We’re time served caravaners and looking to buy a second hand Swift 570 now our kids are up and off. Our last Swift caravan had Truma heating and a fire but we notice there is a crossover with the newer moddles where they stopped putting fires in them. Can anyone with the newer model Swift tell me is the heating good enough in them without a fire to initially blast the heat when you come in from the cold. I’m guessing the heating is more superior in the newer models so they don’t need the fire so much but not sure if people think it’s better and I can’t find it on google anywhere. Thanks ☺️
Swift caravan with fire or without
- Thread starter Jojowhat
- Start date
- Nov 11, 2009
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The modern combi heaters are well able to heat the caravan. The advantage of the ones with a lounge heater and blown air is that even if you loose 240/12v electric supplies you can still use the gas fire , assuming its small 9v battery is okay. I always carried a spare 9v battery which would allow me to light the fire, or replace batteries in smoke or CO detectors.
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Hour fire in our last 2011 caravan worked like that but it’s whether or not the newer ones without the fire are warm enough
- Nov 11, 2009
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As a said above, they are warm enough, but different to the Truma lounge/blown air fires. Friends of ours had a later model caravan with the combi and caravanned all year. When we were with them in the evenings the van was nicely warm throughout. So basically it is your choice.
Cool. Thanks for that advice, no where else tells u and sales people just want to sell so tell u anything
- Sep 4, 2011
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Having had caravans over 50 years and Carver fires, The present day Truma combi are far superior and also save space giving more cupboard area.
One point to note is that the combi 4E only has 1.8kW of electric heating compared with 4kW of gas heating power, and although this is similar to the old Truma S3002 which had 2kW. the heater elements are on the outside of the water cylinder so will , if the cylinder is full of water, and cold, take a little longer to warm up . However you can run it on mix with both gas and electric running (as you could with the S3002) so it heats up faster, then you can switch to electric only to maintain the temperature in the caravan
Yeh we’d never use the gas side of the fire anyway in 5 years in our last one we never needed it so we’ll look into the combi heaters for the heating on its own. Thank you
We have a truma combi. Never had an issue until we went away at Christmas in near freezing conditions. We found that it took an awful long time to heat the caravan from cold after we'd been out for the day, and having to turn the heating off to get the hot water up to temperature in a reasonable time was a pain. Once up to temperature it was fine, even on economy mode. I confess that I never thought of trying it on gas. Next time we're away we plan to take a small fan heater to bring the caravan up to temperature.
That’s what I was worried about to be honest. Our last caravan we’d just blast the fire for a bit when we got back to the van on a night and it’s worked a treat but wasn’t due it’d be enough just with the heating alone
We find a cheap fan heater works wonders to warm the air up in the caravan while the onboard heating system warms the structure at a slower pace - although in our case we have the Alde wet system.
Mel
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- Mar 17, 2007
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We have a Truma combi. Blown air heating. Works very well. Put it on gas and electric mix for a rapid heat up of the van, then electric only to maintain the temperature.
The daft design features is that in some vans the heating duct pipe goes down through the floor, and under the van externally, to come back up again in the rear bathroom/bedroom. This pipe is completely in insulated so getting heat to the rear of the van is inefficient. It is not a difficult job to get it wrapped in insulated foil though.
Mel
The daft design features is that in some vans the heating duct pipe goes down through the floor, and under the van externally, to come back up again in the rear bathroom/bedroom. This pipe is completely in insulated so getting heat to the rear of the van is inefficient. It is not a difficult job to get it wrapped in insulated foil though.
Mel
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