Keeping Warm on a Sailboat! DIY Salvaged Diesel Heater Install! (Sig Marine Dickinson) | A&J Sailing

Keeping Warm on a Sailboat! DIY Salvaged Diesel Heater Install | A&J Sailing

TODAY WE ARE INSTALLING a Dickinson diesel heater because we are going somewhere cold! We previously put a Chinese diesel heater on the boat which works absolutely fantastically, but it doesn’t quite cut the mustard. It takes the chill out of the air but the boat never really gets nice and dry so we are installing a Dickerson diesel heater with the intention of turning our little tiny boat here into a sauna.

We picked up this Dickinson heater off Facebook Marketplace locally here in town which is a really good way ’cause usually they run you a couple of grand by the time you’re all said and done between the day tank and all the flue piping and the different attachments and the fuel lines and everything. But we managed to pick everything up for around $500 which we thought was a really great saving and we get to reuse something that probably was just going to sit around in somebody’s shed for another decade.

We already tested it; it does work and it’s a pretty nifty little thing! Everybody’s install is a little bit different, so you know, we’re going to go through some of the principles of what we’ve done for ours and you might be able to use it for yours. So we’re going to take you through our process as we install it here on Uintah.

This project got going a few weeks ago when we started ripping apart our head in order to make room for the diesel day tank that would gravity feed fuel into our new-to-us beefy heater

We have situated the day tank in the head just behind the bulkhead here. It’s going to gravity feed the fuel under pressure from the tank here; it’s going to run down through the seat along the bottom and into the carburetor, it’ll be fed out into the burn chamber and then ignited, and then the flue travels up and we’re going to have to bust a hole through the cabin, through the deck, up into the top of the boat. The flue gases will travel up through the flue out top of the boat, and we can enjoy the nice heat that’s left radiating out of the diesel stove and warming up our cozy little cabin here.

We then set to work making a DIY heat shielding enclosure for the stove to live in. This meant redesigning our saloon slightly with the benefit of adding some additional storage and seating

In typical jams and Allison style, we made a goal to string this all together using bits and pieces of materials that we could salvage or otherwise lying around. We ended up adhering some mahogany veneer over top of the plywood enclosure to make it look a little more ‘profesh’ if we can say that in hopes of making this Frankensteinian structure fit with the rest of our boat.

And with that, it was time to get to the fun part of installing the heater

We’re at the point where we just got everything kind of put in position. We’ve got it installed; we’ve got the diesel heater with the bolts going through the cabin sole in the right position and we just need to work out how we’re going to get the fuel from the day tank into the bottom of the heater.

So one thing we haven’t spoken about yet in regards to the diesel install is how are we going to get fuel up into the day tank? There’s lots of different ways you could do it

You could just put like a diesel fuel hole up on deck and pour fuel into it, or run a completely different line from your diesel tank and pump it up there. What we’re going to do is use a fuel pump and a three-way splitting valve so that we can have one single pump that we can use to prime our engine and then we just turn the switch and we can use that same diesel pump to pump diesel up into the head tank that way.

We only have to put diesel in one fuel hole through the deck into our man tank, and we can manage the fuel system from thereafter. You might remember a few years ago that we had a little mishap with our um fuel pump on our boat? Well, we are dead in the water again; our build keeps filling up with water.

This is our diesel tank now; we got it off Facebook Marketplace. So it has been used before and the boat that it came off kind of had the diesel stove set up differently from how we’re going to do it

This diesel tank was orientated horizontally sitting up on the cabin top, so it was sitting like this right; like up on top of the boat. And it had a big fill right on top and then the outlet was down here. Now that works great for their application but on our sailboat, we want to mount the tank like this so it takes up less space.

In order to do that, we had to send this thing off to a welder to have the old fill hole welded over; we had to change the brackets for the mounting and add a few more bungs here for putting diesel in as well as the venting. Not being stainless steel welders, we outsourced that to a weld shop, and they’ve done a great job. Cost a bit of money to have it all done but the day tank is back; it’s being cleaned, it’s being pressure tested, and it’s all good and ready for another life in our boat.

We mounted it up here in the head: I removed the countertop, cut the section of the fiberglass back to actually make it fit in against the bulkhead so we just got to drill a couple of holes through the bulkhead

So that we can bolt in the day tank. We are going to punch a hole through the stainless steel into this little cubby, and then again under the seat and that will run back into the head and can just feed by gravity nicely down into the carburetor.

We ended up adhering some mahogany veneer over top of the plywood enclosure

To make it look a little more ‘profesh’ in hopes of making this Frankensteinian structure fit with the rest of our boat and get everything kind of put in position. We have got it installed, we have got the diesel heater with the bolts going through the cabin sole in the right position.

So I think that’s toast as well which is going to make getting to where we need to go really really challenging. It was all around the time when we didn’t really know a whole lot about how the boat worked, and our B pump failed cuz the wiring had shorted out and our B filled completely up with water and then submerged the electric fuel pump.

You don’t really need a fuel pump on this diesel engine because it has a mechanical lift pump that just pulls the diesel up through the filters and into it. But it is really handy when you’re trying to bleed the engine and to prime the injectors and get all the air out of them.

You just press the button and it just pumps fuel until all the air comes out rather than trying to lift a little lift pump, we’re going to do a thing that we haven’t done ever on our boat which is crack the diesel lines and put air in them. Which means that we have to replace the fuel pump now if we’re ever going to run our engine again.

All right so taking out the old fuel pump: little bit corroded and gross-looking it’s obviously been down here for a while, we’ll just get these hose clamps off and then we can install the new one

This is the new fuel pump; same PSI, just newer. We’re going to wire it to an on-and-off switch that way we can turn the switch on when we want to draw fuel into the day tank and then just turn it off once it’s full. I’m just going to install a fuel filter and then we’re going to wire it into the boat.

We’ve got our new fuel pump wired up; we’ve got a cable tied so it’s nice and neat. We’re going to put it into position, put the screws in three attach the fuel lines, and then we can run our new fuel line to our day tank. She’s golden! I am just tightening these barb hoses to make sure that there’s a good seal between the threads.

All right now we have finally installed our fuel pump which means that we can finally get diesel up to the day tank

We’ve connected the pipe to the top of the day tank to fill it and there’s one other thing that I want to add to the tank. This is kind of like a fuel gauge; kind of like a metering device, so we’re going to put a fitting in the threaded bottom hole of the tank and then we’re going to use some clear PVC pipe to run some fuel out of the tank back up along the side of the tank.

We’ve also been trying to get our head organized because we are going somewhere cold and this is what our engine room currently looks like

Now that we have our fuel pump installed, it’s time to try and light our diesel stove. We’ll be turning the dial of the carburetor about midway and wait for two minutes. That will allow the diesel to prime the burn chamber.

We’re at the moment of truth; let’s flick our little switch. Yes I can hear it, I can smell it, I just can’t see it yet

But the fittings are about an inch up off the bottom so we should see it shortly, very exciting! It’s always good when you do a whole bunch of work and you press a button, and then the thing happens that it’s supposed to happen.

So as long as nothing blows up or shorts out or like fails or catches on fire

Then as soon as we open up the day tank to go to the diesel stove and open up the metering device on the diesel stove, we should see diesel come up through the carburetor that we should be able to burn and create heat which is glorious! Get the diesel in there; but yeah, it’s pretty cool!

And then when we get to that stage, we’ll turn the carburetor back on

When it’s ready and nice and warm and hopefully nothing leaks or nothing explodes and we get to sit back and relax enjoy a nice cold beer by the warm stove. Oh yay, beer time! And enjoy all of the new upholstery.

All right now that we’ve got everything connected

We are going to see if this bad boy will start for us so with me standing here in a bikini holding ice cubes over an open flame because it’s summertime, trying to keep cool. We’ve lit our stove. It took two goes.

The first time we did it, it wasn’t priming properly, so the second go-around, I adjusted a couple of things; got it cranking on full and then it just caught like a dream! And now we’re nice and warm!

And that’s our new metering system for diesel

We just made this PVC pipe so you can see how much diesel is in your day tank; when the diesel reaches up to the clear part, then it’s time to top it up.

This project has literally taken us months to complete, so this is well-deserved!

We’re also cutting a hole through our deck for our flu, which will hopefully help to expel all of those gases that are created when we’re running the heater

We’ll be putting in a special cap that should take care of expelling the gases and keeping us warm.

The total cost for our diesel heater installation including labor has been just under $700

And we have all the materials to make it safe, efficient, and most importantly – functional! This is a big moment for us, and it marks the completion of yet another DIY project.

Thank you for watching. If you found this one helpful or entertaining or anything at all, if you just enjoyed it, give it a thumbs up! Don’t forget to subscribe if you’re new here. We’ll be bringing you a couple more boat-project videos in the next couple of weeks while we gear up to sail to Alaska!

Come and check out some of our other content about DIY projects or tips for sailing, boating, living on the boat, maintenance and more!

We’ll be wrapping this one up now because we actually need to keep working.

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Much appreciated. We’re just super pumped that everything is installed properly and safely! So thanks for tuning in. Thanks for hanging out with us for the day, guys.

And we’ll see you in the next video! Until then, happy sailing, stay cozy!