Jess--

our highest windspeed today (Lincolnshire between Skegness & Boston) has been 82Mph but to be fair that is from a sensor at the top of a 40 foot antenna mast

No good for working inside a narrowboat though, I think they'd struggle with getting through a lot of boat doors let alone trying to get inside cupboards etc to reach pumps & pipework etc.

I am in Lincolnshire but my boat is in the midlands on the oxford canal which apart from the small section where the GU and the Oxford merge (Braunston - Napton Junction) is certainly not suitable for anything wider than 7 feet, yet as pictures and posts on here show the wider boats are turning up more often.

while you wouldn't put your 13 foot wide boat on a british canal there is a lot that do put them there, sometimes even a little wider, combine this with the fact that they are putting them in places that really weren't built for anything over 7 feet wide. just because the locks & bridges are 14 feet wide doesn't mean they were built for widebeams, more likely locks were built to allow a motor and butty to breast up and go through a lock together rather than individually and then string out between the locks and the bridges were built with 2 7 foot wide boats passing each other in opposite directions in mind.

That wouldn't happen to have been with Leisure Line canal cruises by any chance?

I noticed that Stenson / MCC boats were mentioned here's mine so people can get an idea of the underwater profile the rear swims end about 6 feet into the cabin and the front curves end about 3 feet into the cabin. it's a 45 foot boat but was originally planned as a 30 footer (we have the plans and a note on them saying "extend to 45 feet" the boat is lovely to handle and totally predictable although I do feel it would benefit from using a slightly larger prop. I will say that the longer swims & curves make a big difference to how much power the boat needs and it's maneuvering capability, we regularly travel with some friends who have their own 40 foot Clubline boat that has the same engine / gearbox / prop as our boat and they have to have their engine revs about 10% higher than ours to match speeds, also in places where our boat will spin round in one turn they will have to do a 3/5 point turn (with theirs being shorter you would assume it would be the opposite way round). edit : I see I'm being an idiot, this post was meant to be in the "what boat builder" thread, that'll teach me to have so many tabs open.

also worth bearing in mind that the high floor in the bow is also usually high because the water tank is below it, if you lower that floor you need to find somewhere else for your water tank. most boats have between 200 & 300 litres as a minimum size (imagine a tank 1 metre square and 20 to 30 cm high as the area needed for this)

Not done the Avon yet, so I was just going by how it appears from the above pictures and how I am used to canal / thames locks working.

it also looks to be a lock landing rather than a mooring space

on my boat it is set up so that the engine heats the calorifier using it's first coil and heating in the boat is done by an alde gas boiler (which also heats the calorifier using it's second coil) while cruising in cooler weather we turn the thermostat for the alde boiler up but don't light the boiler, this means that the alde is pushing water through the radiators and the calorifier but is not heating it. the calorifier acts as a heat exchanger and we get a toasty boat from engine heat but do suffer from slightly cooler hot water (still too hot to keep your hand under) admittedly this is not a proper way to do it but it heats a 45 foot boat quite effectively and in our case involved no messing around changing plumbing.

I think (from the pic) that the airgap is on the stove not the fan

I thought it was Gordon the Gopher

I seem to remember gaz being a butane / propane mix which means that you would be dealing with pressures higher than the usual calor / lpg pressure of around 120 - 150psi (depending on temperature). I have worked with filling lpg cylinders (not calor, our were either stainless at £2000 each or titanium at around £5000 each) and doing it involved a high pressure pump and venting gas in vapour form from the tank being filled with liquid, obviously this is incredibly dangerous (we used to reckon on losing around 100 litres in vapour during a refuel) and should only be done in a very tightly controlled environment

if you keep needing to use easy start to make the engine bleed itself then it points very strongly at a leak on your fuel lines allowing air in and diesel to drain back to the tank

no issue that I can think of if it was the other way around (panels but no batteries) you could do damage.