crazydave

I'm working it out, things have moved on a lot since I first considered boat life nearly 30 years ago but the girlfriend turned her nose up at it - odd as the now ex is boat mad and has been for a good ten years now. back then - no internet, no phones, no laptops, no modern contrivances and having left the army I was used to living with very little as my life consisted of two personal holdalls and my deployment kit. but there's no point in having to give up everything just to live on a boat full time. I'd go for a widebeam if I didn't want to explorer the network at a slower pace so might even end up doing both. I like to cook so will kit it out accordingly as the time I have spent on the cut with friends, enemies and scouts by the dozen the kitchen is by far the worst planned out area - doing the two pennine rings in two weeks on a 50 foot shire cruiser was hard work and great fun but a buggr to cater for six without two slow cookers - one of which had a timer for making the porridge, I will probably end up with an on demand wisper genny setup, having read as much on van life as boat life (and having an interest in disaster recovery from an early age when I was planning to survive triffids and A bombs instead of viruses and zombies as they do now.) I know that there is awful lot you can do to avoid being stuck in a world of twee interiors wishing the oven worked better and would an oil burner be less work than the wood one. there are ways around everything. I have spent the past few years working out how big a battery bank I would need to build to run a three bed detached house and whether to create separate low voltage rings to reduce the inverter and power adapter drag. I have been in boats with fully equipped electric everything so if I end up with more batteries than U357 and a dustbin sized thorium rector to power it all then so be it.!!, I have even gone through the design theory with an engineer friend on making a height or length adjustable boat to stretch a 57 to a 70 foot for extra sleeping/living accommodation and even make a boat 4 foot wider in the mid section which we worked out was more practical and cheaper to do. the hydraulics or worm gear and kit would act as ballast - I am what they call a wrong box thinker. but growing up watching wilf lunn on the telly might have had some influence. while I can live on a boring boat I particularly don't want to.

I've been considering all of this and I do like the idea of easy to dispose of without pump out. so cassette and compost plus shovel or bow mounted catapult seems the way forward although I would look at a charcoal filter for the exhaust or an extension pipe for the sake of the neighbours. mind you a bumper dumper and dog bags mounted on the stern would also work. as a soldier doing COP with instructions to leave nothing behind not even foot prints, we had a fuel can to store fluids and a roll of cling film for the solids which then went into a double bagged rubble type sack. one lad used to like it as a pillow - we left him to it.

as a kitchen fitter I still use drills that are 20 years old and older, I still use festo drills that must be 25 years old at least. I buy clone batteries from german web sites/ebay sellers at a fraction of the price. I have the exact same drill branded atlas copco, AEG and Milwaukee. oddly the old 12v drills often outperform the newer higher voltage drills because the motors and gears are much better - I worked in a factory that made stackable student accommodation and they used bosch drills which were pathetic so I took my own, Dewalt had to go for bigger batteries when they bought elu out because they couldn't make the same product as good as elu did for the mark up they wanted. the old 12v drills are cheaper to rebattery and I can also wire them straight off a 12v car battery should the next solar flare take us back to the middle ages - same goes for my laptops. the only issue I come across is older fast chargers often do not like high capacity batteries. every time I buy a bigger capacity drill the batteries end up dying on me through lack of use. if its that big a job I'll go corded. a tip for those going through composite boards (mfc,mdf) with a bimetal holesaw - use light hammer action, it saves burning the teeth out with a gentle chiselling effect.

for boat use you only need a low power one anyway, but as I also like to cook and intend to have a 'proper' kitchen on the go I will be using a decent solution possibly as simple as a 12v bathroom extractor fan and some led spots built into a high level cabinet like an integrated cooker hood. or refit a cooker hood internally because the main part of a cooker hood is the grease screening and that is easy to get a hold of.

I agree venting out the cooking fumes can be quite important or everything in the boat stinks of bacon after a couple of weeks. its on my list but I have seen boats with chimney cooker hoods identical to the ones I fit most weeks so assume they take the voltage hit or found one that uses 12v fans.

thanks for the comments and no intention to hijack the thread as I am brand new here - with regards the thermosyphoning I agree usually the heat source is lower but that sis a convection rather than a thermosyphon effect, however I spent the last year working out how to combine a pressurised central heating system with a vented wet back boiler stove using a plate heat exchanger. while I pumped both sides of the exchanger for efficiancy I did see several (again US) references to putting the plate exchanger on top of the water tank and that would work naturally with no pumps. while odd and counter intuitive they say it works. but I can't vouch for it until I've tried it. at to making all you need in the summer so loss of output doesn't matter - well I guess that depends on what you are running and where you are to catch the sun. I found a 3.5kw south facing solar array only worked at full speed for around 6 hours a day and it was very easy to not export a thing as the hot water tank could swallow 9kw per day easy. during the summer appliances like fridges use more power and one thing I would like to have is a full size fridge freezer for personal ease. and electric appliances as I don't want to live in the 1970s in my future floating apartment top explore the cut with on my own terms for once, I also use fans to help me sleep even in winter. so I am approaching this from previous experiences rather than the boat learning curve which is coming sooner than I expected or indeed wanted. at the moment it is keeping me sane redesigning a boat layout and services in my head.. so I am looking at gas less and probably wood/coal less too intending to go solar/electric and diesel. so the learning curve is battery banks and how to abuse them as the voltages are different to what I have learnt to deal with. this was what got me thinking at the time and I have a few other websites saved if I ever get my other laptops back. I was trying to introduce a second heat source into the system so I had gravity circuit from my boiler to the heat sink then the secondary circuit into the heating loop via the plate exchanger using the existing boiler circuits and valves to dump heat into the water first and then into the house rads.

as this thread is similar to what I am researching at the moment because of the boat I'm watching has an air cooled lister and without starting a new one off, I have seen some of the things the americans are doing with twin use solar panels. solar panels get hot, they can;t help it and when hot they lose efficiency, I was surprised to see our house panels lost around 40% of their capability during the super hot spells we had during the past few summers, cooling them down keeps them efficient. our panels were also designed for low UV climates so they gathered more energy from winter light. so how to cool them down - basically put a water pipe behind the panel and then a back on that with a circulation pump into the cauliflower. the yanks have done it with silicone pipe, hope pipe, plastic pipe, aluminium and copper pipe. I haven't tried it out but intend to, there are also some dome shaped collectors that use standard black corrugate cable trunking so I assume it copes with the temperatures well enough. in theory it doesn't need a pump either as it should thermal siphon into the cauliflower. the only weak point I see is like when I plumbed in the wetback boiler at home - you probably need a heat sink somewhere or something to stop it blowing if left unchecked.. If I was going to moor south facing or leave the boat empty for a while I would even consider a DIY solar air heater i've seen made from beer cans.,