Denizen of the Deep

Pine pallet-chopping keeps me almost as warm as sitting in front of the fire kindled with it. Reducing a pallet to a big bag of kindling ought to be an Olympic sport :-)

Only yesterday I took advantage of the fact that I had an electrical engineer on board, after the scheduled job was finished, to ask him to identify the unlabelled red light on my panel. He followed its cable right down to the side of the engine behind the air filter, where it connected to a fairly large sensor. He thought it might sense air pressure at the engine inlet and close when pressure was too low. We started the engine and he blocked the air intake with his hand. Bingo! The mysterious light went on. Engineer remarked that he had never before come across a 'blocked air intake' warning on a boat. Maybe that's what you have?

There's loads of room round my engine: it's a small engine for a narrowboat! People generally remark that it looks 'neat' down there, but really it's cos it's small. I joke with folk that it's a lawnmower/tractor/snowmobile engine, and if truth be told I'd rather have a more mainstream engine in my boat - but as long as it's doing the job of pushing me happily round the UK canal system and managing the occasional river stretch without struggling too much, I intend to maintain it and keep it going for a while yet!

My boat (bought second hand a year ago, little history except docs and receipts left aboard) has a Lombardini LDW 1404 engine. Clock now shows just over 14,000 hours. Apart from problems with the fuel supply (not specific to the engine) this engine has run consistently for the year I've had it. I had the cam belt replaced last winter, for which total cost was about £250 - for the kit, including tensioner, plus about an hour of engineer time. The replacement was slightly but not excessively fiddly - engineer was in and out in an hour, seemed perfectly simple. Having no rev counter I have no idea whether the engine ever delivers its nominal 3,600 rpm. I just run it through 4 sweet spots (avoiding resonances with other bits of the boat) - idle, first sweet drive spot, 'upped' drive, and 'flat out'! I find the engine somewhat noisy and rattly, but got used to it. Conversations at the stern require slightly raised voices! From the bank, it seems no noisier than other narrowboats to me and others. On the whole I feel it's reliable. Anyhow, it took me safely from Bristol-Portishead-Sharpness this summer, although I had to run her for about 3 hours at 90%+ power to keep up with the piloted boat in my 2-boat convoy. On that voyage, I ran some hot water off in the galley at about the halfway mark; by the time we reached Sharpness the engine was hot but not steaming, and there was no significant coolant loss. Lombardini on a narrowboat - a bit of a rarity perhaps, but so far I have no complaints