Leaderboard

Including foals we have 20 ponies( 10 Mares, 9 Foals and 1 Stallion) and 1 horse. SWMBO 'drives' (horse & carriage) and we were discussing recently if we could use the driving horse to pull the boat, our Daughter-In-Law ( a real 'townie') was listening in a asked "what would you do with the horse at night, how would you get it out of the canal, don't its feet go soft and wrinkly ?"

Yes - it stops your battery re-charging the Sun

Also heard from a lady at Braunston, as a boat with a Bolinder engine went past: "I'm surprised they're able to keep going, with the engine mis-firing like that" On long-lining, I once came through a bridge hole while a boat coming the other way held back and waved me through; then he immediately shot forwards and collided head-on with the boat I was towing. As we all disentangled ourselves from the resultant chaos, I asked him why he had done that. He replied that he didn't mind waiting for one boat to come through the bridge but wasn't prepared to wait for two !!!

Lady boater at Braunston as a pair went past, long lining: "How stupid, towing another boat"

I suspect that there are many people, boaters and car owners, who would find purchasing an electric car or boat financially challenging.

one thing strikes me.. from the advert it is registered with CRT as electric to qualify for the 25% license reduction but with CRT's rules doesn't it state that to qualify electric must be the sole means of propulsion? with that in mind how does it stand now it has a diesel outboard attached

No it's one of the forums nicer features that threads sometimes come back to life after many years. Who knows - we may even find "Que Sera Sera" some day! (Only tjose who have been on here a very long while will understand that without a bit of searching).

Whilst we can all snigger at people who use their bowthruster to compensate for an apparent inability to steer, the do have their uses. even for people who are perfectly competent. I was grateful for my bowthruster when I had to reverse for two miles last year. Mrs S is also grateful that she never has to handle that long heavy eastern European thing on the roof. I will only accept criticism for using it from someone with a horse.

Not a chordless phone?

Fair enough, they are not suitable for everyone. But... Official government statistics say only 4% of journeys are over 25 miles and only 2% are over 50 miles. Those over the real world range of newer EVs (say 150 miles) must surely be a much lower % than 2%. That still does not mean they are right for everyone but it probably means they would be right for a hell of a lot of people if they weren't so expensive. And probably right for even more people as the charging infrastructure improves (which is happening every month) even if they are unable to charge at home. Individual examples from people showing EVs are not right for them only go to show that they are not right for them, not that they will not be right, now or in the future, for other people depending on their circumstances.

We now have pollution sensors and cameras on the M1 through Sheffield/Rotherham, it seems that 50mph means just that! All caused by those clean diesels that you are all going on about!? At least my Lucida can only just do that 50mph so it dont matter

Do you mean fans are required to make them work? or that a fan us desirable to assist in shifting the heat from the evaporater, Phil

Must have been the beans on toast you had earlier ?

Laws of thermodynamics?

Oink!

The 1st question to ask before purchasing a 2nd hand EV is: How much to replace the battery pack (or how much is left on the battery warranty)? It is still early days for used EV's and the subsequent owners arent used to their battery packs reaching their sgelf life. Example: BMW i8 is now 5 yrs old. Battery life: est. 8yrs. Replacement cost out of warranty: £8 to £10k!

The 'Big-Bang' was a long time before we started using diesel and how much energy did it take, and how was it provided ?

Oh, I don't know. That's exactly what we did 35 years ago on our first canal holiday. Nothing like going in at the deep end (although I left that literally until many years later). In fact the Tardebigge locks are one of the easiest to operate flights, as I realised later.

Ive always been very grateful for my bowthruster. Steered the butty, did the back cabin art work , earned money . Seriously grateful most days. Could not be replaced by an egg whisk in a rotting tube. Sometimes if it was especially difficult we would swap places, but then the boats would get confused and misbehave all over the place, the butty didnt like male steerers and the bowthruster never got the hang of cross straps. canals so much better nowadays. this year the shaft never came out of the hold ..

Bagpipes at any time of day are not good, but fortunately the excruciating sound is mostly confined to Scotland and some other parts of the world that seem to appreciate it. In the event of Scotland's independence, our embassy there will advise tourists to leave the bagpipes at home when visiting the Split Apart Kingdom or whatever we're called then. There will be a hard border from Carlisle to Berwick just to enforce this, perhaps built out of the leftover bits of Trump's wall bought from a US Government garage sale. Seriously, well done Scotland for getting your canals open again. As I argued on the other topic some while ago, this was always going to set an important precedent for when the UK government's subsidy to CRT is supposed to expire in about 2026.

Unless you live in the canal side house with a boat moored outside burning old treated fence panels, green wood and running a smoky engine for a few hours a day for battery charging.

That's like all the articles in papers saying that if everyone in the country unplugged their phone chargers we'd save enough energy to power [xxx] houses. Which sounds like a big number, until you compare it to the [xx] million houses that we have, and realise it's maybe 0.001% of our home energy consumption. Nobody should be worrying about this, fix the big things first, then the medium sized things, by the time you've done all this you don't have a problem any more and can justifiably ignore the really small things. So yes we need a pollution reduction from all *significant* sources including cars, taxis, trucks, planes, ships and trains, and as you say they all need looking at. What can be ignored -- unless you *really* enjoy pointless arguments -- is things that contribute probably 100x less pollution than the sources I mentioned earlier, which includes narrowboats and standby generators. If you want some numbers, there are about 30 million cars and 30 thousand canal boats in the UK, so a thousand cars for every boat. Fuel used per year in the UK is about 12MT (million tonnes) for petrol cars, 12MT for diesel cars and taxis, 12MT for vans/trucks/coaches, 12MT for planes, 4MT for ships, 1MT for rail -- so it should be obvious where we have to look first out of this ~50MT total. A narrowboat used for fairly intensive cruising (3000 miles per year) uses about 1T of fuel (1000l) per year, but given how many boats are essentially stationary or hardly move at all I'd be very surprised if all the boats in the UK use 5000T of diesel between them -- which is 10000 times less than the big culprits mentioned above. You could also say there's no excuse for having a smoky old engine chucking out clouds of stinky exhaust fumes, since this is a local pollution hazard to the nose if nothing else -- however it's unlikely to contribute anything to global warming or lung disease, unless you connect a mask to the exhaust with a length of hose...

This is a problem, but there are solutions for many people. Charging while parked at work would be OK for many, and companies will have to install charging points -- which is far easier to do in most car parks than some houses and streets. Everyone is always ready to point out the problems with BEV -- so OK, what's *your* solution to the pollution/emissions problem? Yes the easy and convenient answer is to do nothing and carry on just like today, which is exactly why we're in this mess...

I'm glad we have a bow thruster. I hardly ever use it but when I do I'm glad we have it. ETA that I can steer!

By definition all the backup diesel generators in the country contribute a tiny fraction of total emissions -- compared to cars, trucks, planes and ships -- because they hardly ever run. The same applies to narrowboat engines because there are hundreds of times fewer than cars, they run (on average) for much shorter hours and at lower power output. Put both together and I doubt you'd get as much as 1/1000 of the emissions from UK cars. So putting restrictions on either of these from an emissions point of view makes literally no sense. The problem with cars/buses/taxis in particular is not just the total amount of crap they put out but *where* they put it out, which is mostly where people live and work and where poor air quality has the biggest effect on health -- hence the fact that air pollution levels in many UK towns greatly exceeds legal limits, and it now thought to be one of the big causes in the rise of various breathing disorders including (but not limited to) asthma. This is one big drive behind trying to move these vehicles away from diesel (and petrol) and onto cleaner propulsion methods like batteries -- and yes I'm well aware of the problems of doing this and the fact that the power has to come from *somewhere*, but even if it comes from fossil fuels it's better to be burned in a power station somewhere out in the country than in the middle of a town. All the arguments about total lifetime energy consumption including building new BEV and the wind turbines to power them ignores this issue -- these are obviously relevant to global warming (which I'm not saying isn't a big problem because it is), but air pollution -- especially NOx and PM, which diesels are especially bad for -- is killing thousands of people per year today in the UK, and it's the thing governments are most worried about because they can be sued for allowing it to continue. Planes (and ships) are also big polluters on a global scale, but most of their emissions are not right in people's faces, they're out at sea or in the upper atmosphere -- so these are a problem for global warming and emissions, but so not much locally which is where the biggest problem is right now. Planes also have a problem that there's little prospect of anything much cleaner replacing the jet engine because of the overwhelming need for high power and low weight, and there's not much improvement on the table for jet engines. Ships and boats have more options but also have the problem that there aren't many other ways to generate the 100,000hp that big container ships need to ship the vast quantities of cheap manufactured junk from China that society demands...

Sssh - don't tell them - they'll all want one! Just remind him that it always rains in Manchester ()