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Or perhaps a case of a new boater who doesn't yet know what can and can't be done or what is worth doing and whats not - nor will they be the first person to need to remove a holding tank (if they do) so hardly reinventing the wheel. Off the top of my head I can think of two YouTube channels where people have posted their narrowboat refits/fit outs; Narrowboat Helen is a channel that shows and older boat being stripped out and refitted, and Narrowboat Zero Gravity is a new boat being fitted out for the first time. The chap from NB Helen is experienced and this is not his first NB project and the couple from NB ZG are new to the whole thing but put a lot of research and work into getting it right which they share on their channel. Both of these YouTube channels will give you a better idea what is going on under the floor and behind the walls. Plus they're just really interesting. Just remember that everybody had to start some where and nobody just instantly knows everything, you will learn what you need to learn as you go along, so please don't be put off by those who might belittle you for not having the knowledge that they took many decades to acquire. There search function in the top right hand side of the site header is very useful. It might be worth considering that a a boat that needs a lot of work done might be cheaper to buy but might work out more expensive in the long run by the time you get the work finished. I'm not sure but from reading your first post you might be muddling up grey water and black water. Black water is you toilet waste and grey water is your sink etc. Welcome to the forum and good luck with your new adventure.

I can only suggest people follow Tim's link to get an idea just how hard IWA has worked over the past 10 years on route and noise mitigation. There are several significant examples of route changes brought about by tireless and very professional, high calibre intervention and, in more than one instance, this has resulted in actual cost savings to HS2. IWA's volunteer planners have worked incredibly hard to present viable alternatives to alignments that would have blighted a waterway location or compromised a future restoration. To read their submissions is to see true professionalism at work and a dedication to ensuring that our waterways can be enjoyed in the future. I, for one, take my hat off to them and they have my unwavering admiration for all the unpaid hours that they have now devoted to finding viable, alternative routes for HS2 alignments. It has clearly ensured their credibility with HS2 engineers and they are now, justifiably, held in high esteem.

I am a member of both the IWA and NABOI and your comments may ring true to both organisations, although the stock answer might be instead of being a non-member why not join them and help to spread the message.. In IWA we do try to promote what we do at local boating related events but it can sometimes be an uphill struggle getting the massage across. With particular regard to IWA, one thing we have to remember is that without their efforts in earlier times, and the continuing efforts of the Waterways Recovery Group, we may not have such had such valuable asset to play on! Why not look out for your local IWA meetings - we meet once a month for example - where you be able to meet up with like minded people and maybe learn something about what is going on. Howard

Are you alleginging it is one of those "Schrodinger boats"? A Schrodinger Boat is a boat that is always there when you look at it, but the instant you look away, it goes off cruising. Then when you look back again, you find it returned from it's cruise to the exact same place, facing the same way, the last possible instant before you looked back.

It was the IWA who brought about the change from HS2's original plans of crossing the Trent & Mersey near Fradley Junction in 3 places to just one place now. They, together with some professional architects, worked out an alternative route which crossed the canal just once instead of the originally planned 3 places and also saved HS2 £55m. Understandably HS2 agreed to it. Another thing the IWA have been working hard on is noise mitigation. HS2 currently are only agreeing to these measures where there are fixed dwellings but the IWA are arguing that boats are dwellings too ,whether they are continuous cruisers, people on holiday, or boaters moored in a more permanent mooring such as a marina or an online one. They are campaigning to have noise mitigation measures put in place wherever to line gets close to a canal/river. They are currently being 'listened to' but how successful they are we will have to wait and see. But whatever the outcome fair play to them for all their efforts. The IWA also do a lot of work reviewing planning applications throughout the country and raise objections to the ones which will have a detrimental affect on the canal environment. They have been quite successful with some of these over the years. Sometimes it may be modifications to plans and other times it's resulted in a complete abandonment of them.

Clockwork will be the power of the future. Springs can be wound by either Workzone cordless drill from Aldi, or for excercise which folk need very badly with a huge key or a Stanley hand drill. Women can use the Stanley breast drill. Broken springs, pinions and governors ect replacement will be properly described with pictures in your Haynes workshop manual. Cordless drills will be recharged whilst driving along by what is known as ''The bump method'' the cars motion of jogging up and down over potholes and sleeping policemen and women. For fast boost charging of the drill battery one simply drives along bouncing in and out of all the drainholes grids along the kirb, by useing the bump method over the drain holes continuousely with the cordless drill attached in the keyhole you have, in effect as well as clockwork motor also electric to power the wheels. With this cutting edge form of ccccclockwork technology car propulsion with the simple aforesaid winding up aids will ensure that you will always arrive at your destination. A little 3 in 1 oil will need to be applied to the clockwork motion every two milliom miles. This form of lowbrid car will be called ''The Clockbatdrill car'' and will be very cheap. Tesla's and the likes, we s--t em. Bizzard, missmanaging indirector and inventor of the Clockbatdrill lowbrid car company.

I guess those with 'more experience' actually have little real experience of anchoring. There are very few rivers that flow with the speed and power of the Sea, yet we seem to manage to recover our anchor every time we use it (most days). There is no way I could afford to lose a £1000 anchor every day. You actually use the boat (under power) to recover the anchor, very little manual work involved.

Nice little video about a day in the life of a fuel boat.

Hi everyone I’m just sending a brief post to challenge the notion that a restored wooden narrow boat has a life span of just 20/30 years. The boat I own is SE Barlows Boat Hood, she underwent phase one of her major rebuild at Bates boatyard back in 1996 ish by the then owner, a very talented builder called Bill George. I bought the boat from Bill in 2003 and my partner and I continued where he left off by replacing the front and back ends (to keep a long story short) just three original planks remain along with some keelson and engine bearers. Much of Hood is now 24ish years old and the rest is 17 years old and as I sit here I can say with all honesty that not a single piece of wood needs replacement and the bilge even beneath the back cabin floor is completely dry she takes on no water at all. This being said she does require a week to ten days in dock every year with an estimated 150/200 hours of labour and all the modern materials at my disposal to maintain her to this level. Thankfully my partner Anita and I are able to carry out all the maintenance. I am quite simply obsessed with her longevity. In addition to maintaining her in dock we pour wood preservative under the floor and generously splash and spray it into as much of the internal hull as we can. It is simply impossible that Hood will be at the end of her life in just a few years. It will be interesting to see just how long a boat vigorously maintained will last. I am currently moored near to Tar tanker Severn that is 25 years since restoration and she is in very good condition. In addition to her are my neighbours Venus(Harland and Wolf, yes really) and Myra (walkers) both of whom have suffered many years of neglect since their restorations 30 or so years ago and despite requiring some restoration still have huge amounts of excellent timber in them. I have worked on many wooden hulls back when this was my job and I was often astonished by the resilience of these boats after their retirement from hard work. If you’d like to see the extensive restoration work that Bill and myself carried out on Hood please visit Facebook page Narrowboat Hood and have a look at the different albums showing the stages of restoration (the actual posts on the page don’t show much, it’s all in the albums) The work we carried out was under the guidance of Jem Bates and to this day we have not had to replace any planks from this restoration. You may also like to have a look at Ade’s recent restoration of Dane, where I believe they kept much of the wood put in by (I think) John Woolley 40 years ago. Cheers Nick

A 'friend', you say.....

I'm with Dave on this. Stuff the performance, looks are paramount and trump everything! 'Windows' on a boat look ridiculous in my personal opinion, portholes look the part. https://www.midlandchandlers.co.uk/products/porthole-ph5-11-9-16-14-1-2-11-brass-cp-014

Not very (But I have 20 litres JIC) Normally not a problem to refill with red. No

Apparently it's a different lithium chemistry, not the blowing up type, Dr Bob will enlighten beyond the not blowing up type EV cars have regenerative breaking, an alternator would be something akin to a perpetual motion machine surely, anyway where would it go?

But you are planning to live inside a big metal box???? ? ...............Dave

Often used on the Broads, it just a dense weight, often a bucket of concrete with a metal loop embedded to tie a mooring line to

In my case only a couple of decades as I'm not nearly as old as almost everybody else here. With the best will in the world being cynical can quite often come across as belittling to someone who doesn't know you, plus she is asking a question based on the knowledge that she has at this time and is trying to check things out, for some people it's not obvious where or how they should go about checking things out and this seems like the place to do it; it can be difficult to use the search function if you don't know the correct word or as with using "tank" as you keyword it can give you a hell of a lot of threads none of which might actually seem to answer your question. It might be "here we go again" for the older forumites but the new first time posters don't know that or that the reason the forum is being actively unwelcoming to them is because the question they are asking was once asked five years ago so everybody's bored of it now. It would be more helpful and better for the forum's long term sustainability if when people were feeling cynical they politely advised the new member where they could find the material needed to do the research rather than making snide, condescending comments about the fact that the OP comes from London. None of this was aimed at you personally or specifically BR even though I quoted you. Back to @Alice And The WonderCat if you are still looking for YouTube videos then try searching for the "Minimal List" they had to remove their black water tank and they posted a couple of videos and did a blog post, and then on composting toilets "The Narrowboat Experience" have one and they love it and have posted quite a few videos about their experience, and then the "London Boat Girl" she had one and decided it wasn't for her so she doesn't have one anymore but she did a couple of good, honest vlogs about her pros and cons, she is definitely not a hater of them but it wasn't for her and she explains why, making some fair points. https://www.minimallist.co.uk/2018/06/removing-our-black-water-tank-and.html https://narrowboatexperience.com London Boat Girl doesn't have a blog but can be found on YT and Facebook.

You can tell if it’s one of those...it has an NBTA sticker in the window.....

Congratulations, I wish you well with your new venture. Thanks for getting back to the forum with news of the eventual outcome.

Yes that was the Co-Op Bank. I switched to Tesco and, to my amazement, when I told them what had happened THEY refunded it to me and said that they would argue it out with the Co-Op later. For 12 months after that the Co-Op continued to forward the DD requests to Tesco saying they were "pre-authorised" but Tesco were happy to implement a complete ban on the requests. Seconded !!!

The monitoring systems have not picked up on this but this could be because it seems to be sporadic and not affecting all users. The logs on the server do not provide any explanation either though I'm aware our hosting provider has had some issues in the past week which may have affected our firewall but presents no security risk. Please let me know if anyone encounters this issue again after 18:00 today and I will investigate further though due to commitments outside of Canal World it may take me longer to get to it. Due to this, I will be standing down from my voluntary role here shortly but will be around until someone else is recruited.

Let's stop the pontificating and wipe the fairy dust from our eyes. There's no way any of this will happen effectively for generations. Nor will petrol/diesel engines disappear in the lifetime of our youngest reader. Nearly everything we consume relies on ships and trucks to get to us. Every essential organisation like NHS & Military will always rely on emergency generators just in case ...... Can you imagine a tank leaving the battlefield in order to hunt out a charging point? No oil company will continue producing product just for them. They'd require a much larger customer group. You can stop any of the Greta Thunderbird brigade dead in their tracks by asking how the likes of her will attend the International Protest Meetings without planes, ships and cars to get there. Let alone get to work on a daily basis if it's more than 8 miles from home. Emergency Services like Police/Fire/Medics ? Even if we stopped shipping in food and grew our own, how would we harvest and process it? It's just blame shaming without a single workable solution. Past evidence tells us: - Governments come up with nonsense merely to look good, they don't know how to achieve it any more than we do. On the International stage and in the voters' eyes they look good. However they want industry to be magnanimous and solve it. Then when it fails it wasn't governments that failed. We also know the students/young anti society, new thinkers of this brave new world, soon change by the time they are in their thirties and have changed a few nappies during sleepless nights. Reality is great leveller. The undeniable truth is you don't suddenly change the lives of those who've struggled endlessly to get where they are in the rat race immediately. All you can hope for is to program the young minds growing up to accept the loss of something they've never known. Look at all the Hoo-Haa when .... Idi Amin expelled all UK passport holders from Uganda, and they had to come here. Motor Bikers were forced to wear crash helmets. Seat belts became compulsory. Mots for road vehicles. All children should carry an inhaler in case they were allergic to nuts or something. You all need to buy a new car, because we're stopping Lead Petrol. Drink driving is unacceptable. You all need to buy Diesel cars because they're better for the environment. You shouldn't buy Diesel cars because they're not better for the environment. Regardless of how much sense any of those meant, they were bitter pills at the time and probably still are to many today. If you want proof that success was achieved through convincing the young then offer to give a lift into town to teenagers. Before they have a chance to do up their belts start to drive off while thrusting a bag of peanuts under their noses with a joyful "Help yourselves". They'll be so traumatised they'll need therapy. So although it could appear Miss Thunderbird and her ilk are to be the way forward, the big difference is they feel absolved of any responsibility to be part of the problem. Strangely that leaves them comfortable merely complaining, pointing blame with not a single suggestion or idea of a workable solution. Most of it will come to pass ... eventually .... but not in the time frames being spouted today.

About five years ago we built a 70’ Northwich shaped working boat which ended up in Ian Rothen’s fleet as a crane boat under the name Hebe ( I think ). It was built for a private customer as a carrying boat, but never was used as such, and whilst still not a carrying boat in the conventional sense it is out doing a job of work. I haven’t and recent photos though Steve

I’m in agreement with @Dav and Pen. If there were punitive costs to the infrastructure manager for having the facility out of use to commercial customers the repair work would have started last week. There’s plenty to do before any work on rebuilding the permanent canal infrastructure would take place. Access agreements, haul roads, site compounds and then clearing the debris that’s been washed in to the channel. If it were an operational railway that stuff would start immediately. I’m sure that’s happened over the past week. But none of that applies so I think we should be grateful that we live in a country that has laws that compel the infrastructure manager to ultimately repair it despite it being of no direct commercial value to the economy. Proof we live in a pretty civilised place. We should always retain a degree of gratitude that the inland waterways are retained as a leisure facility. JP

Could a mod change the topic title since the story isn't about banning stoves. Maybe something like 'banning housecoal and wet wood'

???? Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Bikini was released in 1960 by Brian Hyland. The only novelty record by Andrew Lloyd Webber that I’m aware of is Tetris:

Congratulations! ? ? ?️

And the answer you gave the OP was? I think few people have easy access to all the documents required to give the OP a definitive answer although some may have a general idea. The OP could not tell us how the stove is rated re the heat transmitted to the hearth and when I looked at the link I could see no mention of this. As The Biscuits pointed out this has profound implications for the thickness of the non-combustible hearth. I did not answer because I could not find this info and others pointed to the relevant advisory BS. What did happen is that the question indicated all was probably not well with the boat systems so the OP was advised of it. Now, perhaps you believe that we should not try to resolve issues arising from questions but I would rather try to help the questioner avoid problems. After all the OP can choose to explain or ignore. If you do not find the way the forum operates then simply do not read it and more to the point do not post any questions.