All the comforts of home Cruising Corner Forums

Now for my list of things.

1. Fans. I think that fans in the heat of summer can take a boat from an oven to quite comfortable. Also sleeping at night the fans work great while your sleeping. There are currently no fans installed on Valkyr. We made this a high priority and were willing to spend some serious money to put fans through out the boat. Our criteria for the fans was low power consumption and low noise. We tested quite a few fans and came to the conclusion that it wasn't going to be cheap but that we were going to go for broke on this one. We ended up buying our fans at West Marine and went with their very top of the line model http://www.westmarine.com/weba.....lassNum=36 you can get them in 12 or 24 volt models. At west marine the retail is $99 but we were able to get 5 of them for $64.95 each. The following site had them for  $76.95 dollars each http://us.binnacle.com/p5688/C....._info.html

The things that attracted us to these particular fans was first their extreme quietness. Then the low Power draw of .4 amps. They are actually fairly large units and have the fan in a double gimbaled mechanism that allows them to point in any direction or be laid back flat against the bulkhead they are mounted on. They also have a delay shut off. You can set them to run for 2, 6, or 8 hours and then turn themselves off. The also have a low voltage shut off. If the batteries drop below 10.5 volts they will turn themselves off. Word of mouth is that these fans are as good as the advertising hype. I hope so as they were pricey.

2. Pump thermos. We like hot drinks, tea, hot chocolate, (Zsanic) coffee. It takes time and energy to heat up water to make said drinks. For years now we have been using 2-3 liter pump thermoses to keep water hot so that we don't have to heat water up every time we want something. Instead we boil a whole kettle of water and put it in the pump flask and then we can for the next 4 or 5 hours just pump hot water on demand. If we need to make more we just dump whats left in the flask back into the kettle and add more and re-heat it. This way we don't lose the energy in heat we already put into the water that was left.  Technically I guess they are called carafe's. We used to buy them at wal-mart for $14.95 in a 2 liter size. They work very well and pump water out really well also. The downsize to the wal-mart ones is that they have a glass liner inside and if it falls over or bounces around hard the glass liner breaks into a gazillion tiny fragments that  flood out of the housing with all the hot water and get everywhere. can you hear the voice of experience. It has happened at least twice to us on the boat, once with another boats wake bouncing it out of the sink where it was and the second time us forgetting and leaving it sitting on the counter. They are cheap and work well but our experience is that in the boat they will eventually break and then be a huge mess to clean up. The second one we tried was from Costco. It has a stainless steel inner liner and is 3 liters in capacity. It is bullet proof. No breaking allowed. It also keeps water hot longer than the wal-mart version. Over all it is a winner for use on the boat. There are a few downsides to this one however, the capacity is a little large (the kettle doesn't hold enough water to totally fill the carafe) and it is a larger physically larger unit, it just takes up more space, lastly the Price is $39.

more coming when I have some time