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Fuzzy Perpetrator
by Roger McAfee
I put my 30-foot boat up for the winter. I plugged in my electric heater, turned on my fan, closed up the boat and went home. When I returned about a week later, the boat smelled really moldy. What went wrong?
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The only thing wrong is you closed the boat up tightly. When you did that you made ventilation impossible. The fan you set up was just moving the air around within the boat. As your heater warmed things up near the heater itself, your fan moved that air to colder places in the boat where some of the water in that warm air condensed as the air cooled. Mold needs only water and food to grow and multiply and what you created was, in effect, a mold and mildew generator.
The solution is to arrange to vent the warm inside air out of the boat at the highest point possible. Warm air rises and an open hatch, vent or window will allow the warm, moisture- laden air to escape. Then make sure, at each end of the boat, if possible, and as low down as possible, to allow for fresh, outside air to enter the vessel and replace the warm air that has vented. If a boater can get that flow going, the war against mold and mildew may swing in his favor. Remember, if you have shore power, there’s nothing wrong with using a fan to exhaust the warm, damp air from the boat.
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This article first appeared in the February 1, 2010 issue of Sea Magazine. All or parts of the information contained in this article might be outdated. |
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