Fitting a Diesel Heater

How to fit a Diesel heater to a campervan & a van conversion. 

(00:00) Welcome back to the Benanna wagon, our Sprinter project. As you can see, we've got it in our lovely grain store today because, one, I need to jack it up on a nice flat surface which we have in here and also it's a little bit drizzly out there. So today we're going to be fitting our Eberspacher heater, the diesel heater. I don't know if I've pronounced it right, but Nick will spell it out for me because I'm not 100% sure, but the diesel heater. So we're going to take a look at that. First things first, I need to jack this up so I can get underneath and have

(00:29) a good coat of looking at it so I'm going to put my overalls on first because I don't want to get completely filthy let's get cracking this is the diesel heater kit look at it there's loads of it it's pretty awesome I have to say so I've unboxed it to have a good look at it and familiarize myself with what we've got I've never fitted one of these before so I think it's going to be really interesting so what I've worked out from this so far we've got a heater we've got ducts in we've got wiring loom we've got an exhaust

(01:29) and we've got our Outlets as well so these are our hot air outlets but before we touch any of this I need to drop the fuel tank on the van first thing we need to do is open up our fuel flap and we need to remove this because I need to remove the filler fuel neck part of it to be able to drop the tank so first part with the Torx 30 on a ratchet which I have just here to start on doing you see our further neck is loosened away from the body so that should come down with our tank all in one go so we're Underside ready to drop the fuel

(02:08) tank down Nick's actually filming upside down at the moment but I think he can probably spin it around with his magic stuff on the computer I need to disconnect fuel pipes so we've got two fuel pipes here ones and in and one's a return and also a wiring plug there these wiring goes to our sender unit in the tank and then obviously last of all I just need to undo the straps and drop the tank down now I've got the tank supported with the trolley jack and a bit handy wood from the workshop so all we need to do is undo stuff

(02:37) just as a matter of Interest, the bolts that hold the fuel tank straps up they're an external Torx type, and they're an external Torx number 14. I've just grabbed an oil drain tray because I've got to undo a couple of fuel pipes and it will get messy so this should catch it all I've got my safety glasses on to stop dirt and Diesel dropping my eye because it's not a good combination I don't think first thing I'm going to do is unplug our electrics so I slide my little crafty screwdriver in there like so I

(03:15) should release the clip to be able to undo it like that lovely next I need to undo these clips on the pipes now these can be a little bit more fiddly so I need to squeeze them and push them and pop them up and that will take the locking mechanism off and I should be able to just slide them off as well very last thing to remove before I actually do drop the tank is this gasket that goes around the filler neck underneath here so I've managed to tease that out of past the filler neck and now I can drop the tank so I can take it really slow with the

(03:48) trolley jack, hopefully we're not too caught up with the tank but ideally I don't want to spill any diesel so we're just going to lower it as slowly as I can really in the middle oh so it's a little earth tag to unplug so I've unplugged it, didn't want to pull him out, so our tank's down on the deck now all I need to do is just pop that filler neck this side and then we can slide the tank out so I really don't want to drop any dirt in that tank at all last thing I want to do is start picking up dirt that's going to go into the filter could possibly go

(04:29) through the filter and then damage the fuel pump but the main thing is we need to clean the top the best we can before we take that out I'm going to disconnect the pipes from our sender unit they have the same type of Clips as before so again we're going to push those down and try and tease them out with a screwdriver I have this clip so several ways you can remove this sender unit you can either use a block of wood and a hammer and gently tap it round or you can get a proper tool that fits over and with its feet and grabs

(05:03) the edges and you can undo it that way or you can use one of these this was proper type so I've had to resort to this special pliers oh yeah so I should probably say why I'm removing this the reason I'm removing this is because we need to get a fuel feed to our heater so I'm going to use this little spare pipe here this Outlet is actually blanked off at the moment we're going to drill through this Outlet so I've removed our sender unit and obviously you can see this this is what's called a swirl pot and it's always got fuel in it so you never run

(05:37) out of fuel when you go around corners that's the idea but it's no good to us because we need to be able to drain that and not make a mess so again we need to be super careful next I can drill through this little blanked off fella here and that will supply our fuel supplies for our heater so so with the drill I'm going to gently drill through I'm gonna put my finger underneath as well so I don't want any of that stuff falling through so you feel a bit of a resistance and then it pops through obviously don't go too far because you

(06:08) end up coming through the back and that'll just ruin the sender unit so that's that bit done so this kit comes with a quite a small fuel pickup pipe so if you didn't have that basically the little blacktop version we've got there you could drill right the way through and fit this but this is really small and it doesn't fit our fitting so I'm not going to use that I'm just going to use a standard bit of six mil fuel pipe that we sell I've cut it to 20 centimeters in length the reason I've done that is so when this is in situ in the tank

(06:41) we can't basically drain the whole tank dry with just leaving the heater running overnight so you don't get up in the morning and find that you've got no diesel left to get to the diesel station the way I've done that is obviously I've measured the complete depth of this tank right the way down to the bottom and then minus probably about 40 or 50mm I think so we're well in so we should keep somewhere roughly around between an eighth and a quarter of a tank before we run out and this will cut out at that point

(07:09) so that's just a little safety tip so we can push this on up underneath and I can fit a nice little clamp under there this is our fuel pipe that comes in the kit as you can see it's a lovely little tiny tiny weeny weeny blue fuel pipe but this is really resilient and perfect for the application it's got a lovely little 90 degree bend almost a bit of pipe here which is the same size as this but as you can see that wouldn't have fitted our outlet from our pickup so I've got a tiny little length of eight mil fuel pipe which will now fit nicely

(07:45) and snugly over this end and I've managed to squeeze this into this end too now the two rubber parts that are going together so a little trick there is just spray a little bit of window cleaner that actually slips in there really quickly and then once the window cleaner dries is secure so I've put a little clamp around it just to be doubly safe sure but this can go on now and that should just slide on give it a little wiggle right ready to refit definitely do not want to uh forget this this is our main seal that goes between I'll send the

(08:18) unit in our tank obviously tank's lovely and clean I'm just gonna pop the seal on he's nice and clean too right lovely and now we can submerge our fuel sender, this is for the fuel gauge so we've got to be careful getting him in first there's a wiggle there we go actually before I go any further I've made a little bit of a boo-boo this pipe here I wanted facing towards the front of the vehicle which is that way and for some reason when I had it out I thought I had it the right way around anyway I didn't so I'm just going to quickly

(08:57) loosen this clamp and switch that over so Sean's come down to check us out he's our um QC, so now I've got the pipe facing the right way so he's facing forwards I can put our seal ring back on we need to be careful when we compress this that we don't ping the spring out let's pop that round and our seal's still in place I'm getting this sort of located like that right just push down and we can start boom there we go so that's super tight now obviously we use the magic pliers to do so I've managed to get that Arrow all the

(09:40) way around nearly just in line with the original arrow but it's so tight I don't want to go any further because these rings are only plastic and we know that that seal is in good shape and that'll be compressed lovely lovely clipped on beautiful okay can I have a bit of wood please Nick thank you very much so we've just pushed the tank strap in this side and it's lined up with the holes really easily so I'm going to put the bolts in to secure the back end Nick's very kindly helped me jack the tank up as you can see so we've got the

(10:15) jack sandwiched between the jack we've got the tank sandwich between the jack and the floor all I need to do now is put the tank straps on put the bolts in and that's the tank bolted back in and then we just need to obviously put the screws back in for the filler neck and the filler flap cool squeak his jack in history pretty squeaky I think we need a can of spray on it or something some lube I'm just going to try and line up the original marks that the bolts left we call them witness marks so hopefully the door is in exactly the

(10:51) same position the little filler door than it was before I'm just going to pop down and put our fuel pipes back in and our sender unit but you can wait here I'll be back in a minute fuel tanks all back up and bolted in position really proves that and we've got our fuel feed coming out for our heater unit next we need to put our heater unit into the van I've decided to put the heater unit under the passenger seat and this side of the passenger you see as it's in a Double C purely because I think it's probably the

(11:24) best and safest place for it underneath's okay but inside we're away from the elements aren't we and I think pushing the heat from this corner is probably the best for the for the van as well so we're going to start in this area and the Heat's going to disperse that way they've also got a fan vent in the roof so they could draw the air through if they needed to I think that I'm going to drill the holes next and actually get the main unit bolted in position and then we can look at maybe putting the feed pipes in

(11:52) after that my template marked out under the seat I'm going to run through with a pilot drill first through all the holes and then after that for the big holes for the main part of the heater goes through I'm going to use a cone cutter like so to cut the big holes so let's get that done the holes are drilled so I'll let Nick do the honors it's nice and snug okay that was a nice test fit thanks Nick but before we put it in permanently I'm just going to put a little drop of paint around the bare edges so we're going to continue

(12:29) drilling because we've got a couple more holes to drill and that's for these this is the outlet the hot air outlet and we've got another one for the air Inlet as well I'll show you where they go we decided to put our hot air outlet here this can twiddle around as well so it can face up or face down it's quite a nice position in the van and we can push the heat from here to the back our Inlet we decided to go here in the side of the seat base so we can draw air in through this side heat it up and push it out outside so we'll be

(12:59) recirculating and heating our air so we it should make it quite efficient and uh heat it up very quickly thank you this is our heater with its pipes on obviously they don't need to be this long this is as long as they Supply them so I'm going to pop it in and sort of roughly work out where I need to cut them to length really so that is our next job with spare you can actually make it into a or not just okay that's pretty cool I'm pleased with that that works well so we've got our Inlet here snakes around nicely through our hot air

(13:58) device and then snakes round straight into the back of the van I'm quite impressed with the whole unit itself and how it fits but mainly those flexible pipes they're really good they don't kink they actually follow the nice shape really easily so we're gonna have good flow through that the next bit is quite fiddly it's nuts and washes time to go on uh and fix it from underneath so I'll pop under and do that and show you when I'm done we've got the two pipes popping through here and our little pipe here and obviously our nuts

(14:27) onto our studs to secure the actual unit itself now this little Tinky pipe here is our fuel feed in so we'll have a fuel pump that will drip feed fuel into here this is an air intake and exhaust the air intake and the exhaust is for the burner only which is inside the actual unit itself so this would be our fresh air intake pipe for instance I'm just going to gently push that on there so I'd need to put this somewhere where it's not going to draw water so I wouldn't put it right behind the wheel Arch down here where the mud flap would

(14:58) be so try and get it up as high as possible that draw fresh air in we drip free feed a little bit of diesel inside the burner burns and the exhaust comes out of here and then inside our fresh air is drawn in over our heat exchanger and then the hot air is in or warm air pushed out into the van so we don't get any contamination of exhaust fumes inside next I need to finalize the positions of the air intake pipe and then fix it with a little clip so we've got a pipe clip that'll go around here and then a little p-clip that will go

(15:29) around this pipe too and the same with the exhaust and then I've got a muffler on the exhaust so this Muffler here will obviously quite an exhaust sound down again I need to mount him somewhere so I'll find somewhere really nice to mount him air intake I am going to put further up here so I'm going to keep quite high and it doesn't look that dirty up here as in I don't think much of the muck from the road and the moisture is getting up literally up there I think that's a good place for our Inlet so that's what we're going to go

(15:59) with our exhaust is going to come down I think try and get away from either underside maybe out of the vehicle not sure yet air intake definitely up there though I'm going to fix our intake pipe first it's quite long and I wanted to leave it quite long because I can get it right up out the way of our weather and water and all that jazz so I'm going to put a fixing in here I'm sure that obviously got my safety glasses on drill through there put a screw in there and do the same up there then that side of it's fixed and I'll move on to the

(16:30) exhaust pipe I think so anyway let's uh get a hole drilled all right so fit in the first p-clip to our Inlet pipe oh my god I do have to say Mercedes know to make a van uh you need some mega hardcore drill bits to drill through that part of the chassis I've done it it's screwed in that's the first one fitted the exhaust is actually pushed onto our heater unit and I've put a clamp at the top there to hold it now I'm gonna run this along the Sill and then clip it along there and put our silencer on somewhere like that I think

(17:12) yeah pretty good for our exhaust mount I'm going to use a Riv nut just because it's going to be a little bit more substantial than just a self tapping screw so I've drilled our relevant size hole for our M5 is what I'm going to use M5 size rivnut give that a good old squeeze and then we have an M5 thread perfect so I can bolt our exhaust to that now I can tighten up our 10 mil bolt there a couple of p-clips on the exhaust line jobs are good so the last two clamps for our exhaust pipe I'm going to put one either side of

(17:46) this part here of the sill panel because what I want to do I want to keep this up out the way and uh you know we don't want to drag this over anything and cause any damage when we're driving so that's going to be quite tight up through there put a clip either side of that I think will do just absolutely perfect important notice from Eva spacker I think I said it right that time important note is this is the new fuel metering pump so it's telling me that the connections are actually on the other side to the old pumps so not to

(18:18) get them confused which way they flow so again just check diagrams and instructions it's a must and it's telling me that I need to also have the fuel pump angled up between 15 and 35 degrees on the output side so that's good to know okay that's good I'm pleased with that comes with this lovely little um mounting rubber mounting so that squeezes in there and then we can screw that straight to our chassis look at that it's quite tight it's quite a good fit beautiful remove the passenger side step the reason being is that I could get to uh

(18:55) where I needed to drill for our fuel pump mount so I sussed out from the other side exactly where I wanted to put the fuel pump I couldn't get my drill in there so I managed to mark it enter it from this side and obviously if you drill a hole make sure you pop a little bit of paint around it just for anti-corrosion so I've changed my mind slightly on the fuel pump I did have it fitted this side which was lovely and neat it kept all the pipe work really neat but I was just a bit concerned that it was a touch close to the exhaust even though it was

(19:22) probably okay so to err on the side of caution I've moved the pump across to the other side so our pipes are well away from our exhaust now I'm much happier with it in that position it's away from our exhaust we've got our fuel Inlet coming into the bottom of the pump and then our input out the top into our heater unit so next let's get some wiring to it the wiring was actually really quite straightforward when we had it laid out on the table it looked quite daunting but really it just had a lot of length to it I think just for aid fitting too

(20:03) if you're putting your heater underneath you've still got a lot of wiring to be able to run your control panel to where you need it now we plugged the main control unit in so that's all loomed and plugged ready to go then all we had were feed wires and Earth wires so we run straight across to our Leisure battery over the other side then a pair of wires down to the fuel pump obviously one for earth and one for the actual feed for it and then the other wires was simply the hand control panel simple as that which I ran up the

(20:31) b-pillar and all the way into the back so they can control it from inside of the rear the really cool thing about this control panel is you can either set it timed or you can set it manually also you can run the heater unit as just a cold fan obviously the full-on heater as well so we're going to turn it on for one final test so for example you can see here our heater is on and we've got it to set to run for the next 29 minutes wow that's really quiet and warming up pretty quickly that's only been on a couple of minutes feels good

(21:03) excellent that's our diesel heater fitted and the really exciting part about that is it's now time for me to hand over to Ben and Anna I really can't wait to see this campus start to take shape it's starting to look good already but by the time Ben and Anna get all their Furniture fitted I think it's going to look really cool anyway tune in next week and see what they've been up to.