Bargebuilder

Does that mean a main residence boat can attract council tax if it's not on a residential mooring and a boat that is not a main residence (purely leisure use) can be charged 50% council tax if it's on a residential mooring? So a leisure boat that uses almost no council provided services has to pay 50% council tax, whilst continuous cruisers who enjoy many council provided services pay nothing.

If you live on your boat in a marina that has no council consent for liveaboards, will the council ignore the fact that you shouldn't be there and charge you council tax? This seems to be happening. If this is the case, it would be better to not apply for planning consent for residential status and risk being refused, just move in and wait for your council tax bill.

When you say many boaters are charged second home tax, would you describe their and your boat as a second home? Any boat with a cabin, loo and a stove could be lived in, and there are hundreds of thousands of them in coastal and inland marinas, the vast majority of which don't swap berths every few months, but they are clearly not second homes and no attempt is made to collect council tax from their owners. People turn up on some and maybe most weekends, plus the occasional week for a holiday, often but not always take the boat out, but always return to a home where they pay council tax, have a doctor, are registered with banks, insurance companies, kids go to school etc. I can understand why councils might want to charge council tax to people who do live on their boats: they might argue that they enjoy at least most of the services which the tax pays for. I know of many examples where people live full time on their boats but use family members addresses to 'prove' that they don't. The council must struggle to separate the genuine leisure boaters from the true liveaboards. If you are being charged council tax and your boat is strictly for leisure use, don't pay the tax, let them prove their case in court and set a precedent in law for all councils to follow.

Given a choice, when buying a second hand boat, perhaps more complicated, more expensive to look after and less efficient than a shaft drive then?

It's surprising how a weed hatch can be squeezed into the tightest of spaces if you try. The photo is of a narrowbeam grp canal cruiser with very little space between the cutless bearing and the rudder, but the hatch (circled in yellow) is plenty large enough to comfortably and safely remove weed and rubbish from the propeller from inside the aft cabin.

Possibly, but if you stop a car, it doesn't drift sideways in the wind! Surely, with all the experience a bridge operator has, they could very accurately estimate when to start opening the bridge, such that the green light coincides with the arrival of the boat.

How much does fuel efficiency suffer with a hydraulic drive? It's a consideration with diesel prices as they have been and might return to in the future.

There is a coastal marina I know very well where the district council sent letters to all boat owners who they had discovered were living on their boats, telling them that this was not permitted and they must move off within a certain notice period. Some of these people had actually been voluntarily paying council tax for moral reasons or to legitimise their residence and the council used this voluntary act to prove they were liveaboards! The irony was, that the council was depriving themselves of council tax and there were people who lived aboard who received no eviction letter because they did not pay council tax and the council were not aware of them. Some councils are so determined to prevent marinas from turning into residential floating villages that they will refuse council tax to do so. It's more down to the history of the mooring. If a council agrees to classify a particular mooring as residential, then even after the mooring is vacated, it is still a residential mooring. A previous poster stated that, if a residential mooring is occupied, then the owner of the boat has to pay council tax, even if they never even go aboard their boat! If however the mooring is unoccupied, council tax still had to be paid on it, but by the moorings owner, the land owner or the tenant if it's rented but not occupied. I understand that once planning permission is granted to make anything residential and attract council tax, it is very difficult to subsequently get it declassified. So, check that a prospective new mooring doesn't attract a council tax demand before you agree to take it over, unless of course, you are a liveaboard.

I'm like you and see such a challenge as fun; go for it! Shaft drive is simple; less to go wrong and cheaper to keep serviceable.

Well worth the trouble, you'll be so glad you did I recon.

To be awkward?

There can be an issue, if you buy a boat not designed for the canals to use on the canals, such as a Broads cruiser. Perhaps there isn't a problem with old fertilizer bags, items of clothing etc, let alone excessive weed growth on the Broads, hence why such boats don't always have weed hatches. I'd feel very vulnerable on the canals without one, as the water doesn't often look very inviting.

A lot of canal boats will be using 13kg propane and their rated takeoff is closer to 15kw, not sufficient for our instantaneous water heater, let alone anything else.

Your macerator will be spinning dry for longer than is ideal that way. From memory; it was 12 or more years ago! There is a solenoid on the fresh water supply pipe supplying the flush. If you take a +ve to this solenoid from the supply to the toilet via a momentary switch, when you operate the switch, the solenoid will permit water to flush the bowl. Take your finger off the switch and the flush will stop. If you take a second +ve to the macerator pump via another momentary switch, when you operate that switch, the macerator will spin. In effect, you are tapping into the toilets 40A feed and bypassing the control box with two additional switches. The switch to the pump will be subject to a big surge current, so the contacts won't last very long, but this 50A switch on eBay will work for a while. 115541627795 For a long lived solution, you should run the 40 amp un-switched supply to a relay and the trigger wire from the momentary switch to the relay and the 40A feed from the relay to the macerator supply +ve. When you press the switch it will activate the relay which will operate the macerator. The relay wants to be a quality 50A or higher one.

Very well done for doing it yourself. You are clearly competent to do so, have saved a fortune in not paying someone else, put more time and effort into doing a good job than many professionals might and if anything goes wrong, you know exactly where everything is and how it works and how to mend it; great!

Especially if it's in red!

I had three propane appliances, the 19kw Morco, a gas hob and a built-in gas oven. Each had its own, dedicated gas pipe, run from the gas locker to each appliance. Each had its own stop valve inside the gas locker, so any one could be isolated individually. I used 10mm copper for the hob and oven which was much easier to bend to the compound curves of a Dutch barge. There were no joins in any of the pipes apart from inside the gas locker and next to each appliance. I don't like having joints in gas pipes behind panelling or cupboards. Just because you don't need to have an installation that is over engineered, doesn't mean it's a bad thing to do. That's one advantage of doing the work yourself!

It's important to have read and understood the BSS regulations and to be competent before doing your own gas installation. Of course solder joints shouldn't be used, but no joints are even better than compression joints.

Alan's quote stating such was from an official Morco pdf from the Morco website. Why is it so important to you?

It was probably 11 or 12 years ago when the F11e was a new model when I fitted mine and I don't own the boat any more or the installation manual, but the newer model which I believe is something like EUP11RS is also a 19kw boiler and that too specifies a 15mm supply. It's not that surprising, my home 25kw gas combi boiler specifies a 22mm gas supply and that's only an extra 6kw. I'm not sure why anyone would worry about an oversized pipe anyway, even if that were to be the case. A 15mm copper pipe with no joins or elbows in it outside of the gas locker, apart from at the boiler itself, to me is a safe way to do the job. Not the easiest, because bending 15 pipe accurately requires some practice, but it's nice having no unnecessary compression joints.

My pleasure. Hope you are okay and your toilet is too!

As I said, the gas installation was done exactly as recommended in the manufactures instructions. If in your professional opinion Morco are wrong to stipulate 15mm gas supply pipe, then explain rather than criticise.

Did you have 8 in a row with an auto changeover valve?

Lobster pots only marked by semi-submerged empty 5l plastic cans, the scourge of the east coast! Especially because weed hatches are almost unheard of in coastal waters.

I did the work myself and followed the Morco instructions which specify 15mm pipe. The gas inlet connection to the Morco is 3/4" BSP, so to have a supply pipe of 15mm makes good sense to me. And that the gas bottle is capable of yielding gas at the required rate.