Warwick XL heating system

Hello we are new to motorhoming so bear with me. We have a new Warwick XL ( bought Feb 23) with a whale blown air heating system which can run off gas or EHU.
We are in Northern Spain at the moment with cold nights and early mornings. If off grid and using gas the fan still needs electricity which is coming from the leisure battery and the alarm is soon going off stating “low leisure battery”. We are therefore switching the heating off and waiting for the day to warm up as we don’t want to flatten the battery.
Does this mean in practice the system can only be used when we have an electric hookup?

Yes I think you are correct.  I also have an xl.
Your short term options are to either run the Engine to charge battery or hope for a sunny day! Then run the heating on lowest fan setting and minimise use of other 12v equipment, TV. Water pumps etc. I assume you are running the fridge on gas? 
I tend to use sites with hook up so dont have a major problem with this issue, but it is a pain which caught me out when I first got my xl. 
Long term option may be 2nd leisure battery? 
Billy c

Also remember that the Sargent control system uses a d significant amount of power. Maybe Shut it down (switch below wardrobe) if you are not getting much sun on solar panel for a number of days and especially when laid up for winter back in the UK

Thank you Billyc that is helpful. This is a steep learning curve.

You don’t want to shut it down if you are actually using the van. On a 2023 van you must have an EC700. When the EC700 is shut down, any solar power will only charge the vehicle battery. Which won’t help you run the heating or lights from the leisure battery.

Have you checked that solar is set to smart charging? You could even consider setting it to charge the leisure battery only, if it’s for a few days. If it charges the leisure battery all day long perhaps you would have enough charge in the leisure battery overnight.

We have the same heating system and have had this van for 12 months, using it throughout the year. The idiosyncrasies of both the Whale heating and the EC700 power system have together been a steep learning curve for us and we’re not new to the game.

The Whale heating operating at max output in its gas mode draws 6.5A according to measurements I’ve taken. On cold evenings we’ve typically run the heating on full for 3 hours, not continuously but cycling it on and off in a boost-cruise fashion. In the morning we’ve typically put it on for 2 hours continuously to boost the temperature. 

By that time, just after breakfast, the leisure battery is quite depleted and approaching 50% discharge, below which we don’t want to go in order not to shorten its life. We have a factory-fitted 90Ahr lead acid battery. If we don’t get much solar during the day then we need to look for a pitch with EHU for that night. Even if we have a day of driving the leisure battery doesn’t receive adequate charge, thanks to having a smart alternator and a 2020 van that pre-dates a DC-to-DC charger being part of the standard spec.

I would expect slightly better performance than this in your 2023 van as I imagine you have a lithium battery fitted as standard and a DC-to-DC charger. Lithium can be discharged more deeply and the DC-to-DC will ensure the leisure battery gets recharged while driving. Even so, I’m guessing you can probably only manage 2 or 3 nights on gas before having to put some serious charge back into the battery, either by plenty of sun (less likely in winter), a fair bit of driving, or EHU.

We are in the process of fitting a DC-to-DC charger, also referred to as a Battery-to-Battery (B-to-B), as others on here have done and will fit more solar and a bigger battery when time allows. That should increase our off-grid resilience a bit but the bottom line is that these vans are’t designed for more than a few nights without EHU in winter. 

One owner on the AS Facebook Group has spent a lot of money modifying his Fairford van to be properly off grid in winter as he uses  it for skiing trips in the Alps. We’re not in that league but would like to be able to have 2 or 3 nights off-grid before needing shore power.

Tim

Are you setting solar charging to leisure battery only Tim? I find it helps. I don’t use the heater much in the summer, but I do in spring and autumn. Smart isn’t very smart really. It charges one battery for 4 hours, then switches over to the other one for 4 hours, and so on. That wastes a lot of precious daylight charging a full vehicle battery for 4 hours in every 8. When you really want all of it going into the leisure battery.

I’ve bypassed the Sargent solar charging and have a Victron MPPT regulator connected directly to the LB, so am harvesting as much solar as I can from the relatively small factory-fitted panel. Next step is to fit a bigger panel. 

Tim

So 13.8 at the battery from my solar setting but 13.6 showing on the Sargent and the socket so .2v drop in wiring. Mine is a usb voltage and temperature 
For a item that has a good use will give the voltage to see as Bargee had said[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Yes I've got one with 2xUSB-A and 1xUSB-C, and 2x12V sockets. It usually reads pretty close to what the EC700 says. If buying a splitter for the 12V socket, it's worth getting one with USB and a voltage display as well.

Kemerton-bath wrote:Next step is to fit a bigger panel. 

Tim

I think that's the only change that will make a significant difference TBH. I've been monitoring mine on the hour every hour today and I think a fair estimate of available power being harvested from the standard 80W panel is 18 Ah for the whole day. And that's on a mostly sunny, albeit early spring day. So that's only 3 hours of gas heating on full blast by your reckoning, before you'd be in negative territory with lights and pumps etc still to add. That's if there's no driving involved. If there's an hour of driving with a 20A DC-DC charger you'd get about the same there too.

Sorry I’ve been slow to reply but been travelling.
Thank you all for your advice and tips and I certainly have a better understanding of the system and its limitations. Basically you need an EHU in cold weather. -2 last night and no problems with the heating and batteries on EHU.
The bargee, no I haven’t checked the voltage at the LB but will definitely be getting a voltmeter.
Thanks again.

The Whale heater has infinitely variable fan speed depending on what airflow it needs to deliver to heat the space to the desired temperature fairly quickly. Anything from a gentle hiss to a jet taking off. There is an overnight quieter setting, which is supposed to maintain 16 degrees, although I don’t think it does do that. More like 12 degrees. I have left it running overnight before now on a higher setting of about 18 degrees, and it isn’t quiet then. Running it for a couple of hours at a fairly high fan speed setting when it’s below zero isn’t unusual.

We run our Whale heating at full tilt to get the van up to a comfortable temperature, then switch it off and repeat the cycle as required. Probably no more than two cycles on a cold winter evening.  
Experience so far has shown that if we dial it down and allow the thermostat to control the heating then at some point the gas will fail to ignite and the system locks out. This seems to be a common problem, so I prefer to be in control of it to prevent lockouts, which sometimes have been difficult to clear. 

Currently sat in the van with gas heating on full, no other loads switched on and the Victron shunt is showing 7.4A being drawn by the Whale fan.

Tim

The key to all this is how to improve off-grid performance which largely centres on the solar power setup about which much has been written on the Forum.  As v8oholic has said, you are stuck with the EC700 being on which on its own uses about 7Ah every 24 hours.  If not on an EHU, switch the solar charge to the LB and minimise the load on the VB by not using the cab radio and turning the internal cab lights off so they don't come on when a door is opened.  When back on an EHU return the solar charge to Smart.  When you get home consider replacing the Sargent solar regulator with a dual battery MPPT regulator that bypasses the EC700.  This relatively simple and inexpensive modification has been carried out by many on the Forum.  If you want to do more you are in the business of increasing your solar panel area and possibly your LB storage which will cost much more.  Personally I regard going off-grid as a summer only exercise when the habitation load is less and there is more solar available.

Kemerton-bath wrote:Experience so far has shown that if we dial it down and allow the thermostat to control the heating then at some point the gas will fail to ignite and the system locks out. This seems to be a common problem, so I prefer to be in control of it to prevent lockouts, which sometimes have been difficult to clear. 

Yes, I don't think they quite got it right for the heater when building my van, or yours by the sound of it. On occasion it has taken 15 minutes to get it lit from cold. Of course, every time I have demonstrated this at Marquis, it's behaved perfectly. I have discovered a workaround, lighting one of the gas rings before firing it up normally causes it to light first time. And once it's been running, it seems quite happy to reignite when the thermostat tells it to. It's just that initial cold start that's problematic with mine, and worse at altitude.

I don't know why A/S started fitting the Whale system, Cost? Ive experienced it it 2 vans, frequent lock outs, warning buzzers, poor control panel, noisy fan, flat battery and poor heat distribution. After a cold frosty night I was fed up with it and replaced it with the Truma 6E, now we have heat in the right places, less noise and less power consumption. The Whale system has 2 65mm outlets where the Truma has 4, also there is a lot of heat lost in the underfloor ducting, I measured 20 degrees loss on a frosty morning. I did insulate the ducting which did improve it a bit but in the end the Whale was sold on eBay which paid for some of the cost of the Truma.

Tim

Tim
Cost is the top reason
Like you have done I have changed a lot to the Truma  people want a heater they can trust and the whale has had to mush problems
I have insulated my own camper pipes and is a improvement it keeps more heat to come out the vent .it’s hard to say but I am sure the van heats up a lot faster now . This is another of my mods but a very small cost[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
So a picture before and after small cost great improvement

I’m don’t plan to change to a Truma on grounds of cost and space. The only factor that might change that is if LPG supply became a real problem, which it isn’t yet, in which case I’d make the change to diesel heating. 

We’ll live with the Whale, like most things it’s a compromise, but at least it heats up the van quickly and gives plenty of heat output. The previous owner fitted an additional outlet at the front of the lounge area so the heat distribution is fine.

Tim

You can get a far better control panel for the Whale space heater and water heater to replace the rather basic one. It's not cheap though (over £400 for the part). It has timers and so forth.


[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

It might be on the list for next winter's upgrades, we'll see.

Mines a different system, but I must admit I never thought about the fan running. I have a truma Combi 4E and have a 100W panel with MPPT dual controller. I don’t usually go off grid but if I did, would running the heater on gas overnight cause an issue with the leisure battery? It would be on the thermostat so not constant.

Sally wrote:Mines a different system, but I must admit I never thought about the fan running. I have a truma Combi 4E and have a 100W panel with MPPT dual controller. I don’t usually go off grid but if I did, would running the heater on gas overnight cause an issue with the leisure battery? It would be on the thermostat so not constant.

Having same system as you Sally, I would expect the leisure battery to be dead by the morning. I wouldn't want to try it. That's why we always use hook up from October through to April. We use a lot of THSs and rallies without electric between April to October when hopefully we don't need heating.