I find that well made sleeping bags get plenty warm from body heat.
But I use heating pads or small heating blankets to warm them up
before entry cuz I'm a woos on real cold nights and that first
5 minutes inside is much nicer when it's already warm.

We have one on our boat, and use it. Boy what a great thing! It is a
queen sized one, and we rarely run it higher than 2 (scale of 10); we
have a comforter over it. At that level, it draws a little more DC than
our anchor light. It is a standard 110v model, and we run it thru the
inverter.

NOTE: it is important to be sure to remove all the parasitic loads
(read: wall bricks) if you are going to leave the inverter on for long
periods, like over night. They consume an inordinate amount of power,
even when they are doing nothing.

bob
s/v Eolian

richard wrote:
I treid to post this earlier but do not think that it worked. forgive
me if it double post. Does anyone use electric blankets on board? I
find that at home I only use it on the lowest settings and do not heat
the rooms. How are they with battery power? I have a battery size 27,
and a 1750 Watt inverter. Would I be able to use it all night? How
about with shore power? Thanks

Thanks everyone . Great info as always.

There is one other thing to keep in mind with the inverter setup. I tried
using one and found that the blanket would NOT work with a square wave
inverter. It needed a true sine wave. I can't imagine that the problem is
in the resistive heating but suppose it is in the control unit. I have
heard from others reporting the same problem.

Rich
"richard" wrote in message
ups.com...
Thanks everyone . Great info as always.




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i would think that having one on board for emergencies might be nice,
like if you fall into the water in the north atlantic and get
hypothermia really bad and need to get warmed up or something. i
remember from my sailing class that the instructor said that when your
body gets down to a certain temperature it can kind of maintain it's
temperature but that it doesn't produce enough heat to warm itself back
up, even with blankets and things piled up on it. so you have to have
some kind of external heat, from another person wrapping around you, an
electric blanket, a fire, etc, to warm back up. ok, so that doesn't
make sense to me, but that's what he said. i would imagine that no
matter how little heat you were producing if you covered up with enough
blankets eventually you'd have to get warm, but then if i had a license
to practice medicine it would have to be out of a cracker jack box,
what do i know about it.

but other than for hypothermia, i wouldn't bother. i was kind of cold
this winter so i tossed a couple of thin cheapie 100% cotton blankets
from walmart on top of my bed and i'm telling you it sure heated things
up. even when it's really cold i usually have to fold one or two of
them back or it's just too hot to sleep at night.