Jen-in-Wellies

Do I hear the voice of bitter experience here? 😀

I have had the same situation on my boat. Started off with a pop up basin waste, which wasn't reliable. Replaced it with a traditional hole waste with plug and chain. Again, like your sink there wasn't a hole in the basin to bolt the other end of the chain to, so I just drilled a hole through the counter top behind the basin for the chain bolt. Simple. Reliable. Jen

CaRT will be appointing a Director of Magnet Fishing soon on £100k a year and a department and staff. Responsible for licencing, promotion and going around restocking bridge holes with shopping trolleys, bikes and Luftwaffe bombs. Jen

When on mains hook up the mains passes straight through the Victron unit. Aside from charging the batteries the victron does nothing, so no 1A draw on the batts. It only draws from the batts when away from the mains.

Alternatively, all the scrap iron in the cut will scrape the blacking off the baseplate anyway.

Yes, on mains it will be 230V and a lower current and that will be fine. I was just showing why it would be a bad idea to run them from the batteries via the inverter, which isn't your plan, so that is OK. Jen

The draw on the batteries from the electric rads via the inverter will be much worse, 600W/12V, not 230V so 50A per radiator not 2.6A. i would not use them for heating away from shore power, relying on batteries alone. Aside from that your proposed set up is similar to mine. The only down side is that heating a cold calorifier will suck all the heat from the stove till it is up to temperature. Makes heating a cold boat after a winter weekend away say, a time consuming task. If on a shore line, then keep the electric rads and immwrsion heater ticking over low to prevent the boat getting too cold. Jen Jen

What js your plan for heating after the refit? A stove with backboiler and gravity circulation is about the simplest and cheapest to run way of heating a boat and getting hot water and central heating. Is the stove knackered? If so, then replace with a similar one unless you have good reason to do otherwise

It would be easier to undo the nuts where the pipes connect in to the calorifier to the left of your arrowed cut marks. Same effect, but less work and reversible. If the stove is coming out, then the calorifier will be fine holding water and being heated by an alternative means with these pipes disconnected. Open and uncapped is fine. If the stove is going to be lit with a backboiler and no cooling system connected and filled, then it risks distorting and damaging the back boiler. Jen

Perhaps they should have to throw their catches back after landing them like regular anglers . CaRT should be responsible for restocking the canals with scrap, unexploded bombs, shopping carts etc. Also magnet fishers need to be more grumpy. Jen Jen

I used to have a bit of machinery to do just that. It had two 80W solar panels, mounted to a pole that was tilted by different amounts, depending on latitude and season. During the day a motor would drive the pole rotating a it certain number of degrees every fifteen minutes or so to track the sun over an angle of around 180 degrees. To track you need to average 15 degrees an hour. At night it would rotate back. This was ten years ago when solar panels were very expensive compared with now and having a specific piece of equipment to do this and extract that little bit of extra sunlight was worth doing. It was made by a Czech company I think, imported by a company in Wales, now long gone. These days I've not seen anyone doing automated tracking. The cost and complexity is high compared with just adding more cheap panels and angling them at a best guess. It had all the disadvantages mentioned by other posters. The wind load on it was enormous. It was mounted on a length of scaffold pole, bolted to the boat cabin rear bulkhead via some car exhaust clamps. It had to be dismantled before cruising. I tried once turning the boat around at the mooring in a slight breeze and it acted like a giant sail, making the boat almost impossible to handle. Later I took it out and mounted the panels flat to the roof. I added an extra 80W panel, which by this point cost a fraction of what I had paid for the first two, giving a similar total amount of power, but without having to dismantle the system to cruise. In the winter solar is rubbish anyway. Having the panels flat to the roof helps with collecting scattered light on the usual overcast days. Only on the rare bright clear days is angling the panels of any additional use. A picture from the dim and distant past below of the tracker mounted, showing just how big and unwieldy it was! Late afternoon, judging from its position. Jen

If the car has just been started, then the cold catalytic converter wouldn't be converting CO to CO2. Also the engine would be running fuel rich, so again more CO. Cataclysmic converters only work when they are up to temperature, which takes a while. Diesels seem to produce a lot less CO than petrol ones do. Apparently because they burn lean with excess air. Jen

One the right way up, one on its side, one upside down. Don't buy the lower two. Jen

I'd second that. I had already visited several builders and had face to face discussions. This not only lets you see their work and methods, but also lets you know if they are people you can work with and are sympathetic to what you are trying to get made. The drawings were only made after the final selection of a builder. With boats, especially shorter narrowboats, differences in a couple of inches in cabin length and width are important and can make the difference between an internal layout that works and one that doesn't. Detail design can only be done once a builder is selected and their standard internal cabin size is known. Jen

It is the usual trade off between money and your own time, plus I didn't know about them till later, so ended up reinventing the Tippy. Here it is. Made from aluminium sheet, riveted to aluminium angle, with some brass handles and hinges. A couple of bits of aluminium angle stand it off from the ground so the heat from the ash doesn't transmit through to the paint, wood, or whatever it is standing on. I really must give it a clean! Jen