Truma Varioheat Installation on Jayco Caravan

Are you looking into a Truma Varioheat for your caravan?

Check out this video where we installed the Truma Varioheat to a Jayco Silverline.

Why Truma Varioheat?

If you’re thinking about putting in Truma Varioheat room heaters in your caravan, they’re a fair bit more expensive than a diesel one. But the thing is, once they’re installed, there’s no more maintenance and you don’t have to have a separate little diesel tank that you got to worry about. So they’re super clean, super efficient.

We just did one in a Jayco Silverline. It’s quite a massive van this one. It’s the Outback with the slider on it as well. So it’s pretty massive inside.

The Location

Originally, we thought we might be able to get it under here, but that wasn’t the case. And there’d be stacks of room under this table here, which would’ve been good, but that means the vent would go out into where the annex is. You can get a closed off annex, so could be a possibility that it could be closed off and then gas someone. Very rare, but we’re still bound by that.

So the only other place we could have put it is under the bed. So you can see it’s all put in. This is where it sucks the air in. It then heats it up and then pushes it out the vent here. And this is twistable so you can turn it around.

Instructions

Now, in the instructions, they’re very fussy about sharp 90 degree bends. And also one of the diagrams in the instruction booklet of how to install is very deceiving because the exhaust for it comes out the bottom and then out the side. But then later on down in the actual words in the instructions, it says it can’t go through a horizontal plate, but then the diagram shows it doing that. What they’re saying is you can put it up on something and then go through like this and then out the external wall. But you can’t go through the floor and then out to the external wall. So it’s got to go through.

Now, with this slide, there was no way that we could get into this. We took the bed off, so nothing worked. So what we ended up doing is, here’s the exhaust pipe, so this is the external exhaust pipe. Now, there’s a smaller one inside that, that the hot air blows out. And then, because it’s a room sealed appliance, the air gets sucked in for the burner around just inside this big pipe, and then the exhaust gets blown out. So it’s getting cooled down the whole side. It’s a really, really good system. That means you won’t get any gases inside either.

What We Did

So what we did is, we drilled, you see it’s like on a 45, and then we had to use a special Sikaflex to sort of match it up. And you can see how it’s just gone through and then out the wall there. So very neat, nice sweeping bends. It’s come up sweet. That’s probably the only spot it could fit, ’cause we couldn’t go through here because it’s all locked in.

Now, with these Jaycos and stuff, the cupboards get installed first on the floor. The floor gets down, even the liner gets down, the cupboards get installed. And then, the gas fitters and the plumbers and auto electricians can run all their stuff through the cabinets walking along. And once they’re all finished, then they put the walls on. So it’s very easy for them to run it all and then put the walls on and it’s all good. All this is in position, so you’d have to take the walls off to get it apart. That’s why we had to do that.

Auto Electrics Side

Our mate in the unit next door is an auto electrician. So he’s done all the auto wiring, hooking up to the battery, putting the fuses in and stuff like that. He’s put the sensor just down here on the other side. So that’ll test the temperature and turn it on and off. Now, there’s plenty of room for the air to come in through here and then into there. Put the Varioheat up here. So this is the button for it to turn on and everything. So nice and high you can see what you’re doing.

Gas Side

The gas pipe, we had to sort of do a bit of a wing around and down because it was all these beams and pipes and stuff in the way. So you got to be super careful not to hit anything. But that’s all worked out fine.

There’s a little test nipple down here, because it’s very important that, when it’s working and it’s max, they give you a range of how many kPa it’s meant to be. It was like 1.8 to 2.2, so it had to be in that range and it was spot on 2 kPa. So that was sweet. All running great.

It cranks out some heat too, so it does really extend the range of your camping because you can camp in winter. It doesn’t really matter because it’s nice and warm inside your van. Apparently, the dog used to sleep here so we don’t think he’ll be sleeping there anymore, ’cause it’ll be super warm. And one another thing important when we put the vent in, you need at least 500 so nothing blows onto it.

The Vent

So we’ll just take you around the back here and show you how we’ve come out the wall. So we got the Jayco, here’s the slider. Here it is here, here’s the vent. So this bit here is where the hot air comes out and it sort of forces down like this. And the air for the combustion, it gets sucked in this round.

Now, this aluminum sort of casing that it’s pushed into the wall here. It’s on an angle, like a 15 degree angle. So any water that goes on here or anything like that, it’s not going to go up into that unit at all. It can’t do it. So it’s a very, very good design and you just got to make sure that these vents are nowhere near openings or windows or anything like that.

Interested?

So if you’re thinking about getting a Truma Varioheat installed in your van, so you don’t have to have the diesel and you don’t have the maintenance, give us a call. They’re not that hard. Putting the toilet in the limo bus that we’ve done was a lot harder than these things.

The gas run, we’ve run all the way from the front, all the way from the back to the front. And you can see that was a bit of a mission to get it through. This is my new gas pipe here. So it runs all the way through the chassis all the way down. And then it comes up here at the back. And that’s the water pipe we had to avoid and everything. So all runs up.

If you live at WA and you want a Truma Varioheat installed, give us a call. Got our mate, Glen, who’s in the unit next door, auto electrician. So if he’s not busy, he can wire it up for you.