30s or low 40s.

The reason we keep the engine room at this temperature this is that we use the boat year round. While we generally don't go out if the daytime temperatures are near or below freezing because a) our boat being from California has no heat on it other than the portable propane heater we use with some very elaborate safety precautions , and b) if the temperatures remain at or below freezing for several 24 hour periods in a row, the marina develops a layer of ice on the surface due to the high freshwater content of the water most of the time. And ice, even a thin skim of it, can do a real number on the gelcoat of a boat that punches through it. We have seen this happen on several occasions to boats that went out or came in and pushed through the ice.

But with the engine room at 55 degrees the engines (FL120s) start instantly on the first turn of the starters, exactly the same as they do during the rest of the year. The engines are equipped with cold start controls on the injection pumps to allow more fuel into the engines at startup but we have never had to use them in the 14 years we've had the boat.

When we go out we take the heater out of the engine room and stow it in a closet along with the same kind of heater we keep in the aft cabin during the winter.

Most of the other power boat owners we know in our marina keep heat of some sort in their engine rooms during the winter even if they don't use their boats at all during that time.
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