The stove has finally arrived!
Posted by deletedaccount, Jan 12 2010, 10:47 AM
When it looks like this outside you really want a stove:
So, meticulous planner that I am, I ordered one in plenty of time and before it started to snow. Last december in fact.
I opted for a 'boatman' stove, as made by Eddie from northern fabrications. He makes them to order and then delivers them by hand. They're cheap, small and well put together. They also look pretty cool. The only snag to my otherwise brilliant plan was that it was supposed to be here a month ago but due to one thing and another it's only just arrived. Eddie and me (with a little help from tim, my neigbour) manhandled the stove, flue and assorted other bits down the steep slope at dundas and along the icy towpath. In the dark. Eddie, decent chap that he is talked me through the ins and outs of installing and operating it before heading all the way back up to manchester.
Here it is, sitting on my almost complete hearth. Which, blowing my own trumpet a bit here, is looking rather nice.
All that remains is to cut the hole in the roof and install the flue plus chimney. I'm fairly certain I won't have to crank (bend) it either, just stick it at an ever so slight angle. Jonny will hopefully be doing this next week and I can't wait. You can see my emergency halogen in the pic above and I've blown one of the bulbs already 
Some bloke on the towpath just went mental at me
Posted by deletedaccount, Dec 25 2009, 08:09 PM
Some bloke outside started shouting at the boat so I popped my head out the front doors (in nothing but a dressing gown) to see what's up.
He's tripped over my mooring pin and aparently I'm a thoughtless bastard. Rage building he starts to steam at the ears, egged on by my initial response of "have you not got a torch?". He keeps the rant up despite me pointing out (1) it's clearly marked with a blue tie and (2) it's pretty dark and icy round here and should he really be traipsing down the towpath in the dark with what looks like a five year old kid.
He starts to leave so I wish him merry xmas and get a "fuck off" in that precious impotent fury style, so I ask him if he should really be swearing like that in front of his kid. I'm pretty sure he blew a gasket at that point and stormed off.
Anyway, the spirt of xmas is alive and well 
I must be getting good at this.
Posted by deletedaccount, Dec 22 2009, 02:15 PM
I just fixed my engine, all by myself.
It suddenly stopped working this morning. I'd had it on, turned it off and been unable to start it up again.
I dutifully checked that fuel was getting through (it was), checked the oil, checked the air filter and then bingo! I checked the fuses mounted on the engine. One of them was blown and as luck would have it I had a spare just lying around.
A pint of smugness all round is in order
Oh, and cheers for frigatecaptain for helping out.
Batteries for the clueless (FAQ part 1)
Posted by deletedaccount, Dec 1 2009, 05:21 PM
Given that I've learnt an awful lot form the kind folks at canal world, I thought I'd give something back. That something is a collection of articles detailing basic level information about a wide variety of narrowboat related topics. Now I could have picked something less contentious than batteries, lets say choice of toilet, but I thought I'd get it over and done with. These are simple guides for simple folks but I'd like them to be acurate in the main, so those that actually know about batteries, feel free to correct anything I've written and I'll update the article accordingly!
What kind of batteries have I got?
A boat has two types of batteries, a starter battery and a domestic (leisure) battery bank. The starter battery is like a car starter battery and serves the same purpose. It fires up your engine. The domestic battery bank supplies the electricity used by your lights, fridge, pumps and via an inverter any 240v appliances you may have.
Batteries have a number of qualities that define them:
Firstly they have voltage. Most narrowboat systems are 12v, some are 24v or even 48v, but the most are 12v and supplied by 12v batteries. Secondly they have capacity, measured in amp hours. Thirdly they have a type, such as lead acid or gel. Some are maintenance free, others require you to top them up with distilled water from time to time. I am not going to go into the advantages of each here, because I'd be typing all day and probably get it wrong.
My boat's got 6 12v lead acid110ah batteries and that's fairly typical of a liveaboard boat.
How do I charge them up?
The most common ways to charge your batteries are either by plugging in the shore power or using your engine. Shore power will be routed through some sort of charger, perhaps one side of a combined inverter/charger unit. The charger part will be rated in amps. This is the amount of juice they can pump into the batteries in an hour. Engines have one or more altenators on them. These belt driven gizmos generate electricity and pump it into your batteries while the engine is running, and like the charger used by the shorepower, they're rated in amps. My boat's got two, a 50amp that charges the starter battery and a 100amp one that charges the domestics. Other boats may be set up similarly or may have a split relay charging system where one alternator serves both functions. Whichever way it is, that's how the engine pumps the juice into your bank, Some engines require you to rev em up to get the altenator going. Mine does and it took me a fair old while to work it out. The third option is a built in generator that some boats have. It works pretty much the same way as the engine, I think.
So on the face of it, a 50amp charger will stick 50amp hours into your batteries, right? Er, no. Wrong actually. Due to a variety of long and technical reasons it'll put in just over half that. The charge rate falls as the battery fills up. So at first it'll do the full 50, but by the end it'll be doing more like 10, The last 10% of charging takes the longest.
There are different stages to charging (one, two, three or four depending on how fancy your charger is) and during them the charger will behave differently. As far as I can tell they vary the voltage depending on the state of charge. I'm sure this is for a very important reason, but the details are fuzzy. You can tell you batteries are charging by the voltage at the terminals (or on the display of your charger). If it's 13.6 or so or above then it's working. If it's less that 13 then it's not. If it's 15+ it's doing something called an equalisation charge and if it's above 15.5 or so it's ruining your batteries and should be stopped immediately.
Looking after your batteries
"But they're maintenance free" you cry. Well, yes and no. You can knacker out your batteries really really quickly if you abuse them. And by abuse I mean draining them flat. The advice I've been given is to keep them at least half full at all times, which is easier said than done. I wouldn't worry too much if you can't, but it's something to aim for if you want your batteries to last a reasonable amount of time. To measure how full your batteries are, the voltage at the terminals should be 12.7v when full, 11.8 or less when nearly empty and somewhere inbetween for half full. I think it's 12.2 or 12.3 for 50%. If you've only got one of those 3 or four LEDs to indicate state of charge, just try not to let it go down to 1 bar.
The more knackered you batteries the less charge they'll hold. I'm fairly certain I can't fit 660ah in my bank any more and I'd guess they're closer to 440ah now, simply because I abused the hell out of them before I knew the above. So take care.
Some people view batteries as disposables, lasting a few years, others spend more and look after them and have them for years. It's horses for courses and you'll find some, er, vigorous debate about the merits of each on the forums.
Oh teh noes, my engine is bust and shorepower not available!
Yeah. This happened to me last week, so I spent a while working out 1) where to get a generator at short notice 2) how to plug it in to my charger and 3) how to get it to actually &%%^& work! My advice to you is that if you're living aboard, knowing where to get hold of a generator at shortish notice is a useful thing. You'd be suprised at the number of places that don't stock them.
Once you've got the generator going (you need to fill new ones with oil and petrol/deisel) you plug it in the same place your shorepower would go - you'll need an adapter for this. One end has a normal 240v domestic plug, the other the round blue connector your shore power expects. Hopefully it's plain sailing after that and your charger will take over, but if it doesn't and it keeps triping fuses/rcds or whatnot a simplpe solution that seems to work is to plug something else into the generator alongside the shorepower. I used my tv. No idea why this works, but it worked for me and it worked for others too. In terms of how big a genny you need, my 1000w genny will happily charge at around 30-35amps.
How much leccy will I use then? All these numbers don't help
If you're powering a firdge, pumps, lights and a bit of tv you'll use between 100 and 200ah a day. Nobody will be able to tell you for sure without a power consumption audit. Suffice to say as a livaboard with a reasonable altenator you'll be running your engine a couple of hours a day to keep up. If you use more your choices are to run the engine more or cut down the amount you use. Simple eh?
Some photos of bristol harbour
Posted by deletedaccount, Nov 10 2009, 04:24 PM
Lovely place bristol harbour. A bit pricey, but lovely nonetheless. I think I'm going to try for a winter mooring there next year.
Funky bridge near temple meads train station:
Loads of people rowing boats:
World war 2 landing barges that never left for france, with bristol castle in the background:
One of the many big old ships lining the harbour walls:
The impressive cranes:
And keynsham lock, on the trip back to Bath. That's the old cadbury's factory in the background.
Shit creek
Posted by deletedaccount, Nov 9 2009, 03:12 PM
Well, river.
Me and the little one came back at the weekend to find this:
Urgh. I just spent an hour cleaning off one side and to add insult to injury one of the offending herons tried to shit on me when I left. Bastards.
Broken down in Bristol
Posted by deletedaccount, Oct 24 2009, 08:49 PM
Something fun happened yesterday. Something rather fun indeed. The engine cut out on me as I was cruising about bristol harbour, about half way from either side. "That's a new one" I thought, before turning the engine back on. I got about another two seconds and it died again.
Shit.
Now what?
A frantic bout of two second bursts and tiller work had me pointing at the harbour walls again. A slow sedate drift later I bumped gently in between a massive cruise ship type thing and a nice dutch barge affair. Shit. Shit Shit Shit. Out of diesel thinks I. How did I use that much? At this point the first "really nice people on boats" in this tale see my predicament and lend me a petrol can and point me in the direction of esso.
Off I trot, 20 litre can in hand cursing my idiocy under my breath. 20 minutes later I return with a round 9 litres of diesel, fully expecting to top her up and head down to the marina for the rest. Except I'm not out of diesel at all. I've got half a tank staring me in the face. My gormless idiot face. Why didn't I check before I set off?
Oh great, so there's something more serious wrong. Opening up the hatch doesn't really help me. It still looks like an engine. It's not on fire and there's no obvious holes in it. Nice one sherlock. Enter the second lot of "really nice people on boats", who see me fiddling around under the hatch in a spot I obviously shouldn't be. Describing the symptoms to one bloke (who's name I think was John, his mate being Dave) brings and immediate "fuel filter" from him and although he has a fiddle he's not able to do much about it.
Instead he does me a huge favour. He calls up a couple of mates and they tow me to the nearest visitors moorings, which are powered. The problem with generating your electricity with your engine becomes obvious when your engine suddenly stops working. Sure I've got batteries, but they only last so long, and everything on the boat requires juice.
The little wooden boat that they tied up to my stern can be seen here (mirabelle, miranda?), next to another couple of little rubber boats nudging me into the jetty.
A couple of jokes and a lot of heartfelt thanks later and I'm left staring at my engine once again. Like I know anything about engines. Dammit. I was going to have her serviced next month too (which includes changing the fuel filter). So I try to get hold of river canal rescue, or RCR for short. Except I can't find my membership card, or anything RCR-like other than a short letter telling me it's going up a fiver from september. Double shit. I pull their office number of the internet and dial that. It's an answering machine directing me to a different number, which is fair enough as it's 6pm, so I dial that instead. It doesn't work so I double check. It still doesn't work and no amount of triple and quadruple checking helps. Balls. That'll teach me to file stuff properly.
The next day the office is open once again and after a brief chat with the lady at the end I'm told an engineer will be with me later today. At 3:30 in fact, which is great news as far as I'm concerned. That RCR membership is going to pay for itself pretty quickly. Me and the little one spend the day in explore@bristol, which is excellent fun by the way, before heading back to the boat.
After a bit of confusion describing where the boat actually is to the poor bloke trying to find it he arrives. RCR don't seem to have told him anything that I told them, so I describe the problem, present him with a fuel filter I found lying about the boat and watch him go to work. He certainly knows his onions and talks me through what he's doing as he does it. It turns out that my engine has two fuel filters and the spare I've got fits the first one in line, which is great as that's the most likely one to be knackered. And it is. So he replaces it, fiddles around a bit and it's still not working. Gah. No problem says he, and he sets about re-routing some of the mysterious pipes around some sort of one way fuel valve, a valve that's broken and apparently quite rare to have, especially where it is:
This works a treat and the engine is up and running again having gone above and beyond the call of duty by sucking the diesel through the tubes with his mouth. Erk. However, Dave from One Stop, not content with having fixed my engine tells me my alternator belts all need tightening and sets off back to his van for the correct tools. I take the opportunity to make some more tea then watch him set to it, which he does. So not only is my engine working again, but making tons less noise!
So thanks to Dave the engineer from One Stop Mobile Engineering, Dave and John from round the corner (who's company name I've sadly forgotten), the two blokes in the little wooden boat who helped tow me, the other random old guy in a rubber dingy who nudged me to the side and the guys who build masts for a living who lent me a can for diesel I'm all shipshape and bristol fashion again 
I even know how to change a fuel filter now!
Well, except for the huge list of things Dave gave me that I really should be sorting out sooner rather than later
Next time I'm going to try and show a bit of the bristol floating harbour as it's pretty amazing round here. And I'll have my new camera to do it with by then as well!
Rethinking the stove
Posted by deletedaccount, Oct 22 2009, 11:47 AM
Ok, I'm not the most decisive person in the world but this is getting ridiculous. I'm now looking at a bigger stove mounted more centrally in the boat. 
Reasons for this are:
1) more heat from a bigger firebox
2) better distributed heat due to being centrally mounted
3) it's safer cos it's got a bigger flue and is designed with boats in mind
4) Nicer to look at
5) it has an oven!
6) could possibly be linked into the radiators at a later date if ness
7) better long term option cos of all of the above
Of course, it involves more expense. Much more expense in fact. And it involves ripping out a couple of cupboards but fortunately not any re-wiring or re-routing pipework.
The stove is a chilli penguin. It's expensive, but just the right size for the space. It also comes in red:
I've been quoted 700 quid to have it put in, including laying the hearth, attaching chimney and flue and all the materials to do that which I guess are worth about 200 or so. All I have to do is provide the stove, which at 1100 quid isn't cheap. 
So do I find the 1800 for this or stick with the 500 or so for the little one? Help!
Getting the stove in
Posted by deletedaccount, Oct 14 2009, 10:35 AM
With winter drawing in it's time to get a stove installed. It's about the only thing my boat was missing when I bought it. The diesel central heating is all very well and good but there's nothing quite like a stove to keep you toasty warm.
Unfortunately, there's nowhere in the boat I can put it without ripping something else out. That, coupled with the fact I'm only going to be using it in the evenings to heat the saloon has led me to the a slightly curious solution to the problem. I'm going to get a little one and mount it on top of a corner cabinet. The stove in question is a pipsqueak and it'll look something like this:
Cute eh?
It's plenty enough for just the front of the boat and it's got a little window on the front so you can see the flames crackling away. I'm going to put it here:
From what I've read I need to line both walls with cement board, which I'm probably going to face with slate. I'm also going to put a slate tile underneath it to protect the cupboard top and stop it scorching. I've done the measurements and I'm fairly certain it will fit. Just. All I need to do now is get the welder to cut a hole in the roof and weld me a slightly twisty flue to reach it. The flue itself is much thinner than a normal one but I'm going to put on a standard size chimney anyway just in case my idea turns out to be a really bad one and I have to stick in a 'proper' stove next year. The only problem I foresee is that my feet get cold, heat rises you see and it's well above floor level.
It'll not cost me too much to find out though. The stove is a bargain £165, delivered
The other added benefit is that I'll be able to stack 10 bags of coal on the roof to correct the list, which is starting to irritate me slightly
Talking bilge
Posted by deletedaccount, Oct 12 2009, 11:38 AM
So I thought I had a manual bilge pump. When I flicked the switch it would come on and when I flicked it back it'd go off. Pretty simple, right?
Well it managed to get stuck on all the time.
So, clever bod that I am I tried to check if the switch was broken and stuck on. A couple of hours of fun later (one of which I spent in the dark) I discover that no matter what I do, disconnected or not, it's always on. 
At this point I'll explain a bit about boat electronics. You've got 12v batteries. Like car batteries but designed to be discharged more often but at a slower pace, they're usually known as leisure batteries. Well these batteries are all wired up to a distribution panel, which is essentially a big pile of master switches for all the things that run of 12 volts. Like the fridge, the toilet and the lights. Things like the lights have got their own switches on the wall, but the master controls are all in one place.
So when I removed the front of the panel (as the back was handily boxed in in an impossible to remove way) a bunch of the connectors came out of the back and I was plunged into darkness with only the sound of my (still) running bilge pump. An hour of really tight squeezed wire manipulation later I could at least see again, but was no closer to sorting the pump out.
The pump is supposed to come on when it's under water, which will pump out the back of the boat (the bilge) and stop me from sinking. The only way for water to get in is via the tube the propeller comes through, which has a greasing mechanism to stop that from happening. But hey ho, like everything it's not foolproof. The great thing about the greaser though is that it covers the bilge in... grease. Thick black grease. Which means any time you fiddle down there, like the times you need to fix your bilge pump, you get covered in the stuff. I'm still picking it out of my fingernails.
So I pulled the pump apart, found nothing wrong, put it back together and it's still on. Eating away at my batteries like, well, a battery munching pump bastard that won't turn off.
Luckily, the canal world forums are full of helpful and much more knowledgeable folk who pointed me in the right direction. It turns out I've got a pump that is automatic with a manual 'on' mode which has a separate breaker from the rest of the 12v electrics to ensure that it'll work even when everything else is off. I eventually found it, 'broke' it and now I've got blessed silence from that damn pump. Success! But only partial. My pump is now fully manual, not that that's a terrible thing on my particular boat. But it does mean I'm going to have to check the bilge more often to make sure I'm not about to sink. At some point I need to replace the pump, but it's not urgent. And when I do I'm sure I'll be back on the forums asking for advice.
My toilet was also full. An interesting side effect from turning your electrics on and off repeatedly. Every time the toilet 'boots up' and gets a fresh spurt of juice, it tops up the bowl with a little water. Luckily I worked this out just before I flooded my bathroom with watered down wee. Aren't boats fun. 
On a lighter note, me and the lil one took the boat down through the bath flight of locks at the weekend and my, isn't bath deep lock, erm, deep. 
Now I'm down on the river I can open the engine up a bit. It's like a really long thin heavy speed boat. At least it feels like it.
I suppose it depends on your definition of speed
on Shit creek