In past years we’ve heated the boat with a Dickinson Newport diesel fireplace, but we were always a bit nervous to run the fireplace at night and usually just used a small electric heater after we went to bed.  This resulted in a few funny instances, most notably the time we woke up to find the temperature had dropped overnight and our breath had coated the entire overhead of the v-berth with ice, but mostly it just resulted in arguments about who would get out of bed first and start the fire.

With our two new roommates set to arrive, we decided that this situation was no longer tenable, so we set about installing a forced air heating system with, wonder of wonders, a thermostat.  We bought everything from a local truck dealer, avoiding the steep marine industry markup for the identical parts.

Here’s the unit during installation in the port lazarette

and here’s the new outlet in saloon