Mike the Boilerman

No I meant the Tesla S that peterboat is always prattling on about...

And £60k to buy it in the first place.....

Worcester have just unveiled a prototype 100% hydrogen boiler, so my not be quite that far away.

I was about to make this point myself. The home heating demand on the National Grid once we switch over to leccy heating I think might dwarf the demand from electric cars. Typical home has gas heating rated at about 20kW. Probably only 25% of this is being used during mild winter (i.e. most of the winter) but that is still 120kWhrs a day. However, the leccy technology likely to be installed to replace gas boilers is heat pumps. Heat pumps use leccy to harvest heat energy from the outside air so achieve a typical efficiency of 300%. So a het pump delivering say 12kW of heating into a house will be drawing 4kW of leccy, ALL THE TIME during cold snaps. The other technology in the running is hydrogen. The heating industry press can't make up its mind. We see adjacent articles in the various comics, one stating with total certainty that hydrogen gas boilers are the future, and the other saying heat pumps are the future. Bottom line is both have major problems in implementation.

I have one made out of a Kelvin engine, some on here say!

A 'friend', you say.....

Sorry but even your Clockbatdrill car has a carbon footprint to manufacture it. Here is a truly zero-carbon car, the only one designed and made so far in the history of mankind: . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I'm with Dave on this. Stuff the performance, looks are paramount and trump everything! 'Windows' on a boat look ridiculous in my personal opinion, portholes look the part. https://www.midlandchandlers.co.uk/products/porthole-ph5-11-9-16-14-1-2-11-brass-cp-014

I can't decide if you actually mean that or are just being silly!

But this illustrates my point. Knowledge is available to be picked up. You heard about the forum, joined it, read it, asked questions. The boaters you mention probably did encounter the forum at some point in their lives but didn't have any interest, didn't read it, didn't join it. Have probably never googled for anything boaty in their lives or this forum would have been returned in the results. Some people soak up available knowledge like a sponge, others simply don't.

There are plenty who have been out and about on the cut for years and learned nothing, as your question illustrates.

Brass portholes seem the obvious choice to me.

Never seen it move.

No I've not seen it, but my calculations prove it might or might not be there....

Seen what?

I can't for the life of me work out why everyone with a steel pump-out tank does not get inside it every three or four years and inspect it carefully, and re-black the inside as necessary.

Yes, it is.

I know of someone who bought a brand new electric car and on their first trip to cornwall got stranded, as the charge point they were relying on to get back was broken, and there were no others within their remaining range. The wife found the whole saga so stressful she refused to travel in it again. He had to sell it and get a proper car. Lost a packet on it.

Are you alleginging it is one of those "Schrodinger boats"? A Schrodinger Boat is a boat that is always there when you look at it, but the instant you look away, it goes off cruising. Then when you look back again, you find it returned from it's cruise to the exact same place, facing the same way, the last possible instant before you looked back.

It certainly looks to me like waterline corrosion. I note your son has pulled out but I'm adding a further comment for anyone in the future reading this thread. No-one so far seems to agree with me but to me, this looks as though the boat was once a liveaboard which received no maintenance for 25 years. Long term liveaboards tend to carry a couple of tonnes of personal possessions which lowers the boat in the water by a couple of inches. An old liveaboard emptied of all the junk and generally smartened up for sale, consequently rises out of the water but the old waterline corrosion line often remains visible after blacking. I think this is what's happened here.

The obvious place to fit a new plastic suitably-sized water tank would be under the bed, where the black water tank is being removed from. This assumes the OP sticks with her plan to use a composting bog. The viability of a composting toilet on a narrow beam boat depends largely on whether and where the boat will be permanently moored. Storing the containers of poo for three to six months appears to be necessary while the composting process completes, and finding somewhere to keep the containers on board both outside and where they will not be in the way when cruising the boat is not easy, so most composting users store in on the land. To do this, obviously you have to have some land! Although users often point out that composting toilets does not smell at all, the same does not apply (I suspect) to the composting buckets while they are maturing, so they need to be stored outside. Consequently the OP should not take the decision to switch to a composting toilet casually as the ramifications are large, and the decision about what sort of toilet to have impacts heavily on decisions about replacing water tanks, and how.

The buckets will be MUCH larger than the bead you mention, so storing them all for 6 months could be quite a problem I think. Where does one store all the wee then, with a composting bog?

I doubt any steam loco could levitate....

Never did, did it?

Steam still runs...