dmr

Its all interesting, in a frustrating sort of way. If I am correct that red can't be used for generation then boats must be an exception because we can use red for everything as long as we pay the extra duty for propulsion. I wonder what the situation would be if we put red in a separate generator out on the towpath rather than using the main engine? It is because we often only have one tank that this whoe 60:40 propulsion thing was invented. The ideal outcome would be to let boats use red HVO for everything, including propulsion, without any extra duty. I will keep my fingers crossed.

That would be a very interesting court case, but as you say, I think you would loose.

I think I was wrong, www says red can no longer be used in a generator, I had got confused between generation and non commercial heating. I think that currently HVO can not be used for heating so this pretty much prevents using any red HVO in a boat. This all relates to various subsidies on HVO which were devised without any consideratiion to boating. There are people working hard to get this changed as HVO makes a lot of sense on the Inland waterways, but paying full duty for propulsion, battery charging and heating is not attractive even if it was legal. Red diesel is currently pretty much limited to farming, forestry and boat heating. (and I think domestic heating though this is normally done with kerosine/ heating oil). A possible loophole is to get a trading licence so that your boat becomes a commercial boat......but this has more costs 😀

If you want to go to HVO then this project maybe makes a little bit more sense, but you still have the diffcultities are delivering to a boat. There are currently technical/legal issues with boats and HVO but some of us hope these will be resolved soon. Red HVO will cost significantly more than red diesel but still less than DERV. An advantage of a tank is that you can fill it up when the fuel price is good. Lots of second hand heating oil tanks on eBay for a good price but usually collection only and usually not bunded. A new installation must be bunded, and will also need an approved concrete base. Plastic is probably better than steel. I suspect the EA thing is more a formality rather than big issue. I think a new diesel tank installation needs to suck the fuel from the top of the tank with a pump rather than having a tap at the bootom like a heating oil tank, you need to find out how strict this is. You could maybe get a standby generator to justify buying in the red but this might be on the edge of legality. A nice old Lister might look good in the garden 😀. I do not know if an oil company will deliver to a bowser, and taking the bowser to a boatyard might or might not work, and as I said will negate the cost saving. Also you can't get red HVO this way.

Bowsers are expensive, that one is well over £1000 second hand, so not just a £few hundred. With this approach the OP will pay full marina price so looses the cost saving which was likely the driving factor. The marina might offer a small discount, but also might likely refuse to have anything to do with this. And he will have to park this ugly thing in his front garden. Any fuel tank installation is going to cost £1000, and more likely well over £2000. If this saves 20p/litre thats at least a 5000 litre payback. It takes quite serious boating to get through 1000 litres in a year so the payback time for this project is many many years.

I assume you mean the tank is on the land under a garden deck? The saving might not be huge, maybe 20p/litre, so it will takr a fair while to cover the cost of the tank. The tank must meet various regulations and this includes that it must not be close to water (I assume some boatyards have got an exempion of some sort???). You need to inform the environment agency but probably won't need planning permission (but you need to confirm this). The delivery tanker will have a long hose. The oil company is most likelly not able to deliver to a boat but as your tank is on land its a grey area, but you will have to sign a declaration saying why you are allowed to use red. I don't think you can pay propulsion duty directly and the oil supplier will not collect it for you so you can really only get the domestic fuel. Storing diesel for a long time is indeed a bad idea. and although minimum fuel order from most suppliers is 500l, if they decide to increase it to 1000 you will be stuffed 😀 All in all this is probably not a good idea.

Vegan chocolate is really very nice. I have always liked dark chocolate and thats pretty much what the vegan stuff is. I believe its only the finings that makes beer non vegan, there are other ways of making beer clear but the cloudy beers are getting very trendy and are rather good. Golden Lion had yet another Cloudwater beer on last light and I think that was a bit cloudy. £4.80 so not a session beer but good for the last pint. I regard my vegetarianism a bit like the boating rules that we are talking about. It's a concept and target but Im not going to get upset if I eat (or drink) a couple of cow molecules. And we do have a dog and run the boat on HVO 😀.

The really bad things are fishermen on any lock landing, and unattended boats on a lock landing on a river. Mooring on water taps is also pretty antisocial. Actually we did this at Todmorden last week as there was no other space. Fenders down in case anybody wanted to get water, and a hire boat did turn up. We helped them get alongside, lent them our hose, had a good chat, and they gave us a bar of vegan chocolate in return 😀

Colonising the pavement and sometimes blocking the road is still quite common in the backstreets of Hebden Bridge, and a couple of spots in Todmorden. 😀 and the most common colonisers of the towpath are a certain type of leisure boater who set up picnic tables and foding chairs outside their boat sometimes totally blocking the towpath. I am not too bothered about really bad stuff like mooring on a lock landing (which I have done many times), its fine if you arrive late and leave early and its not a busy canal. I think its the attitude that matters and quite often it does feel llike some boat dwellers are just putting two fingers up to other canal users.

Since we have relocated our "winter canal" from the K&A to the Rochdale I have very much changed my thinking about "short distance CC'ing. Canals need boats, amd especially they need good boaters. A good boater is anyone that adds a bit of life to te canals and does not antagonise the locals. The only real issue is massive overcrowding that prevent other boates from visiting the area, and even this is a relative sort of thing. Trying to encourage or even force boats to move a longer distance is not a good way to tackle congestion. CRT are a bit limited by the waterway act but with a bit of thought and luck there are probably better approaches. Some places are popular and will always be busy even without over stayers. Stone springs to mind. I am with Goliath on this, its ok if its difficult to find a mooring, or a long walk to the pub, its only a real problem if you go somewhere and there is just nowhere to moor. Visiting places that are popular and rammed, and then moving to the lonely widerness, is all part of the fun.

Nah, Ive just paid £4.80 for another one of the Cloudwater beers and it was very good, but still lots of stuff at £3.80.

I didn't mean hunting, just the speed jumping between the two adjacent "digitisation" states due to the low speed resolution and some sort of noise, not an issue but it just looks bad. Likewise Zeus only displays and logs temperature to a 1 degree resolution but it holds that temperature really well so its internal measurement must have more resolution (or averaging). I just don't like seeing digitisation steps 😀

Many many years I had the use of a minicomputer that had ROM chips based on real OTP fuses, and the myth is true, over time the blown fuses really do grow back and make some horrible bugs. The Zeus rpm does bounce between two adjacent values, just like yours, so if I have set a speed dependant duty cycle limit that bounces about too, no real problem but it looks a bit messy on the logged data.

You will note that in my plot a few posts back I was really lucky because current, duty cycle and temperature all fit very nicely on the sames Y axis.😀 I note that your speed resolution is low, just like the Zeus. It should be possible to do much better, especially if the controller has a counter/timer, but this will depend on both hardware and software detail. I do not yet know if Zeus is going to handle end of charge detection correctly as a low current could be due to a fully charged battery OR potentially due to the engine speed dropping and not taking account of low speed duty cycle reduction. I suspect our market is very small and most sailing boats will not see as much big speed changes as canal boats, but there is always mooring manouvers so it should be ok. I think I read that the Wakepeed can go into a zero current mode rather than a zero charge/float mode, dunno if the Zeus can do the same. A liitle job later this week is to get a proper ignition light working. I reckon a relay on the old ignition wire will do this. (output from diode trio activates a changeover relay and breaks the indicator light drive. Neater than a big resistor.)

NBTA are very good at getting publicity for their (one) side of the story, and it works. During all those little conversations that we have with the public at locks I have during previous campaigns been told "CRT are going to evict you all if you don't travel 100 miles every month" (or whatever). And evicting attractive young professional couples with children, or disabled old men 😀, is a much better story that the 1995 waterways act and a funding gap etc.

Its a real problem, most modern car radios are all about bluetooth sources and working hands free with the phone and streaming spotify from the phone. Actual radio reception is an afterthought. and I share yiur frustration about finding the on-off switch. Am currently listening to radio 4 streamed from the internet to the PC and sent via an optical cable to the bookshelf speakers, 😀 I was defeated by the radio but will try again in a couple of days.

Coming up the Rochdale through Newton Heath year before last we had eggs thrown. Somebody said the locals have gone soft, they used to throw bricks. Going towards Wallsall we got stuck on shopping trolleys under the bridge to the supermarket. Locals on the bridge started to tear up bread and throw the bits at us, a bit like feeding the ducks I suppose. At Gas street the chef in the hotel wrapped all the breakfast leftovers in tinfoil and threw them at us, some went in the cut but we caught most of it.

Skinners Union made some lovely carburetors, but those electric fuel pumps with the funny springy thing at the bottom did have a few problems 😀.

Speak to somebody who knows about these things. Some reads/grasses can be good, and might even make a home for a water vole. Others can take over the canal and so be really destructive.

Yes, the 1E (rotational frequency) component is actually a pitch. Many off the shelf 3 cylinder engines will have an out of balance flywheel and front pulley to turn half of this into a yaw as a best compromise. A proper (automotive) design would establish the sensitivity of the vehicle structure to the various force inputs and design the mounts and pitch/yaw split correctly. This is also sometimes done on big plastic boats but I don't know if it has been tried on a narrowboat, it would be an interesting project. Balance shafts use/waste a bit of power and would have limited gain on a three due to the various frequencies, they work a treat on the I4 (standard inline four cylinder engine) as this has one major harmonic (but do have to run at twice engine speed). Traddy boats have a rigidly mounted big heavy engine, I don't know how well a lighter modern regidly mounted engine would work but suspect boaters who choose not to have a "proper" engine aspire to near xero noise and vibration so mounts are the way to go. Putting the engine right at the back of the boat is probably good for noise but maybe not optimum for vibration.

In a modern car one or more mounts are often quite high up to give a "neutral axis" installation where the mounts are on the axis about which the engine wants to rotate. In boats the mounts are low down and not "designed" so more engine movement is likely. The three cylinder engine is quite difficult as it produces two harmonic series, one at the firing frequency (1.5 times rotation) and one at rotation frequency, so its difficult to steer clear of all the resonances.

I like a boat with an engine room, Jims boat doesn't even have an engine 'ole, its just got a big white thing stuck on the back 😀. Have helped a friend up the C&H in a 55 footer, I really would not fancy doing those locks in a 60 footer. Got a bit restless with the home moorer stuff so having a few days out, left the mooring at 9:30 yesterday morning and sitting in the Golden Lon with a pint in hand before 3, I reckon we could almost keep up with the hire boats.

Yes, we do have a liitle pang of sadness each time we turn let coming out of the Leigh branch, but even more as we pass the turn to the Rufford Arm. Still dream of a second "Northern Boat" but think two boats is just too much maintanance. Have invested in some premium bonds 😀 ...........and we do do the Manchester 18 twice every year 😀

Not sure about the wisdom of going down Wigan flight just to turn and go back up 😀. You would need to get right through Wgan (which is a few more locks) and get to at least Crooke Hall which is probably too far, but the L&L from just beyond Wigan to just outside of Liverpool is a very nice bit of canal.