Hot air out the side

When we were going with an RV furnace my thoughts were to vent it through a VW oil cooler radiator... Running through a very small pump feeding into another oil cooler on the inside with computer fan. With the little bat usage I think some of the heat could be recovered??

Repo

Hi,

Here is what the lung association suggests: Never use unvented appliances

You know that vent pipe that goes thru the roof of a house from the gas water heater and the one for the gas furnace......same thing on an RV propane water heater and furnace. Hot exhaust gas from the combustion process.

Might as well stick your noise in vehicle exhaust pipe.

skipnchar wrote:

TucsonJim wrote:
I don't think it's wasted at all. On a cool morning, I love to sit outside with my coffee and enjoy the warm air that the vent puts out. Kind of like a clean campfire.

IF you call breathing CO gas "clean". There are several deaths per year from camping too near neighbors furnace exhause and contaminating the air inside a neighbors RV. Happens most often at events like NASCAR events or DRAGS where RVs are parked very close together. Please don't think of it as "clean" anything.

Can you find even one news story that references this? I've enjoyed the heat for years and never had an adverse effect. I've never heard of a death caused by someone else's heater being vented to the exterior of the RV. If so, the lawsuits would be outta this world.

Hey thanks for all the great replies:C
Guess tenting the outside in for a warm place to sit a night is out of the question now!;):B

Hi Ed,

It is waste heat, and combustion by products. Such things are often corrosive. I would not want a leak in a pipe which was intended to attempt to keep the battery box a bit warmer.

It, to me, is surprising that they are 80% efficient. Like any hydrocarbon, propane when completely burned produces carbon dioxide and water; these are not too bad, although you could use up enough oxygen and produce enough carbon dioxide to suffocate anyone in the building. Complete combustion never happens in the real world, and so you end up with partial combustion products of which the worst is carbon monoxide, which combines readily with the hemoglobin in the blood, displacing oxygen and suffocating the victim.

When I have enough shore power I can heat totally electrically down to -27 C (-16.6 f).

I wish they could redirect that exhaust to the tubes and tanks that are exposed to the cold. You'd think they could wrap the exhaust tube around important stuff and have it go out somewhere else. I doubt I'm the first person to think this and I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason why it's like it is.

TucsonJim wrote:
I don't think it's wasted at all. On a cool morning, I love to sit outside with my coffee and enjoy the warm air that the vent puts out. Kind of like a clean campfire.

IF you call breathing CO gas "clean". There are several deaths per year from camping too near neighbors furnace exhause and contaminating the air inside a neighbors RV. Happens most often at events like NASCAR events or DRAGS where RVs are parked very close together. Please don't think of it as "clean" anything.

RV furnaces are running about 80% efficient. Check your stand home non high efficient furnace and they sent just as much heat up the chimney. Your RV furnace are not the BTU or have the blower motor size of the average small home so they don't heat as well. Most RV furnaces are around 35,000 and to heat real good should be up around 60,000 for most RVs 34' and longer.

I would also think it's full of water vapor.