My First Chinese Diesel Heater

[Music] so i've just jumped on the chinese diesel heater bandwagon these things seem to be all the rage these days for overlanders campers and others for heating everything from tents rvs and any other unheated workspace and you know they seem pretty handy so i figured it was about time i jumped on the bandwagon to try to determine whether or not these things have a place in my lifestyle in this video i'm going to cover why i got one of these things a brief history and my expectations for it assembly and firing it up for the first time and then some take away impressions and next steps you can find chapters and time stamps in the description below in case you want to skip around to anything so let's get started [Music] [Applause] now i can certainly use a good heater and i got this thing in the hopes that it could meet three main purposes one heat my shop i've got a detached one and a half car garage that i use as my shop and during the winter months it gets pretty cold i currently heat it with a propane heater and to be honest burning through about 20 pounds of propane every 24 hours of high run time gets a little expensive diesel is cheaper and if i can use this thing to effectively provide some dry heat into my shop during the cold winter months then i'll call that a win number two heat my tent or other camping closures when i'm out and about in cold weather i have a gazelle t4 that i've used in the winter and i've heated it with one of those little buddy propane heaters and while that works well it does produce a lot of water vapor and i suffer for some condensation and icing on the inside of the tent so ideally i'd have a good source of dry heat and allegedly that's what this thing's good for and third to use as an emergency heater i've got forced heat in my home which means i'm reliant on the power grid so if i ever have a power failure then my heat's dead now as a primary backup i've got a generator but in case that fails it'd be nice to have an alternate source of heat plus i'm just a fan of redundancy so there's an interesting story behind these things heaters like these have actually been around since the 60s when companies like ebersbacher and wabasto have been producing them for marine and automotive use these companies are still producing heaters like this today and from what i've read their quality and performance is excellent but the thing is they're expensive comparable units to this one are north of a thousand bucks and while that might sound pretty expensive from what i've read you get what you pay for you get the german engineering quality parts and the legacy experience of having produced these things for over half a century enter the realm of the chinese and russian knockoffs you see not long ago the patent on these heaters expired allowing other companies to legally produce and manufacture the same type of design that wobasto and eberspocker were known for presumably they're using the same previously patented technology but as you can imagine the quality of the parts might leave something to be desired my version of that knockoff is this happy by 5 kilowatt heater and at under 200 bucks if this thing can meet my three knees that's a pretty good deal the main concerns that i have read about with respect to these knockoffs comes in the form of safety reliability and performance and maintenance safety wise i've read that some of these things don't come with thermal protection and are often built with flammable parts such as the plastic surrounding the heater itself as far as reliability these generic brands are said to have issues with blower motors glow plugs and fuel pumps often failing sooner than what you'd get with higher quality parts lastly with respect to performance and reliability these cheaper versions are said to produce less heat and be noisier than their higher priced counterparts and they're also said to be prone to running rich which means that you're going to likely suffer higher carbon deposits causing premature wear and failure so yeah despite all that potential downside i figured it was worth giving a shot because best case scenario i save a thousand bucks and i end up with a pretty decent device that meets all my original three needs worst case scenario i'm out 170 bucks but i will have learned something had an opportunity to share something with you and i should know definitively whether or not this is something i want to invest the money in to keep long-term so let's put this thing together and see what happens so in addition to the main unit let's see we've got an intake hose an exhaust hose a hot air vent hose air filter and various clamps and a pretty sad looking muffler this muffler doesn't even look like it does anything to be honest so let's set all this stuff aside and take apart the main unit looks like it's just got some clips take the cap off and remove the cover we've got a gas tank that really isn't held in place by anything our fuel pump with a short line from the tank going down to the motor a blower motor to blow across the heat exchanger the heat outlet itself and an lcd panel of some type power is just 12 volts it's got a ground line and a hotline with a fuse this is a 20 amp fuse i don't really like this i think i might just do a different type of fuse here anyway i think the first thing we got to do is go ahead and hook up the intake and the exhaust on the underside so first let's start with the intake line uh it's pretty straightforward just a hose and a hose clamp slip this on here fuel line looks like it gets a little bit in the way let's slip this up and it looks like at least they give me enough room here to get a socket or nut driver through and i think i'm going to route it right out the back why read instructions right next i'm going to try to connect the exhaust line and it's pretty rigid i've never really worked with line like this before so let's see if i can't just bend it after mounting it on here my goal is to bend this in such a way that i don't need to mount it to anything else good lord let's see if we can't bend it a little bit more there not a big fan of the 90 degree bends in an exhaust but it should work let's get some hose clamps on it and give it a shot okay let's stand it up there let's shift all right that ain't going to work doesn't seem like you can just bend this exhaust hose hard enough to allow this thing to sit down on his regular feet so we're going to make some makeshift [Music] feet [Music] [Music] okay feet so what we've done so far is we went ahead and put some feet on it because this exhaust tube was not going to clear uh just laying it down on this regular feet went ahead and tightened this non-muffler muffler on place put in the intake hose grab the air filter and what we're going to do now is put on put in some fuel connect some power some 12 volt and this little control panel should light up and we'll go from there all right we filled up the tank with some diesel fuel and we plugged it into my jackery 500 for a 12 volt source and i'm gonna go ahead and fire up the power and then we'll turn on the diesel heater now one thing to note this 12-volt socket that i'm using on the jackery only has up to a 10 amp outlet so from what i've read the startup procedure with the glow plug and so forth shouldn't draw more than 10 amps so hopefully i won't blow a fuse in this thing but let's give it a shot and find out so we're just gonna hit power so a fan's kicked on i can feel some air coming out of the exhaust and we're beginning to draw some power currently climbing through 76 watts if we exceed 120 watts and that'll be about 10 amps at 12 volts and i might need to shut it down okay at about one minute in we're starting to hear the fuel pump click on getting a little bit of exhaust now coming out and we're pulling a little over 100 watts three minutes in now and this thing's really starting to kick on exhaust is nice and hot can't hold my hand above it too much and the air coming out the front is starting to get pretty hot starting to sound a little bit like a small jet engine the starting cycle seems to be coming to an end because we're beginning to draw less power starting to put out some healthy heat seems to have come to a steady running state exhaust is nice and hot and we're holding steady at about 38 watts power consumption which is about a little over three amps now the instructions that came with this thing are translated from chinese and they're absolutely deplorable they're almost impossible to decipher so i went on youtube and watched a couple videos on how to use this panel and from what i can tell as it starts to heat up you get up to the little red bars that we'll see here and that basically means that it's running in a steady state now i'm very unwisely running this inside of an enclosed garage but i'll be honest with you this is burning extremely clean it doesn't really stink in here like burning diesel and as you can see this exhaust isn't putting out a ton of fumes as far as black smoke and the heat output is quite good i really can't hold my hand in front of that exhaust for too long let's do a quick temperature reading to see how hot this air is coming out of there so i'm just shooting it right at the exhaust outlet and we're pushing between 130 and 140 degrees fahrenheit not bad at all this is pretty nice so as far as the exhaust goes at about 18 inches above the exhaust outlet i can hold my hand there for quite a while without getting too hot burning myself any closer and it would really start to screw me up the heat from the exhaust ports coming out i couldn't hold my hand in front of this thing for six inches more than about that so it's now up and running and it seems to be working fantastic burns very clean puts out a ton of great heat simple starting cycle and is currently pulling 31 watts which is a little over two and a half amps at 12 volts so assuming my jackery 500 was fully charged drawing 31 watts i can certainly run this thing consistently overnight without a problem all right let's shut this thing down and see what happens as i understand it you're supposed to leave this thing connected to power not just kill the power to it shut it down and it's going to go through a shutdown cycle where it's going to kill the fuel and basically continue to run the blower motor over the heat exchanger to dissipate some heat so let's give that a shot believe we just sit and hold down the power button says off fuel pump is shut off exhaust is starting to cool down and it should continue running the motor all right so the fan is still running so i'm assuming it's just blowing air over the heat exchanger to help it dissipate some heat but i've noticed that it starts consuming more power as well we're up to about 90 watts now i'm just guessing but perhaps it's reigniting the glow plug to help burn off any carbon deposits and hopefully clean it off so this might be a cool down and self-cleaning cycle as it shuts down not 100 sure this is just me speculating but if so that'd be kind of cool all right and now we're shut down completely we're down in the green so i guess that's good stowage temperature the unit is nice and cool to the touch base plate's a little warm the only thing that's still a little taut is going to be the exhaust line but i can still hold on to it with my hand how about that a successful test the thing works it's pretty awesome all right let's get this thing fully assembled and give a recap okay so first impressions i think the thing's pretty awesome for 170 bucks the thing fired right up on the first try it seemed to do everything that it said it would as advertised and i'm very much looking forward to taking it out with me on the next camping trip the heat output seemed quite sufficient more than enough i think to heat up my gazelle t4 or rooftop tent or annex or anything of that nature i don't know about my garage though my garage isn't that big but i think it's going to require a little bit more heat than this thing's capable of putting out to heat this shop noise wise i didn't think this thing was that bad some people seem to really complain about the tap tap tapping of the fuel pump with this thing running at full speed it sounded basically like a motor running at idle with a slight lifter tap the fact that i can run this thing on my jackery 500 is a huge plus for me i like the fact that it doesn't pull more than 10 amps during startup or shutdown and running at about the medium setting is drawing about a steady two and a half amps which is more than enough to get me through a night as far as the cons go well that big list of potential failure points that i mentioned earlier in this video is going to always be in the back of my mind i don't know how long this thing is going to last and i won't lie the thing just feels cheap it's cheap sheet metal it's cheap parts and like i said earlier you get what you pay for but that doesn't mean that it won't work and that it won't work well the question really is how long will it continue to work well also this thing is a little bulky i still have to figure out how i want to take this thing down in order to transport it in the subaru i'll probably pretty much leave it as is and maybe just end up disconnecting the exhaust pipe so it's not sitting here dangling like that the last con i've got for this thing right now is the manual this manual is terrible let me give you an example of the instructions for operating the lcd panel in the condition of not setting pressed raised first press the confirmation key at the same time to keep more than three seconds remote control to the code into the interface display hfa press on the remote control to open fire away what so i'm just gonna say this for this thing youtube will be your friend as far as learning how to operate it but as you just saw from my test video it's really no more difficult than pressing the power button once to get it fired up it'll go through a startup cycle and start running on its own and then pressing and holding the power button until it shuts off and even then the thing goes through its own shutdown cycle and you're good to go now time will tell to see how well i like this thing long term and while i'm enamored with it right now two three months from now i might absolutely hate it but if it comes to that i'll certainly let you know i'll make another video and hopefully in case it's not too late prevent you from buying one but if you're interested in giving this thing a shot like i just did i'll include an affiliated link to this particular unit in the description below so there you have it that's my experience with my first diesel heater and if you're in the market for something like this i gotta say i'm more impressed with this thing than i thought it would be the weather's getting warmer but hopefully there's still a couple cold nights in front of us where i can take this thing out and do some backyard camping tests to see how well it heats up the tent if you have one of these or perhaps one of the eberspocker or robusto or other expensive brands i would love to hear about your experiences with them in the comments below heck especially if you have any tips or tricks on how to keep these things running for a long time please share them so others can learn from your experience so that's it for this video i hope you enjoyed it thank you as always for watching and until the next time this is tom thediliton saying have a good one [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tom the Dilettante

Views: 553,714

Keywords: diesel heater, diesel heater review, chinese diesel heater, chinese diesel heater review, van life, tiny house, diesel heater setup

Id: faz8RtV9t68

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021