IanD

Looking back through my photos it was 2013 when this happened to us, can't remember for sure which lock it was but looking at photos it could have been going up 27W -- we got stuck on the top cill coming out of the lock but managed to reverse off it before things went completely pear-shaped. The next time we did the HNC in 2017 the W locks seemed less leaky, but this time we were going down them so wouldn't have seem the same problem.

It nearly happened to us on the HNC, coming out of a lock with leaky bottom gates into a low pound. We knew about the risk and immediately went astern and pulled back into the lock and then ran some water down, but somebody else at the same lock earlier that year didn't and sank in the lock as the leaky bottom gates emptied it faster than water could flow round the boat plugging the gap... 😞

The lower one -- like several others in Leicester, some of which are *really* pretty -- is done by an officially-authorised graffiti art bunch in conjunction with CART, you can see the logos on it. We ran into a couple of them actually in the act at a lock further through Leicester, and had an interesting conversation with them about what they were doing. They did say that the stuff they did mostly got left alone by the taggers, and that public opinion seemed to be overwhelmingly in favour of what they were doing because it replaced eyesore tagging with properly done creative artwork which actually added something to the view. So graffiti in general -- especially on historic structures -- is undoubtedly a bad thing, but experience shows it's well-nigh impossible to either prevent it or clean it off. I'd say it's far better to have arty graffiti (like the one I showed) on such structures than badly drawn uncontrolled tagging, because not having anything isn't a realistic option without having hundreds of graffiti police patrolling the canals 24h a day -- and they'd be far better employed fighting real crime which affects people which is completely under-resourced like burglaries...

From the pollution/CO2 point of view there's little point forcing all ~30k UK canal boats to switch (expensively!) from diesel to electric, they contribute maybe 0.01% of the CO2 that ~30M cars do, the money would be far better spent pushing up EV use and efficiency. But logic doesn't come into it, I'm sure that they'll get caught in in the eliminate-diesel hysteria. Quiet vibration-free boats with no exhaust fumes though, that's a very good reason to do it. Yes charging points would be needed, but in reality this is a tiny problem compared to the car one which *will* be solved. Could even go through Dudley tunnel if the boat would fit...

It happened to friends (Kate and Snowy) after we'd spent a frozen Christmas (1986?) with them up at Cosgrove. We were breaking ice all the way back (they were moored at Broxbourne on the River Lee), the boat (Baron) was in a boatyard afterwards to fix it who failed to keep the bilge pump going, it sank in deep water with all their possessions on board 😞

There's no need to go to that much trouble. It would work for cars because they need much bigger battery packs (getting on for 100kWh now) and want to charge them quickly (ten minutes or so), and a 600kW charger is a challenge to say the least, which is why swappable packs are proposed (but impractical with car packaging restrictions/differences). A boat would need less than half the battery capacity, and people are happier to stop for half an hour or so, maybe while they fill up the water tank -- net result, 100kW charging, which is much easier and means there's no need to swap batteries. Also avoids the risk of dropping a 100kg battery on your toe, or in the cut... The big problem is still providing the network of charging stations, but this is probably still easier than a network of battery swapping stations 😉 Except your solution (huge solar array on a wideboat, hardly any travelling) doesn't meet the needs of most boaters...

Prolonged ice breaking will even remove the rivet heads from an iron hull, followed by bilge pump running every half an hour. Followed by boat sinking when the power fails 😞

They're not the problem, magnetic fields have little effect on most of them. But keep well away from your wallet with credit cards in. Don't ask me how I know... 😞

I didn't say it was difficult for the likes of you and me, I said it was difficult for *most* people -- and you've just agreed with me. If you multiply the 5% or so of people who *could* do it (I think 10% is optimistic going by the number of electrickery newbies on canal forums) by the (my guess) 20% of people who *want* a high-capacity battery/mains system on their boat, you get 1% of canal boaters. That's a tiny market by any measure, and is what I meant -- your guess of 0.00001% is 5 orders of magnitude out, as an engineer I'd say that's quite a long way off 😉 Agreed, because it will then be the mass market not a tiny minority -- and I'm very much looking forward to silent non-polluting boats with a system-wide charging network which is what will have to happen 🙂

That's pretty much what I said. But the cost problem isn't just for retrofit, it's also for new build, because developing and debugging such a solution and making it idiot-proof takes time and money (see Integrel) and whoever does this has to get this back (with some profit!) unless they're doing it as a hobby or for themselves, like the people on this forum are. Such a system also can't use secondhand batteries like many people are doing to keep the cost under control, the supply/reliability/capacity/lifetime/warranty issues don't allow it, so the cost of the battery packs is much higher too. And now we get the chicken-and-egg problem; until enough people are willing to buy such a system nobody will bother developing and marketing it and use sales volumes to drive the price down, but until it's available cheaply enough (a long time with new batteries...) not enough people will buy it -- and even then the canal market willing to pay for an advanced battery/charging system is too small, most people don't want or need it, a few lead-acids are dirt cheap and work OK even if they die after a couple of years. If the canal market is lucky it might be able to piggyback on the yacht market which is far bigger worldwide and also much richer, but the cost (with new cells) will still be a lot higher than lead-acids for the foreseeable future -- even if this evens out over (say) ten years, many people can't or won't stump up the cash up-front, or realise they're unlikely to have the same boat in ten years' time... Everyone saying "but it's easy, I managed to do it like this..." has already outed themselves as somebody who understands about boat electrics and batteries (lead-acid and lithium) and charging systems and how to roll-your-own LiFePO4 solution -- which is great but you need to get out of your bubble and smell the coffee, you're one of a small minority in the canal world, for a start you're reading this 😉 Don't get me wrong, lithium can be a great solution for some boaters, but there are many obstacles to it getting widely adopted on the canals -- it's already happening with yotties but space/weight matters to them (like cars but unlike narrowboats) and their pockets are generally much deeper...

As I said, give that many boaters have difficulty with simple conventional 12V lead-acid systems without killing their (cheap) batteries, this is all a step too far to get wide adoption -- you and MP and Peterboat and Nick and me may think it's obvious but it just isn't to most people, you need to put yourself in their shoes. Even if somebody (like Nick) produced a comprehensive "Lithium for dummies" guide complete with a component list and instructions, if it made it seem easy then people would go for it, screw it up and kill their (expensive) batteries, then blame him (or whoever). They're just plain more finicky then lead-acid and need more care, and cost a lot more if you do kill them -- which people who don't understand them inevitably would unless the system prevented them, which means no possibility to override Vmin and Vmax, which means a closed system they can't mess with, which means not a DIY one. I'm not saying that lithium isn't a good solution for people who see and understand the advantages and know how to use them, but right now they're just too expensive and fragile to put in the hands of people who can't even keep lead-acids alive...

Two self-explanatory examples of graffiti from our recent trip through Leicester...

It's not just the balancing, it's also over/undervoltage protection, monitoring, control, displaying status, error/fault checking, Raspberry Pi, software -- somebody with enough knowledge (I'm an electronics engineer) can roll their own system at the cost of significant time and development/debugging effort, but this is beyond the skills of most boaters who would just want something that works that they can connect up and go with. But also they don't want to pay what a commercially developed system to do all this would have to cost...

You could make them out of moored boats -- oh, hang on...