Giant

I can certainly imagine the surface water outfall being much worse for corrosion than the canal water. Firstly, the water coming from the outfall could be much more oxygenated than the canal water the rest of the boat is sitting in. Secondly, it could be contaminated with all sorts of things picked up from running over the land.

I believe the number you're thinking of is 13.7m, it was probably previously specified as 45ft and then metricised. This is the cutoff beyond which you become a Class XII vessel from the MCA's point of view.

What is the boat? Unless your boat is a very large barge indeed I don't see much reason to worry. Plenty of Sheffield size boats (61'6" x 15'6") still powered by 21hp Lister JP2s and move themselves around tidal waters just fine. We have the luxury of a third cylinder in ours. Any tidal trip should be planned so that you are working with the flow rather than against it, anyway. I'd worry much more about the state of your fuel tanks - bumpy water tends to dislodge gunk in the bottom of the tank which then clogs the system.

Ohhh, I have a good answer to this. You can even do dimmer control, of two separate lights, down the one pair of wires! You need an full H-bridge IC that will carry enough current for either light, and a little circuit to generate the control signals for it. The H-bridge will let you connect the supply to the wire pair one way round, or the other, or neither. At the other end you connect one light one way, and one the other, with diodes so each only comes on for one polarity. So far the same as RLWP's idea. The trick is, to get both lights on you feed alternating control signals to the H-bridge so that it rapidly switches between the two. By tweaking the duty cycles you could get dimming control of both. I bet you could do it with just a 555, an H-bridge and some passives.

They liked to market themselves as such, and it was true in terms of their own infrastructure, but they had nowhere near enough 3G coverage to be a viable national network on that alone. They had a deal to let their customers fall back to O2's 2G infrastructure until 2006, and then Orange's after that (later EE). They started phasing this arrangement out in 2012/2013 but AFAIK it still continues in more remote areas.

Thanks Nigel, I think it's very useful to have that summary of where the provisions for payment arise, especially since the 1995 Act makes no mention of license fees at all. For anyone reading along, here are links to the 1971, 1975 and 1983 Acts.

Mike, sorry, I think I have just realised why you were so incredulous - you were imagining a room thermostat controlling the pump? That would indeed be monumentally stupid. I'm talking rather about a pipe thermostat attached to the hot side pipe coming out of the back boiler.

I'm not sure that the question about payment should be considered as flippant. Everyone reasonably accepts that a license fee must be paid to secure a license, but what parts of the legislation actually provide for that? If there is not something specific, then is the requirement of a license fee not, in itself, a condition outwith those enumerated in s.17(3) of the 1995 Act? And if the imposition of this fee condition is to be accepted, then why not other arbitrary conditions? I'm not saying this question has merit as a line of argument, but I think it's worthy of an answer.

Having turned the thermostat down to the point where the system will always run without hissing and banging, that's pretty much what it does. The amount of heat might be the same, but that doesn't mean you can get good use from that heat. E.g. if it's going into a calorifier coil at the same warm temperature as water already in the tank, it's not going to transfer any heat. Surely it makes sense to try and regulate the supply of water to the back boiler so that it comes out as hot as safely possible, to give best heat transfer to downstream uses. That's basically what we have. The distance is still non-zero.

For the pump to come back on when the thermostat is back up to its trigger temperature of course! You say this as if it would be obviously stupid to have the thermostat set too high, but in our case at least, it's hard to find the best setting to leave it at. The pipes from the back boiler run through a wall to get to the cupboard with the thermostat & the rest of the plumbing, so it's a short distance removed from the back boiler itself. As such there's a delay between the boiler getting hot and the thermostat getting hot. If the thermostat is set to what might seem a reasonable temperature, we can still sometimes get some brief banging before the pump kicks in, if the stove heats up quickly enough. If set low enough to completely prevent this in all cases, the boiler doesn't get the water hot enough to be useful. Yes it's silly and we should move the thermostat closer to the boiler, but it's a boat so there's a zillion more pressing jobs to do.

Our system is pump driven but we will get the same banging if the fire heats up very quickly and/or the thermostat controlling the pump is set too high. Either fit a pump or find some other way to improve the circulation and it should stop.

2G networks in the UK use the 900Mhz and 1800MHz bands. 3G is on 900MHz and 2100Mhz, 4G is on 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2600MHz. Different network providers use different bands. So in practice you can only choose bands by selecting your network provider. In practice it's a question of which network has good signal at your location, not which band they happen to use.

We have a JP3M dated 1957. Can't be the original as the boat was built in '53 though, so it may have been specially ordered from Lister as a replacement after some mishap.

Thanks for that. I suspect it would end up being the XP because we'd be wanting to apply by roller. I'll have a chat with SML about it at some point - we've already had (non-epoxy) Jotun paint from them for our topsides, and they were very helpful. Will be a while away as we need to finish doing the decks first!

That was Hempadur 15130.

Black 2-pack epoxy goes chalky grey fairly quickly. Freshly applied: 8 months later: The resulting matt finish isn't so bad where it's consistent, but it does start to get quite variable in appearance depending where water has been running down etc. At some point I would like to find a compatible gloss topcoat that could be put on above the waterline.

You might also try contacting the Yorkshire Waterways Museum (http://www.waterwaysmuseum.org.uk/).

Aluminium is the best bet for brackish water and is what we have fitted. Not quite as good as zinc in seawater or as magnesium in fresh, but definitely the best choice if you are somewhere in between, or cruising on a mix of waters.

The PLA were starting to require grey water to be tanked as a condition of new river works licenses for residential moorings on the Thames, as of a couple of years ago. With support from the DBA we were able to avoid it being retroactively applied to our mooring, but I don't know what may have happened elsewhere.

Not that we've noticed! All the littler ones seem to just get out of the way when they see us coming...

Aside from our penchant for Humber barges? How about Edward Burrell's lovely Angelus, for sale at 145k: Half the river would immediately know your boat, because it is this photo that adorns the front cover of Edward's book A Guide to Motor Barge Handling. She is about as far from new as you can get - built of riveted iron in 1884 - but has been lovingly looked after and is a truly beautiful ship, we passed her on the Thames earlier this year. It's sad that he has to sell her. http://barges.apolloduck.co.uk/feature.phtml?id=466952

As a complete aside, any discussion of Tyler Wilson's boats drives us mildly crazy, because not only do we have a real Sheffield keel, we crew now and again on an actual brigantine. I can assure you that both are really quite straightforward to handle on a canal...

It depends. If you had the time and knowledge and skills you could do it yourself for below the low end of that, but you're approaching this having never fitted out or even lived on a boat before, so you don't know what you need to do - you will need to hire one or more people to plan it, manage it and do it for you. If you get the right people and everything goes smoothly and there are no disagreements, then I don't see why you'd need to be getting as high as 100K. If it all goes sour as so many jobs do, especially for inexperienced clients, then who knows what it may cost you at the end of the day - both in money and time spent both waiting for it to be done or chasing things up when it's not. We spent years researching and looking at boats before we bought, and had already lived on two before buying our own, so we had a lot more awareness of all the issues than you are arriving with - but we still decided to go with an existing boat that was already fitted. Had we tried to specify and oversee a fitout ourselves I very much doubt we would have got it right. Even now, were we needing to commission a whole new boat, I would find the prospect daunting. A second hand boat that you like, can get started living on, and gradually improve to your liking, is what I would recommend to anyone new to living aboard.

If your thoughts are turning in this direction then the Barge Buyers Handbook is essential reading.

I gather there are quite a number barges around that are capable of going up the Lea, the GU, and the K&A. I expect the high decked style presents some challenges for getting on and off at locks & moorings - where the UK canal norm is for the water to be quite close to ground level. This is the tradeoff with the increased freeboard that makes them suitable for tidal waters and large canals.