How Safe is your Diesel Heater?

The Lost Jockey · 2025-12-21T16:08:19+0000

How Do you Know if your Diesel Heater is Safe?

Please will you give me your thoughts on this. I bought a 2009 camper with a diesel heater, a private sale about 9 months ago. I am just about to start using the diesel heater in the colder weather and wondered if it is safe. Is there any way of testing these or getting them tested somewhere?

The heater works fine and the camper had not been used a lot before I bought it. However, given that carbon monoxide is odourless, I wondered if I should get it checked. I did buy an alarm for the camper but the instructions gave me the impression that the alarm would not work efficiently in the confined space.

To keep warm and reduce the amount of condensation, hopefully, I was hoping to keep the heater on all night but I’m now having second thoughts. I know caravans can get checked—well, I think they can.

Your advice and knowledge would be gratefully received: thank you.

Beeechke1 · 2025-12-21T16:50:53+0000

The factory fitted heater is a self contained unit mounted under the van.
The combustion chamber is completely isolated from the circulating hot air and exhausts through a short pipe under the drivers door
We have used our heater extensively over 570+ nights away including two winter alps trips where we ran the heater 24 hrs a day for a number of weeks and have never experienced any problems or fumes in the van.

Sad · 2025-12-21T18:40:01+0000

Beeechke1 said:
The factory fitted heater is a self contained unit mounted under the van.
The combustion chamber is completely isolated from the circulating hot air

WelshGas · 2025-12-21T18:46:01+0000

The Lost Jockey said:
How Do you Know if your Diesel Heater is Safe?

Please will you give me your thoughts on this. I bought a 2009 camper with a diesel heater, a private sale about 9 months ago. I am just about to start using the diesel heater in the colder weather and wondered if it is safe. Is there any way of testing these or getting them tested somewhere?

The heater works fine and the camper had not been used a lot before I bought it. However, given that carbon monoxide is odourless, I wondered if I should get it checked. I did buy an alarm for the camper but the instructions gave me the impression that the alarm would not work efficiently in the confined space.

To keep warm and reduce the amount of condensation, hopefully, I was hoping to keep the heater on all night but I’m now having second thoughts. I know caravans can get checked—well, I think they can.

Your advice and knowledge would be gratefully received: thank you.

You produce more Carbon Monoxide using your gas cooker burners without adequate ventilation.
As explained, the products of burning the diesel fuel in the heater, different to combusting diesel at high pressure in a diesel engine, are exhausted to the exterior and not the interior of the vehicle.
These heaters are widly used in HGVs and in the colder climates run 24/7.