Hapy Heat Circle-Back

Brief post this week. I've been tearing down the electrical in the bus, and it's really not that photogenic. I'm not really sure how to post about it since it really is very boring from a read-all-about-it perspective. It does, however, take an incredible amount of time. I have spent probably 10 hours just slowly working through the circuits, figuring out what's what and then cutting and labeling things so I can put it all back together, but cleaner. So, while I figure out how to not bore people to tears, here's a quick update on the furnace.

Hapy outside townhouse
before Champoeg trip

As I post this, I am realizing that it was 10 years ago that my first marriage dissolved and, perhaps correspondingly, the TDI transplant really got legs. How time flies. Over the course of this next year, I will be hitting other 10-year milestones: getting my townhouse apartment (See Hey Strangers), that first camping trip with the boys to Champoeg State Park (See One Small Step for Van) in the TDI-powered bus, and meeting Boo (See Football, Friends and Further). Funny how 10 years later, we are still making improvements on Hapy, I am still fiddling with the TDI electrical and his exterior doesn't look much better. Where were we? Oh yeah, furnace fun.

 

Yeah Yeah, Follow the Manufacturer's Instructions

It's been a few months since I did the parking heater / camping heater install. As directed by the manufacturer, I have been turning the heater on and letting it run through it's cycles about every 6 weeks since. My last runs have been these last 2 weekends. 2 weeks ago, it was super cold (low 40*F's or ~5*C), so I thought it would be interesting to see how the heater sorted itself out. The heater had the interior of the bus genuinely warm in about 10 minutes.

 

Can't Leave Well Enough Alone

I thought I would experiment with the fuel pump frequency at the low end of the maintain cycle. This is the speed at which the heater would run when you achieved the target temperature. I figured that even at the recommended 1.3, the noise coming through could be disruptive when you're sleeping in the middle of nowhere. So, why not see if it can go super slow? So, I set it to 1, which is below the manufacturer's recommended low. I left the bus alone for a while to see if it could arrive at stasis. When I returned about an hour later, the inside of the bus was kind of exhausty-smelling. Yuck. I shut things down, and thought about whether I had an exhaust leak. I had not had that smell before, so either I hadn't run the tests long enough before, or maybe that manufacturer setting was related.

Not a Leak, Just a Bad Idea

Fast forward a week, and I'm ready to test again. This time, the temperature is just above freezing. I turned on the heater, using the built-in Afterburner WiFi, from my living room. This is so cool. So, I'm in my living room, and simply connect to the WiFi and go to 192.168.4.1 on a browser and bam, there's the controls for the heater. Tap on the thermostat image and a popup asks if you want to start the heater. Once that process started, I changed the fuel pump low setting back to 1.3. After about an hour, I checked the Afterburner browser on my phone. The heater was maintaining 68*F (20*C), and was in a maintain cycle running the fuel pump at 1.3. So, I put on my shoes and coat and went out to Hapy. No exhaust smell, just the smell of warm metal from the furnace. Of course it was totally comfy.

 

I now conclude that when you go below their recommendation, the heater still works, but I think the fan speed is somehow involved in the force at which the exhaust is expelled. Continuing this thought, since the fuel pump was set so low, the fan ran super slow, and the exhaust fumes built up inside the bus. Neat.

So, that's it for today. Basically, if you were wondering if you can run the heater at a setting below the manufacturer's recommendation, that answer is "yes", but the risk is not just premature wear. The greater, or at least more immediate, risk is that exhaust may not properly vent, so you could create an unsafe condition inside your bus. Thanks for following along-