How to give the DNV guy bad dreams

I was tempted to title this post "Jury Rig of the Century", but that would have been to ignore the proud traditions of the American Redneck. While this is not up there with some of the worse AC installations I have seen, it has got to rank as the worst fix I have ever made myself. These are desperate times, and they have been ripe for desperate measures for a while now. Previously, I have kept warm by burning copious amounts of "odorless" paraffin indoors. When I got tired of the 40 NOK / Liter price of the stuff, not to mention the inevitable fuggienss resulting from releasing so much water vapour and CO2 indoors, I cut back to burning very little of the same stuff to keep warm. While a couple of oil lamps will keep temperatures above freezing, it is hardly sufficient to maintain a cozy atmosphere, so when I got tired of freezing my ass off, I resorted to running the electric space heater.

Now that's idiocy in its purest form. While the heater itself is 100% efficient, the overall adiabatic efficiency coefficient of the generator I've been using is around 0.25, probably less. In plain English, that means that less than a quarter of the heat content of the diesel going in gets turned into electricity, while the rest goes towards heating up the great outdoors. While that's not the sort of thing I should be doing, considering my present economic predicament, it is a prime examples of the power of apathy. Yesterday I finally pulled myself out of the mire, so without further ado, here's my how-to guide for giving your insurance inspector and/or classing agent a hissy fit:

Take one diesel fired pot burner, set it on the floor next to a window, and fasten with screws. Install one short length of stove pipe. Next, remove said window and replace with a piece of plywood or other, unsuitable material. Fit a short length of flexible, PVC-coated aluminium ducting over the stove pipe, crimp in place with a hose clamp. Run the duct through a hole in the plywood sheet. Finally, run a fuel pipe from the engine room, through the shaft space to the burner, and secure with zip ties. Not enough hose clamps? Don't worry, it's just a fuel line adjacent to a heat source. What could go wrong?

Aside from the horrid looks of the "installation", the obvious fire hazards and my much too detailed knowlege of the combustion by-products of PVC, I'm reasonably happy with the results. With the thermostat turned up, the stove gets red hot, but nothing seemed to want to catch fire. With the thermostat turned down low, the temperature levels out above where it used to be while running the electric heater at 1250 watts, and I haven't yet seen a noticable level change in the day tank. This project is teaching me all the wrong lessons, but at least I'm staying warm.