IanD

If the heating was electric then a heat pump would be needed, same as in houses. These draw about 1kW so running one all night would be no problem.

You forgot saxophones... 😉

He did say "Model Y -- asking a question", which is exactly what the last post says at the bottom... 😉

Will that be about 3cm then? 😉

Owning a boat you only use occasionally doesn't make sense, certainly not from a money point of view. Neither does buying a brand new one. Actually, neither do lots of other things people spend money on... 😉

As I've said many times, a diesel engine running on HVO is currently the best solution for *most* boaters -- and in the longer term without enough charging points... 😉 Don't forget that most of the 35000 boats aren't travelling round the canals, they're at static moorings most of the time. Obviously enough mooring points would be needed, just like enough EV chargers are needed. It's not an insoluble problem, there are 1000x more cars in the UK than boats on CART waters and they're almost all going to be EVs eventually -- but not for many years, and unlike the canals there *is* some kind of UK plan/strategy for EV chargers...

Certainly not... 😉

Expensive is one side if it, big issues with safety and certification of installations both on land and boat is another. But the real killer is that it's not really needed... Ultra-fast chargers (>100kW) handle currents of many hundreds of amps at 400V or 800V DC nowadays, the equipment to do this is expensive but also needs a lot of safety precautions, and DIY installations are pretty much banned -- EVs also need extensive certification and mechanics need special training. It's needed when EVs on long journeys need to charge rapidly. It's difficult to see why canal boats need it when they can charge up overnight much more cheaply and easily, with simple and widely available 48V systems, and without the need for massive expensive shoreside batteries and chargers. Similar to the case for home charging of EVs which is what most owners do...

I don't think electric canal boats would need "a range equivalent to diesel", they need a range long enough that charging isn't needed more often than other things like water filling/toilet emptying -- which is rather less. Batteries -- apart from cost -- aren't the problem, charging points are. Electrifying the canals isn't even on the government's radar, "green marine" is because -- like cars -- ships emit huge quantities of CO2. Boats on inland waterways probably emit 1000x less than either so they don't care... 😞

Absolutely -- I was just pointing out that he'll get a lot of advice, some of it good and correct, some of it poor and wrong, and it's not always easy to tell which is which... 😉

Me too, I had lots of ideas for my boat which turned out to be impractical when confronted with narrowboat realities -- but also several which did work out well, and I'm pleased with the end result 🙂 If you do go ahead I'm sure you'll go through the same process, but you might also get a lot of useful advice from people on here who've already done this -- even if a lot of it is explaining why something you think is a good idea is pointless or won't work... 😉 Be aware that there's a pretty strong "anti-modern-technology/the-old-ways-were-better" bunch on here as well as a smaller "boundless-optimism-tech-can-fix-everything" one, and neither is always right -- or wrong... 😉

Ho Ho Ho, I realised that. Didn't make the article any less crap, though... 😉

Adding ballast to the bows to bring the stern up isn't very effective, it's far better to lighten the stern -- I know, I went through this exact process when my boat was put into the water and the stern was low and the bow was high. Roughly speaking, a ton of ballast in the middle of the boat will drop the whole boat about 3cm in the water, if you put it right in the bows then they'll drop about twice as much as the stern comes up. 6 inches extra draft means the boat is about 5 tons heavier than it should be, if this is the extra depth everywhere -- no way can shifting ballast correct for this.

I don't think the canals around Sheffield are especially conducive to rest and recuperation... 😉 There's a lot of confusion in that article -- high-density molten salt (sodium-sulphur or otherwise) are not exactly compatible with boats and cats, "molten" should be a clue, for the same reason "room-temperature" lifetime isn't relevent, and they certainly don't have 4x the energy density of lithium when you include the case and things needed to keep them molten. Batteries using sodium instead of lithium are already starting to appear on the market, they're cheaper and sodium supply is unlimited but they're also bigger and heavier than lithium cells. So another badly-written publicity puff piece about yet another "battery breakthrough" that isn't... 😞

Happy Xmas in return 🙂 Don't be discouraged by what might seem mostly negative comments, many people on CWDF have spent a lot of time looking into the realities of electric/hybrid boating over the last few years. Some of us even have them, but are well aware of their limitations and reliance on "burning stuff" -- even @peterboat with a widebeam with far more solar than can be fitted on a narrowboat has an onboard diesel generator, and heating which burns stuff... 😉 I doubt it will be free, but it might be a bargain. I wonder where any money from selling it will go, since I assume the builders were paid by Government funding?

The problem is that a patchy network of charging points doesn't make widespread adoption of all-electic boats possible, to get rid of expensive and non-green onboard generators you need to cover the whole canal system. Fast-charge is also *much* more expensive both landside and on the boat than a slower 32A/7kW charger. EVs already have the high-power electronics capable of dealing with hundreds of kW as part of the drive system, but boats don't. If you think of it as "hours cruising per hour charging" a 32A point gives maybe 2 hours, not really fast enough for "drop-in" charging -- but it does mean you could get enough charge overnight for 2 days cruising, which seems like a good solution, and one with less load on the grid per charger than one house.

So being turned back into a standard series hybrid boat then, just like all the others Finesse have already built (including mine)? Except having wasted a shedload of dosh on something that was never going to be any use... 😞

You don't need charging points every 5 miles any more than you need water points every 5 miles, you need them perhaps half a day's cruise apart and wherever boats moor, and you'd put them in places where there's already power next to to the canal -- towns, houses, shops, pubs. All perfectly possible, but without a government/CART plan/strategy on how to make it happen and pay for it (like in France?), it's simply not going to happen... 😞 Not surprised to hear the fate of the Hydrogen boat, it always was a pointless technology demonstrator, but it was funded by a government desperate to look green even when it's not. Paid for by *our* money being spaffed up the wall though... 😞

Measured, according to the posts above... 😉

I don't think you understand how to analyse/combine multiple choice questions, and your analysis is wrong because the choices and numbers in the survey results are not what you seem to think they are. No doubt you disagree... What you're suggesting also doesn't make any sense when you look at the fact that CCers are outnumbered about 4:1 by HMers and wideboaters are also similarly outnumbered by narrowboaters. Which means it's unsurprising that far more boaters think CCers amd wideboats should pay more than everyone should see the same increase, which is exactly what the survey shows. It *would* have been surprising if the most popular option had been to keep the status quo, because most boaters would be worse off than choosing the other options.

You and I both know that -- my point was that 15kW/20hp is plenty even on something like the Ribble Link or the Trent... 😉

If it was him who said this: Percentage of all boaters choosing option B over option A - 40% Percentage of all boaters choosing option C over option A - 20% Percentage of all boaters choosing option D over option A - 24% then that's not what the results showed -- the percentages are the number of boaters who would favour each particular option above the alternatives after all the results of the ABC/ABD/ACD questions are combined, it's not a comparison of any one choice with another or the actual numbers who chose each option at any stage. It's a way to do valid analysis to measure people's opinions faced with more than two choices -- probably the easiest for this particular case since the alternative would have been six pairwise choices (AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD) which would have discouraged answers ("too many questions!") and also not given the option of the status quo every time, so could have been misleading. After this combination -- which is not dodgy or CART trying to fiddle the results, it's a standard statistical method -- the results were as follows: 14% most preferred option A (flat increase) 40% most preferred option B (CC surcharge) 22% most preferred option C (area-based pricing) 24% most preferred option D (bigger widebeam surcharge) It's also statistically valid to combine the last two results and say that 46% most preferred wideboats to pay more. So those boaters in favour of the status quo/flat increase were greatly outnumbered by those who thought that CCers and wideboats should pay more. This undoubtedly isn't what CCers and wideboat owners want to hear, but it's what the results of the survey showed and what CART have implemented.