Sail Life - Picking up a Refleks 2000KV diesel stove to heat my sailboat

Good morning guys. This is how most mornings start out here aboard Obelix, and often can take quite a while to convince this little guy to get out of bed. Today is a Wednesday, but it's no ordinary Wednesday. I've taken a day off work to drive down and have a chat with Tony at Reflex, and to hopefully pick up a stove for Athena. I'm sure not all of you are familiar with Reflex, so here's a quick introduction off the top of my head. Reflex is a Danish manufacturer of diesel stoves. They've been in business since the 50s or something like that, and their stoves are used all over the world, in anything from boats to cabins. And in my humble opinion, they make some of the best diesel stoves available. They're super reliable, very low tech, as in no electronics at all, and I really like their design. I realize this might start to sound a little like a commercial, but this video is not sponsored by Reflex. These are my opinions. I've been living aboard Obelix for a year now, and my only heat source has been my Reflex 66 stove, and that thing is awesome. It's completely silent in operation, it's got no electronics and consumes no electricity, it dries out the boat really well during the winter and keeps humidity in check, and it's got a little cooktop where I can heat up water, and a little window where I can look at the flames. There are some downsides, or at least things that you should be aware of, before purchasing a Reflex stove, but I'll get back to those in the end of this video. For now, I better get moving, because it's a pretty long drive down to Reflex, and I gotta take Jerkul for a walk and head over to Athena and grab some measurements before leaving. With Jerkul's walk out of the way, which took about an hour, let's head over to Athena and grab those measurements. The good news is that I've arrived at Reflex. The kind of annoying news is that I've managed to delete a bunch of footage from this morning. I had some stuff of me grabbing measurements aboard Athena, and a time-lapse of the drive down here, but it's all gone. Oh well. Welcome to the workshop here at Reflex. As you can see, there's no shortage of nice shiny stainless steel. Reflex has lots of different models, including the two you see here behind me. That's a stove for a galley with two cooktops. This is the same model of stove I've got aboard Obelix. This is the 66 model, and this is the model 2000. This is the type of stove I'll have aboard Athena. There's a quite a significant size difference, but there's also one other difference. This is the 2000 kV model, which means you can hook up radiators to this, and you can then use that to distribute the heat throughout the boat. The awesome thing about the 2000 kV model is that it's made in such a way that you can hook radiators up to it if you want to, but you don't have to. You can run this without the radiators attached, and that's what I plan to do this coming winter. Now, I'm not going to be living aboard Athena yet, so I can use this winter as sort of a trial period to see if the heat gets distributed evenly throughout the boat with just the stove, or if I need to add some radiators. Now, I am 90% sure that I need to add radiators, but it'll be fun to test. Like I just mentioned, the 2000 kV model is designed to be able to run with or without radiators. The same is not true for this model. As you can see here, this stove has a piper tube in it, and if this stove is run without the radiators attached, this tube will deteriorate over time. The equivalent of this tube in the 2000 kV model is made of stainless steel. I sat down with Tony to go over my plans. Tony helped me a lot when I purchased the stove I've got aboard Obelix. He's extremely knowledgeable and great at coming up with awesome solutions. When I'd explained what I wanted to do and shown him all the pictures and measurements I grabbed earlier, we set out to find a flue pipe in the correct length. It turned out I needed a little extra piece of flue pipe, which Tony whipped up in record speed. After that, we picked out a deck flange to lead the flue pipe through the deck. They come standard in 3, 6 and 9 degrees, and I need a 6 degree flange for Athena. We also spent a fair bit of time going over how I would best go about adding radiators to help distribute the heat more evenly throughout the boat. As I mentioned in the videos I published two years ago while installing the reflex stove aboard Obelix, the customer service at Reflex I don't know if you'll be able to tell on camera, but I've loaded the reflex stove in the car, so let's head back to Athena. That was a lot of traffic coming back, but I made it, and I'll just drag the reflex stove up aboard Athena, and I'll show you what it looks like. I've gone ahead and placed the stove according to the safety regulations, so this is the minimum distance of 12 centimeters. Of course, I need to add a sheet of stainless steel in here, but we'll get back to that in a later video. So this is going to be the position of the stove, unless I decide to modify this. My primary reason for picking up the stove today was to figure out if I need to modify the galleon anyway to be able to fit the stove. To be more specific, I needed to figure out if I should move this piece further out towards the hull. If I move this piece further out towards the hull, of course I can move the stove with it. The only downside is I'll be limiting the amount of space I've got available for my fridge. The upside would be that I've got more room to go by to get into the forward cabin, but I kind of think this looks okay. There's 45 centimeters here, and I mean, that's not a ton of room, but I think it's enough. And I am planning on putting some stainless steel tubing around the stove up here and filter it down also, so that Jekyll or I don't accidentally brush up against the stove and burn ourselves. There were a couple of comments on my last video asking if putting the stove here would sort of hinder access to the fridge, but I don't think it's going to be much of an issue because, well, I can easily reach in there. And I think the same goes for a much shorter person. By the way, have you noticed that there's a piece missing here? I'm curious to see if any of you guys can guess why that piece is missing. I got the story from Tony down at Reflex today, and it is a somewhat entertaining story. So if you've got a guess, go ahead and leave it as a comment down below. And let's say the first one to get it right wins the customary warm and heartfelt handshake. There's more stuff I want to tell you, but I need to head back to Obelix to take Jekyll for a walk, and I've got some other stuff to attend to tonight. So unfortunately, I won't be able to finish this video today, so it'll be a few days until you guys see this. As I mentioned in the beginning of this video, there are a couple of things you should be aware of before purchasing a Reflex stove. The first one is that the stove won't work properly if you're heeled over more than 10 degrees. This has to do with the regulator. It's only an issue when you're continuously being heeled over. So if you're motoring or going downwind, it's not going to be an issue. The second thing is that backdraft can occur. I've experienced it on a couple of occasions, but only during storms with very high and very gusty wind. So high winds, in fact, that a couple of boats here in the mooring lines. So it's not really that big of an issue, but I thought I'd mention it. Other than that, I'd be hard-pressed to find anything negative to say about Reflex stoves. There were a couple of comments on my last video asking if maybe a forced air heater like the products from Webasto or Velas or IbaSpec wouldn't be a better choice. Well, forced air heaters are awesome, but not if you're a liveaboard. All of the brands I've just listed are not designed for continuous operation. I think one of them even mentioned it in the manuals, but they all tell you through their warranty. They'll all offer you a two-year warranty, which sounds pretty good until you read the next bit, which is or 2,000 hours. But 2,000 hours is nothing considering that I'll be running my stove for somewhere around 3,000 to 4,000 hours a year. Forced air heaters are just not suited for liveaboards in cold climates, or at least that is my opinion. And that's based on what I've just told you and also the fact that a lot of my liveaboard friends are having issues with their forced air heaters, and that usually results in some pretty costly repairs. Before I can install the Reflex stove aboard Athena, I need to install the fridge, finish painting and varnishing the galley, and last but not least, I also need to figure out where to put the day tank for the Reflex stove. In the next video, I'll get started on building the fridge. By the way, remember that footage I mentioned I accidentally deleted? Well, that was super annoying, in part because I spent a lot of time going over the measurements I grabbed aboard Athena, but also because I stopped by the Danish city of Middelfart on my way down to Reflex. Now, Middelfart might be pronounced a little bit different in English. And for some odd reason, the name of that city always causes a fair bit of amusement amongst overseas visitors. I don't know why. Okay guys, that is going to be it for this video. See you! Jukul and I hope you've enjoyed this video. For more videos like it, click subscribe. Please consider leaving a comment and a thumbs up. It really helps me a lot, and I appreciate your support very much. If you're new to the channel, please check out the introduction playlist. If you want to watch every single video I've ever published, check out the playlist named All Videos. It contains every single video listed in chronological order.