trackman

You mentioned getting solar panels. Do it. They will charge your batteries when you're not there, even in winter. In summer a decent set up will run your fridge and keep the batteries charged. The size of bank you'll need will depend on your electrical power consumption. I have 200W and it's fine but we have a 12V fridge, no TV and all our lights are LED.

I'd only add to what's already been said to say that the vlockies are only there "in the boating season", and most of the year you are on your own at Sawley locks.

Builder Peter Nicholls, long retired as far as I know, used to do a line in inspection saloons. These were fancy Narrowboats, replicas of the things some canal company directors used to be driven about their empires in. For some reason, I assume so that the steerer was handy for directions from the directors, they had wheel steering from an internal position in the cabin front. The Nicholls replicas were the same. I always felt they'd be very strange to steer

I have very similar windows and got replacement seal strip from Seals Direct on line. Sold by the metre. I had to measure the width of the existing as they have various sizes

My boat won't go through Froghall, but I've gone through Harecastle Tunnel and also Nell's Bridge lock many times with no bother. My boat gets scraped every time in Ashted Tunnel, going down the locks, unless I lower the pound before entering the lock. The absolute max air draft is not usually the issue, it's the shape of the structure v the shape of the boat that can be the problem.

We get New Heat in Beeston, Nottingham from a local merchant. It burns hot, stays in well overnight & produces less ash than anything else I can get locally. It is far from ash free though, I usually empty ash twice per 24 hours.

As live-aboards, my wife & I would totally disagree. In winter we find the extra covered space invaluable. It's a useful store, and when returning to the boat from the pub or whatever, it's easy to nip under cover in bad weather while you find door keys & unlock the door. In summer the cover is easily rolled up out of the way in seconds.

There's also a hydro system at Holme Lock, though I believe it's out of order, having its own problems with the Trent! It has become difficult at times to judge the true state of the river at Beeston, and this will apply wherever such schemes are working. The trad red/amber/green boards are not an adequate guide to river flow, as they only reflect water levels. Hydro schemes like that at Beeston can draw the water down significantly, putting it into the amber or even the green when it ought to be in the red. Not directly relevant to this mishap, but worth knowing about when deciding whether to venture out onto a river.

Mrs T and I had to take our boat into Sileby lock some years ago when the Soar staged one of its frequent rapid rises. On that occasion there was so much timber in the water that I abandoned engine power and we bow hauled the 20 yards or so. On the Trent I imagine that would be impracticable, but then I doubt there would be the concentration of debris we experienced. The question then would be whether the boat had the power to make headway into the current prevailing & reach the lock safely.

It looks like one of the two pipes that ought to go to the gearbox oil cooler, but I can't see enough of the oil cooler itself to really tell what's what. Can you post a more general shot that shows the surrounding area?

My money is on a failed field diode in the alternator. I've seen 16+ volts from an alternator which had failed that way. The work on the engine may be a coincidence, though I suppose it's possible those doing the work ran the engine without connecting the alternator properly to a battery & damaged it. If that's it, a good car electrical specialist should fix it and not charge a fortune. I got mine done for the cost of the parts, less than £20.

I'm having a similar issue with my JD3, with the header overflowing & settling at a significantly lower level than I'm used to. I've been told there may be an airlock somewhere. I have yet to find evidence of that. Can't shift the bleed screw on the head, but will continue trying. I'd be interested to hear if you find out what's going on with your engine!

I have a JD3 and as has been said, battery charging doesn't make it work at all. When we charge our batteries I put the Travelpower on & turn on the immersion heater. We also use an electric toaster on board & if it's opportune we put that on too. All this makes the engine do some real work, though not a lot. If you don't do this I'd be afraid of glazed cylinder bores, and the engine certainly won't heat up fully. I've found a 70 l calorifier, from cold, cools the engine for quite a while even with the immersion going.

I had a similar problem a few years ago. Turned out that the control circuit in the alternator had failed, causing it to generate well over 16V. This was cooking the batteries. We noticed first when our gas alarms started going off when the batteries had been charging for a fair time. I investigated & found the high voltage. A new alternator cured it, though I was later able to get the old one fixed cheaply, and now keep it as a spare

Definitely get your drive train alignment checked. If the shaft is being pulled off line by misaligned gearbox/engine, that puts excess pressure on the stern gear causing extra wear. Well set up these stern tube arrangements last decades. Our boat is 10 years old with thousands of hours on the engine. I've never even had to repack the stern gland and have only had to tighten the gland slightly a couple of times in all that time. The reason is that our boat has a trad style engine room and there's a cardan shaft under the back cabin floor from gearbox to propshaft. There are two universal joints in the run so no missalignment can affect the stern bearing. In a boat with a more usual modern engine installation, the equivalent effect can be achieved by fitting two universal joints between gearbox and stern tube. Aqua drive and Python drive are two examples of devices that include this sort of arrangement. Fitting one would make the stern gland far less susceptible to misalignment. There may not be enough room in your installation for one of these though. If that's so, you will just have to get the alignment corrected, and have it checked regularly.

We used an independent surveyor to check our boat fit out. He got into a spat with our boat builder about the fire resistance of this stuff. He wanted a fireproof version used, saying that was what the RCD required, the builder had always used fire resistant and couldn't source fire proof. The builder had used the same stuff in lots of boats and no other surveyor had queried it. The difference between fireproof and fire resistant appeared to be that the first won't burn at all, the second will burn, but only if it's held in a flame. We decided to go with what the builder was using! It's never been queried since and the boat is now 10 years old. It has passed its boat safety checks first time every four years.

If I recall correctly iroko contains natural chemicals that corrode iron and steel very effectively. If I'm right some care needs to be taken to isolate it from direct contact with metal.

A calorifier leak sounds likely, either from a sticking pressure relief valve or a split in the tank itself. The former (PRV) should only let out water if the calorifier pressure gets too high. However they do stick open or even fail. Search on here, there are posts with pictures and advice about them. If the calorifier itself has a split you need a new one, sadly, like a neighbour of ours here! Otherwise, could it be water from your stern gland? Normally that should collect in a separate bilge compartment and be pumped out by your bilge pump but things can go wrong with that arrangement too.

If you buy an expansion vessel make sure it's one made for fresh water, not for a heating circuit. The ones for heating assume that the water in them will be full of corrosion inhibitor and if it isn't they rot and fail quickly. Clearly this is what happens when one is used on a fresh water supply. I know, I was supplied the wrong kind by a well known chandlers in the Midlands even though they knew what it was to be used for! I had to replace it after less than a year.

Try Bimble Solar, see what they recommend for your application.

These days it would be perfectly possible to map the entire canal bed using sonar type equipment and computers. The problems, I imagine, would be the cost, and the difficulty of tying the survey data back to the exact location on the ground. The Rail industry has similar issues collecting track data and then finding the recorded fault on the ground later to fix it. As for the mobility of the silt, I imagine much of the bed is soft & mobile but it's the lumpy stuff that obstructs boats and won't move easily.

We had an issue like this on an old boat years ago. In our case it was traced to a faulty ignition switch. As I recall the switch had a setting that activated the engine pre heaters. When you'd run them long enough you turned it to the "start" position until the engine fired, then back to the "run" setting. The switch failed to leave the heaters running all the time the engine was running! The result was the batteries got flatter with the engine ticking over and barely charged at normal cruising revs. A bit more dramatic than the OP'S fault, but could theirs also be some sort of failure of the ignition switch?

I'm quite sure the Rule 500 I have only draws current when pumping water. It doesn't have a float switch, which is good as these can get stuck up with muck and fail. This may be "on" or "off", so leading to either flat batteries or a flood, if it happens when you're not there. I'd recommend this type of pump every time.

Neither of them looks like the one we have. The second, not the cylindrical one, might be an updated version of what we have. Re what Tony says, I don't think it works that way. The instructions suggest that it uses some sort of measurement of capacitance to detect water level.

We live aboard a lot of the time but now and again leave the boat, sometimes for weeks. The sensor in the Rule pump has been very reliable by the way. It doesn't seem affected by grease or other muck in the water as the old float type switches can be. Currently we have a mooring at Beeston so we're not far away!