With the fan turned off and running on electricity only, does the fire get warm at all? I find it much better to leave the fan off until the fire is nice and warm or it takes an age to heat up.
Do you have a light on your thermostat, or is the thermostat turned down too low?
We only have a small caravan, so our experience may not be totally relevant, however, we use our heater on electric as a convector heater, i.e with the fan off, and on 500watts it keeps the van plenty warm enough overnight, on 1kw in the evenings is enough, and we adjust temperature on the thermostat. On several occasions we have been told that the fan driven ducted system is not very succesful on electric only.
The answer to this is either the voltage in the barn might be very low? depends on distance and cabling and what was expected of the power requirements in the barn? So tht's a possible
However, the first thing to do is check the outputs from cold without fan, first 500w and a couple of minutes to warm up, judge the heat output coming from the grill and then change to 1000w, heat output should very quickly double and double again when changed to 2000w, at this point it should be very hot!
If things don't seem very good, then next test is with an amp meter of the clamp type, this will tell you exactly what heat it's producing and on 2kw your looking for a little over 8amps being used, although anything over say 7.3A should be adequate.
Again there are plenty of reasons why it won't be giving out full heat and most if not all are mentioned in my overview
Thanks for your responses, Gary the ammeter clamp is a great idea and one I wouldn't have had without your help.
Dave - yes the unit did get hot without the fans running, although not sure I could say that the heat doubled with each step (500w -> 1000w -> 2000w). Yes there is a green light on the thermostat.
Gary - the power to the van was being delivered via a long cable on a drum (probably a bad idea for anything other than testing, made sure it didn't get hot, etc.) There is therefore some chance there was voltage drop although not enough to cause the effect I was seeing, or at least I doubt it.
I will report back when I've had a chance to test properly now that I have some idea what I'm looking for.
One thing I did notice is that the thermostat is in one of the front dinette bed boxes, which has both the heater duct running within it, and is directly in the line of the blown air outputs. From what I've read, this is double bad news and will mean that whatever I manage to sort out, it's not going to work correctly.
Therefore when I go back, I'll check all of this over, and if need be also install a remote thermostat attached to the gas thermostat, as described many times in other threads on this subject.
I will always remember once when I had to drill a few holes in a wall about 60 yards from a power socket, after beg borrowing and stealing several 110v extensions leads, the drill would hardly turn!. So carted the heavy yellow box transformer to the job so 240v was reduced there, I figured whatever the voltage drop there would be plenty left to reduce to 110v, nope, exactly same result!!
Leaving spare wrapped on the drum makes things even worse.
As for the stat, yes this is a problem but not while testing.
I suspect there is a combination of a low voltage at the heater, causing the element to be producing less heat than it should, coupled with the fan blowing the heat away before it has had time to build up.
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Topic: Truma Ultraheat / Blown Air
