pinkoi

This made me giggle, next year we must do this! We left Alvercote this morning as we need to be back ready for work in a week. Ended mooring Rowan up past the bridge/winding hole - shorter walk to the pub, but we were a bit out of the way. Hope everyone had fun Helen

We are on our way there now in our not quite historic 1976 ex willow wren kerns/Middlewich hire boat Rowan. Just been through Fradley junction should be there mid to late afternoon. Bunting is half up. How is the mooring situation looking or do we need to dig the bike out? Helen

Hopefully this isn't against the rules to post this here as the content is elsewhere and isn't as detailed as some posts but we have been tweeting our holiday this year, including quite a few photos. www.twitter.com/nbrowan Our boat is 1976 ex Willow Wren/Middlewich Narrowboats camping boat and as an excuse to explore we decided to take her back to Middlewich (and beyond). At time of writing we are 2 weeks through our month out and have reached Middlewich. Because I am a nerd I exported the route out of www.canalplan.org.uk and onto a google map to show you the route we are taking. Click here for google map Hopefully some might find it interesting

Indeed you can. Midland chandlers do them Russboy I think they are called

We have a refleks and while we wouldn't be without it (and we did have 500 quids worth of reason to skip it recently) life isn't quit as simple as your picture paints. Just a word from the wise They need regular cleaning, it takes about 3 hrs to heat a 60 litre tank of water. They are the kind of stove you should leave running low in the background rather than turning off all the time. How much you have to clean it depends a lot on how much you turn it off and on. The kettle on the top thing is great and you can do a good stew on it or boil the potatoes if you don't have a spare hob. Refleks is out only source of hot water so we are thinking of going down the gas heater route for summer too. Hope this helps

Nope carbon on the window never seems to clear, it only clouds up if we get mucky orange flame for a long period when it's going out or starting up.... We have a pan scourer for the task instead

Carlt, Thanks thats a really kind offer. I'm going to phone lockgate today and I will PM you if I don't get any joy as the coil would be good (I don't mind loosing the visible flame window- it's normally black with soot anyway!).

-10 points, but I can see why people could get hacked off with diesel stoves as mastering them takes time, it's only because we have had to learn because we live aboard. Having said that if this one dies we probably would have another one... We have a multifuel stove for our back cabin and it's not much fun with the dust and the shifting coal and not been able to keep it in for more than 48hrs.

Ours isn't a coil its a sort of semi circular tank that comes half way across the burner (perhaps as it's the model that has the visible flame window)- I have seen models that have the coil of pipe in though... Perhaps it's possible to replace with that though... Thanks for looking

Evening Folks, We have the dubious pleasure of owning at lockgate refleks stove 2000kv which we have almost tamed. So now it's back boiler is doing a wonderful impression of a sieve. It started off about 2 months ago with a small bead of water being visible on top of the boiler when we let it go out for a day or so. Then the little watery dots multiplied and now leave it off for a day we have a bout a table spoon of water in the bottom by the end of the day. This makes it make a wonderful sizzling noise about 10 mins after lighting but if it carries on at this rate we will soon struggle to light it... Does anyone know if, or have experience of replacing the back boiler in one of the beauties? We are slightly anxious as this is our only source of hot water apart from ye olde kettle. I have sent a couple of emails to lockgate who always used to reply to stuff via their webform about if the boiler can be replaced on this model but not heard back. Thanks in advance to lockgate buffs and -10 points to anyone who tells me to chuck it in a skip and get a squirrel

Our method is to chuck about an eggcup amount of paraffin in there, get a bit of old receipt (any supermarket chain will do) dunk that in the left over paraffin residue in the eggcup light that and chuck it in... Give that 5 mins to get the cage hot and then switch the diesel onto low flame - Timing is the key, turn it on too soon and you get a diesel paraffin mix which roars for a few mins, turn it on too late and you get the mucky orange flame which coats the thing in soot and needs turning up to 3 to burn hot enough to go back to blue flame again. I have to say, after seeing how the thing behaves when the slightest diesel residue is in the bottom I would never light it on any amount of diesel pooling in the bottom. Lockgate advise against lighting with any diesel present. It can get a bit exciting when it over fuels (I started writing my will the first time it did it) and often it starts placid when it has too much diesel until it gets to the magic temperature when it goes crackers.... You are all obviously all braver than me

Hi, I'd recommend regentex purchased from Tony Beal in Glasgow- we made our tippit and topcloth from that ourselves and got a satisfactory result. You just need a couple of days booked in a village hall, a couple of sewing machines and some denim or leather machine needles... It is entirely waterproof in our experience. The only things are. 1) It does shrink very slightly (1 inch over 30 foot) at first. 2) There are often joins in the sheets (which is fine in our case as the topcloth is made in several sections to allow windows to open). 3) The colour fades very slightly - not a problem if you put on all your cloths at once, we did ours in two batches so it took a while to catch up with the colour of the first sheet. I can live with these for the amount of money it saves...

Glad it has turned up that much be a relief! Although I haven't seen the boat, take heart in the fact that once you have cleared it out a bit it probably won't seem half as bad as it was when you first saw it :-) I had this reinforced to me the other day. H x

Negative pressure thing is interesting, we have a problem with that when trying to light the stove while the engine is running (air cooled engine). Never considered it in terms of external weather conditions. :-) Thinking about trying out an H shaped chimney cowl. So ugly that it's use may be restricted to tempestuous conditions. It seems there might be less to go wrong with one of these mechanically compared to a rotating cowl...

We have had the same problem in the last few days thanks to the strong winds with our Refleks stove. A while back it was blowing out all the time (turns out due to it over fuelling and thus not burning hot enough - it sounds counter intuitive I know - Diesel is only reluctantly flammable it seems) and we were recommended to get an anti downdraught cowl. I wonder if it would help to have one in this situation too (before we asphyxiate in our sleep - not that there has been much sleep during the high winds). Does anyone know what they look like (we have some sort of enclosed cowl on there but I don't know if it would constitute an anti down draught)? Also anyone that has one already, do they work and are there any recommendations of types? ta muchly

On the South Oxford and that was definitely the worst night I have had in 18 months aboard. Constant gusts of wind kept blowing out the diesel stove (luckily it's running well at the mo so the catalyst mesh immediately reignited it again) which emits lots of stinky smoke which then blows back in through the window. 4am rain sounded like the end of the world being beaten on the roof and then there was the constant bobbing about and squeaks against the fenders. Oh and the bit of tree that fell off and hit the boat... I just thank my lucky stars that the very dodgy tree near us changed into firewood just before xmas. *yawn*

Rowan pre holiday in the early 80's (not our holiday, a chap we bumped into whose family hired her and kindly let us have his pics). Rowan now, gradually being put back to look like she did in the above... Sadly we will probably won't reinstate the front deck... but the diamonds and the round tunnel light are coming back.

Very glad to hear it and we have been talking about taking the Rowan up to Middlewich to take her "home" for our summer cruise next year. We will have to come and say hello :-) I tried to get in touch with the former owners about a pictures of Rowan as we are trying to put her back as much to how she looked as posible when she was a hire boat, but got no response at all. (We bumped into someone on the towpath who used to hire her in the 70's/80's who gave us the pics in my gallery) Helen

Cor... that really is a deep low! The boat is rocking enough at the moment and we are "down south" and looking at today's pressure charts we are nowhere near that sort of low yet....

Sycamore lives just north of Cropredy now (the wooden top one) If I recall correctly (seen it there 2 years in a row). I had my photo taken next to it on hols this year as she is our boat's sister :-)

*waves* :-)

I live in an ex Middlewich hire boat from the 70/80's so I care about this on a few levels. Firstly I have emailed the company under the former management a few times without acknowledgement. In my opinion I would be sad if the name went, surely there has to be some value in being able to show a long established company line. As already mentioned multiple times before in the thread, perhaps there is a market for basic but serviceable boats. This would allow more families to get into narrowboats if it's affordable and perhaps school parties as well ( I believe our boat was frequented a lot by scouts and guides, as it was a "camping" boat ). As people become more environmentally aware they are holidaying in this country again, in droves, if it can be a reasonable price against other uk holiday options. Having simple cheap to hire boats give your the means to entice in customers for your posher boats in the future. Our boat is simple by house and most modern boats standards, but there must be a way to market simplicity as a good thing. Helen

Does anyone know what the queues are like? We are due to reach claydon about midday - 2pm is tomorrow... Not expecting to be about to get through tomorrow...