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Ditto

Water under troubled bridge ............

You do appreciate that this is a fossil fuel; emissions sit mid way between gas oil and HVO and its Shell's way of pretending to be green whilst still peddling stuff from a bore hole.

More than anything it's price that's working against the sale of HVO at the moment – currently £1.39/litre + VAT @ 5% as opposed to gas oil @ £0.83/litre + the VAT. That's the price for 'red' with duty @ £0.11/litre as opposed to road fuel that carries duty at £0.56/litre & VAT @ 20%. So 'white' HVO is still costing close to £2.00/litre. As long as you able to state (and sign a declaration) that you are legitimately using the fuel for propulsion purposes, Crown will send you a 1000 litre IBC. The cost of the IBC and carriage (it's effectively the standard pallet rate) works out at an additional £0.10/litre, although if you can return the IBC there should be a refund of around £40. Similar arrangements can be made for 205 litre drums. Otherwise if you are within the area of their distribution network (Beesley's in the Midlands, Speedy Fuels in the Home Counties and Crown in the Bury/Manchester area) 1000 litre+ deliveries by tanker are possible. All in all getting hold of HVO on the inland waterways is currently nigh on impossible, especially if you have no means of handling an IBC. Please PM me if you want further, detailed information.

Indeed they have. Their excellent bi-facial offering is no more, although there will be other manufacturers that go down that route.

Out of interest, how many dry docks of these dimensions are there around for blacking etc?

It's rather looking as though this took everyone by surprise ....... including the navigation authority. But for this incident they would almost certainly have got away with it as there's little or no joined up thinking where moorings are concerned.

Just beat me to it! I look forward to the comments and am only grateful it happened yesterday as I was through there on Monday afternoon!

Can anyone explain to me why a smoke alarm doesn't meet these criteria too?

And the BSS are just getting togged up to join in the fun/run. Somewhat late to the party, they have recently published a (restricted) consultative document and hybrid installations (and their problems) are on their radar.

A wee piece of background to the change to the current format: In the early 1990s, Ordnance Survey announced that they would not be producing any more single-colour mapping (the base mapping for the original Nicholson guides was black and white and the blue was an additional, in-house layer, added together with all the boating info) and that Nicholson Waterway Guides would have to make do with the seven colour maps or go without altogether! The publishers (and I can't remember where we were with mergers and whether it was Bartholomew's or Collins by then) agonised for some 15 months and finally agreed to go with the all-singing, all-dancing, colour maps. Meanwhile, the editor David Perrott, had come up with the current division of the waterways into seven regional titles, plus of course the map and briefly, in 2022, a Scottish book (replaced by a fold-out map) to coincide with the restoration of the Lowland Canals. The Broads coverage followed in 2010, adopting a somewhat lack-lustre format using 1" mapping and a totally different presentation ......... now, thankfully, scrapped and totally aligned with the seven other regional guides and their 2" scale of mapping. Whilst there is overlap between the content of different guides I can't fault the way David went about things with a view to minimising the number of different books required to make up rings and the like. After all the bulk of new sales will be to hirers and those unlikely to be regular boaters. In their latest incarnations, paddling information is starting to appear in recognition of the popularity of canoeing, kayaking and paddle boarding.

Fort William (still live).

So far no one has mentioned either the stand alone Thames guide or the Fens and Broads guide which ran to only one edition published in 1986. These were both in the old format.

Thought that restriction had been lifted

I think the answers to your problem can be distilled from the range of comments and observations above, Rosie. Pragmatism is the key, however. I've been involved with a very similar situation, even down to it being a Beta engine, although the level of incompetence with the engine installation (at the boatyard of an 'approved' Beta agent) was far greater than in your experience. In fact it beggared belief and the report I compiled for Trading Standards makes extraordinary reading – (looked at it only last week by a strange coincidence as the boat has just come up for resale). If you want to PM me I can give you an idea of what Beta's reaction will be and how you might employ pragmatism and the engineering wisdom of this forum to your situation.

Thanks Tony. I'll second that observation!!

Hi Frangar, sounds like you might just be able to help me with some detail by expanding on the specification of a Crowther's "Compensated Prop". A few years back I was looking at something slightly larger than a 22 x 22 prop as my boat was clearly underpropped and there wasn't really space to swing a 24 x 22 one. Keith came up with something with a similar moniker (I seem to remember he called it a 'Crowther's High Performance Propeller') but was somewhat coy about giving away its specification and any further detail. Suffice it to say that he being Keith, and Crowther's being Crowther's, it's spot on and does the job perfectly with the engine now correctly loaded. But I'd love to know a wee bit more about its detailed specification, especially as I might be getting an electric motor to swing it in the not too distant future!

Worth taking the opportunity to warn against cheap HVO. If you're offered HVO at a price well below the going rate (around £1.80 at the moment and nearer £2.30 if it's had the 60:40 split applied to take account of paying the full price – without RTFCs accruing – for the domestic element) then it will almost certainly be a blend of HVO and GTL which is, of course, derived from fossil fuel. I understand that even in the lab it's pretty well impossible to tell the two apart and there are unscrupulous suppliers out there producing their own blend and passing it off as pure HVO.

Botany Bay Boatyard Chorley 07967 380464/07770 576288 – open daily 08.00-20.00.

I believe that the BSS chaps and chapesses are grapple with this as we speak. I know for a fact that they do at least understand the point that peterboat has just so aptly made.

I understand that the hydrogen is the expensive bit and its 'brown' source is what renders HVO only 90% carbon neutral. Once 'green' hydrogen is used in its manufacture we will have a product that is pretty much 100% carbon neutral and if the wind power used to produce it would otherwise have gone to waste (middle of the night stuff) it would be hoped that the price of HVO would come down. Right now we can only speculate.

VERY!! If Scottish Canals hadn't elected to do due diligence before stocking HVO (along with the Broads Authority I believe that they are the only navigation authority that currently do) this anomaly would never have surfaced and 'the body could have remained buried' which is how things stood a year or so ago. However, you'll probably be aware that all the commercial and passenger-carrying vessels plying the tidal Thames are now running on HVO and you can bet your sweet life that the tug skippers and all the Uber passengers are not freezing their nuts off (those that are that way endowed that is). In that watery arena the body remains buried as I know for a fact that many of the vessels concerned have a single diesel tank. The tugs, operating around the tides as they do, are often lived on 24/7 and heating, lighting and cooking is all supplied by separate, engine-room generators. Exactly so! Emissions are emissions whether they are released by burning fuel in a stove or in an engine. In a sensible world every opportunity to reduce them should grasped with both hands and pair of RTFCs.

It does just so long as you don't show a heater, cooker or WhisperGen a drop of the stuff ........

I wouldn't wish this on anyone but if you Google the Road Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) you will gain an insight into the mechanism that generates Road Transport Fuel Certificates (RTFCs). In short, any fuel producer manufacturing more a certain amount per year (44,000 litres comes to mind but I'm likely wrong) – their obligation in fact – must pay an agreed sum per litre sold into the market place. When I first got involved in these shenanigans it was around £0.33/litre but I believe its gone up. This is 'put into a pot' and is redistributed to biofuel producers within the transport sector. The value of a RTFC varies and until recently was £0.42 and HVO attracted 2 of them per litre sold, hence the £0.84/litre 'subsidy'. Right now the value of an RTFC has dropped to the £0.25 – £0.30 mark meaning that the pump price of HVO has potentially risen. And yes, you are correct, the real cost of manufacturing and marketing HVO c/w the full duty and VAT is very close to £3.00/litre. Just so long as Government doesn't reappropriate the 'pot', the RTFC support of biofuels for the agreed sectors is secure. What is more likely to happen is that they will move the goalposts and inland waterways could cease to be eligible for RTFC support. This mechanism has been around for something like 14 years I believe so is pretty mainstream and not a dodgy, hole in the corner operation! Just to complete this boring saga, taking things full circle, the reason why DfT won't allow RTFC support to extend to the domestic consumption of HVO runs along these lines: "Mrs Jones buys 10 litres of diesel at the pumps which she puts into her CAR. This in turn puts something like £3.30 into the RTFC 'pot' which then becomes available to support RTFCs for biofuels. This is fine in Mrs Jones' book (I doubt anyone actually checked back with her) as long as the HVO gets used within the transport sector (and inland waterways is ... but deep sea is not (even the definition of 'Inland Waterways' is "fun" as it varies winter to summer!!) but it's not fair on Mrs Jones if the RTFC that she has helped 'pay for' gets used by someone to subsides the heating in their boat – i.e. something that is not 'transport' ". You can't make it up ......... but this, unfortunately, is the line that DfT have adopted and one that IWA and RYA will have to fight them on once the world situation settles down ....... as in world energy prices and the Ukraine situation: both not a million miles from one another.

It's about as lunatic as the situation prevailing around which uses of HVO attracts RTFCs and which don't and the system's total inability to accommodate mixed use. I've had some direct dealings with a couple of Government departments since I got involved with promoting waterways use of HVO and they al seem to be populated by bright young things, with excellent degrees, but with zero practical life experience. So they devise clever schemes but have no awareness or understanding of the practicalities of putting them into effect.