By Joe Gresh
Towards the end of last year’s heating season the Vevor 12-volt, 5kw diesel heater started shutting down and giving an error code. The big blue, start/stop button on the front of the machine blinks the code number between pauses. I counted an error No. 8, which the owner’s manual said was a problem with the temperature sensor. This was a little disappointing because I had only run 10 gallons of diesel through the heater. (It runs a long time on a gallon, like 8 hours) I didn’t mess with it at the time as it was warming up and I was busy doing other vital, yet unimportant tasks.
Fast-forward to winter, 2024 and it’s cold again so I figured I’d better fix the heater. I looked up a new temperature sensor for $4 on Amazon and after waiting a few weeks the thing came all the way from China. Installing the new temperature sensor changed nothing. The heater kept shutting down with an error code No. 8.
Utube Academy provided some more ideas, one of which was the fuel pump was not functioning good enough to keep the fire going. I bought a new fuel pump on Amazon for $18 and installed it. After bleeding the air out of the pump the heater turned on for a few minutes and then shut down showing error code No. 8 again.
Another Utube suggestion was that the glow plug was bad, failing to ignite the diesel fuel. While looking up the glow plug @ $19 I found a complete new heater for $90 with free delivery. I stuck the new heater in the shopping cart and it showed up a few days later.
The new heater was almost an exact duplicate of the Vevor unit and in fact it had a more advanced keypad display instead of a blue button. The replacement unit swapped out easily and in no time I had heat in the shed.
A few more weeks passed and the new glow plug showed up. Taking the unit apart to gain access to the plug was easy and I pulled the wires off of the glow plug so I could put a socket on the thing. That wasn’t a good idea. Turns out the wires are non-removable and you need a special 12mm slotted deep socket to unscrew the plug. When I pulled the wires off I actually broke the glow plug ceramic. The special socket for the plug was helpfully included in the box with the new glow plug. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this before destroying the old glow plug. That’s just how I roll.
None of this mattered because once I started taking the heater apart I noticed the exhaust port was almost plugged with diesel soot.
It was so clogged I had to take the fuel feed pipe and the combustion chamber apart to clean out all the soot.
The gaskets tore when I dismantled the fuel feed and the combustion chamber so I had to order new gaskets from Amazon @$16. If you’re keeping count I now had almost as much in parts as a heater costs.
These Chinese diesel heaters are pretty simple to work on and after cleaning the combustion chamber and exhaust pipe it was only a few minutes to put the whole thing back together. I rigged it up for a test run and the heater put out plenty of hot air and ran for as long as I wanted to hear it run. It seems to be fixed but I don’t understand why it sooted up so soon. Maybe there was another issue that I have inadvertently fixed while swapping out parts? Maybe not. Keep clicking on ExhaustNotes and I’ll report on this situation as it develops.
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