Blackwatch 40 Ventilation System

January 30, 2025

Brad Marsden

Director - Marine Air Flow International

35 Years Experience in the Marine Industry

View Brad's Info

Do You Have a Black Watch With Overheating and Salt Mist Intake Challenges?

Black Watch 40 with retro fitted Intake Grilles

Even though Black Watch is a great sea boat, when the ocean is less than flat calm they can and usually do have quite a challenge with salt mist coming into the engine room. This can cause some increased maintenance bills and the need to replace valuable engine room equipment more often than you maybe would like.


What you might not know is that here at Marine Air Flow we can retro fit both new intake grilles and fans so that not only are your water issues resolved, but your engine room will overall be much cooler as well.


What we do is remove the fashion teardrop on the outside and a single stage separator grille is fitted in its position. We can powder coat to almost any marine colour so you don't have to be concerned about the aesthetic look either.


You can see in the photo above that our colour match to the boats hull was perfect. We recently did one of these retrofits for a client who was very  happy with the result.


For the best outcome with this particular boat, the Best position for the fans is to be mounted is on the forward bulkhead as high as practical. If they are installed on a 45° mounting bracket, the discharge velocity from the fans will push the air down to the keel ensuring the engine room has great circulation.


The last item we added to this project was our manual fan speed controller. This control system results in a reduction of noise and power consumption when you turn the fans down to a lower speed. This is really helpful when trawl fishing as your engines are doing low rpm and producing minimal DC power via the alternators, but pending sounders etc you may still be pulling a lot of amps. So reducing power consumption may become essential, pending your set up.


We did manage to turn this project around in just a few weeks as we had the grilles in stock. However our lead time can be up to 12-16 weeks for custom projects, so be sure to get in touch in advance so we can be sure to provide the equipment when you need it.


Equipment Supplied:

  • 2 teardrop shaped Mist Eliminator Grilles,
  • 2 DC compact fans (12 volt and 12" diameter)
  • A compact fan mount bracket and finger safety guard
  • Dc Fan Speed controller with reversing switch


Black Watch 40 intake grilles
Black Watch 40 Intake Grilles Drawing
Black Watch 40 Grille Diagram
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