We have noticed over the last few weeks that our diesel boiler, an Eberspacher, has been getting more and more smoky on start up, has been making a few odd noises and once or twice has failed to start and needed to be switched off then on again. With that wonderful 20/20 vision known as hindsight it should have been obvious that failure was imminent. However that well known saying goes 'Experience is what you get just after you need it' and thus it was one chilly evening we switched the heater on, there was a faint sound for a few seconds, then nowt.

Like many boats Wychway has multiple water systems. Our hot water tank has two calorifier loops, one that is fed from the Eberspacher which gets pumped around the hot water tank and then the radiators and another from the engine that only goes as far as the hot water tank. So we can create hot water for washing and showers by running the engine for a short while but unfortunately the engine loop does not heat up the central heating loop, and whilst in theory there should be some transference of heat from the tank to the radiator loop in reality this is negligible to the point of being worthless. 

So next morning a very nice man from the marina comes to visit, discovers it is an Eberspacher, announces that they don't fit or deal with Eberspachers and says that the workshop could take a few weeks to get the parts. Word on the marina is that Eberspachers are unreliable, costly to repair and hard to get parts for. Experience of HGV driving tells me that there are thousands of them in trucks and you don't sell thousands of units that are unreliable, costly to repair and hard to get parts for. Humour me, I like Eberspacher units.

I come home lunch time, remove the Eberspacher from under the back deck and start to strip it down, hoping a good clean out and de-coke will cure it. It doesn't, but now I know the ins and outs of the thing.

A phone call to those very nice people at Black Prince gets us through to a helpful service bod who says that they can service and repair the unit as they have the diagnostic tools and they would lend us an exchange unit whist ours was being serviced. The only snag is that they are in Kings Bromley and I won't have a chance to get over there for some days. So we find a local company that service them and a few days later we have our unit back, complete with a warning that the motors are a little noisy but it is working and some advice that we need to put antifreeze in the system as this helps to lubricate the pump. We are warned that just putting antifreeze in the header tank won't help much, we need to get it into the system.

Once installed we drain the header tank down in order to make space for the antifreeze, tie the float switch up so that it doesn't refill itself with water, then connect the water hoses back up and tip around 1/2 a gallon of neat antifreeze into the header tank. Switch the heater on and get rewarded with a smoke free, much quieter start up. Mindful of the warning to get antifreeze in the system, not just the header tank we let things warm up and circulate then open one of the drain taps on a radiator to bleed water out. As we bleed water out of the radiators we top up the header tank until nearly a whole gallon of antifreeze is in the system, then top up the last bit with a pre-diluted 50% mix.

Amazingly I remember to untie the float switch for the header tank and we're back in the pink.