Adding electric heat to coleman Mach3+

westend wrote:

myredracer wrote:
Our TT is comfortably warm and evenly heated from front to rear. An installation like this is not for the average DIY-er tho.

Will the 2000W keep the TT comfortable down to 0f? I know there are a few guys on the Forum that are trying to go pretty much "all-electric". An advisement that a conventional trailer can be heated with appliances and be comfortable at low temps would be a good jumping off point for the DIY'er.

Unfortunately, not a chance, not even close. TTs just aren't insulated well enough. Then if you camp in cold weather and moisture migrates into the insulation (and it will), the R-values go down. Our 2KW of electric heat is only good to around upper 30F and at that point, the heaters are running non-stop. Your lower legs and feet feel start to feel the cold because the furnace isn't making the floor warm. I sealed up all the openings in the floor which helped a bit. Heat loss is a direct/linear function between interior & exterior temp. At 0F, I *think* you'd need over 4-5 KW to maintain about the same inside temp. compared to 40F. You'd need 50 amp service to use electric down to 0F-ish.

One thing about the front-back dimensions of shallow metal outlet boxes is that screws poke out the back 1/4" or so. Carlon has the blue old-work boxes in a shallow version that are 1 1/4" deep. The Carlon boxes are the shallowest I've seen. They won't have much volume in them and may not work in some cases. I recently tried to mount one of the shallow Carlon boxes on an interior wall (in the TT) that was 1" deep but had to furr out the rear of the wall to get a box installed. If you had enough wall thickness, I'm not so sure it's a good idea to have the rear of a box touching or close to the exterior skin as you could get condensation in it?