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Newbie looking for advice on residential mooring for modern dutch houseboat


selena

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4 hours ago, dmr said:

There is currently a lot of interest in pontoon houses so I reckon before long some suitable marinas will have to spring up else there will be loads of very frustrated pontoon boat owners.

 

 

 

Well the blindingly obvious place to park tens of thousands of these non-navigable floating homes is in the hundreds of redundant gravel pits all over the south of England currently being used only for fishing. 

 

RMC, Lafarge or whatever they are called this week who dig them, could really clean up in my opinion.

 

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55 minutes ago, Tumshie said:

I'm thinking the toilet is the least of my worries.... how do you heat it, I can't find anything on the website about insulation or heating. I assume if you can have a sewerage tank you can have a water tank but it doesn't mention electric hook up. I wonder what the life expectancy of the pod home is and what it would need in the way of maintenance. They look lovely but I've yet to see one that doesn't have a kitchen the size of a postage stamp. 

 

@selena   When you talked to the sales people at Crick did they explain any of these things, because the pods you see on the website look lovely but not very practical when you want to live in them full time. I know you like the pod but if you look at boats you can get an awful lot more boat for your £45 grand. 

 

 

 

56 minutes ago, Tumshie said:

I'm thinking the toilet is the least of my worries.... how do you heat it, I can't find anything on the website about insulation or heating. I assume if you can have a sewerage tank you can have a water tank but it doesn't mention electric hook up. I wonder what the life expectancy of the pod home is and what it would need in the way of maintenance. They look lovely but I've yet to see one that doesn't have a kitchen the size of a postage stamp. 

 

@selena   When you talked to the sales people at Crick did they explain any of these things, because the pods you see on the website look lovely but not very practical when you want to live in them full time. I know you like the pod but if you look at boats you can get an awful lot more boat for your £45 grand. 

 

 

Bugger me, surely not £45k for that ???? this is a newfangled trendy companies ripping off aspirational boat dwellers, 45k  would get a really ok proper boat.

There are people on this forum who have lived on boats all their lives, we are amateur newbies at just ten years,  the OP needs to learn a lot from real boaters before spending that sort of money on a dodgy water-house.

 

......................Dave

 

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6 minutes ago, dmr said:

Bugger me, surely not £45k for that ????

 

Far canal, I was imagining they were being sold for about £10k, given the simplicity of construction and absence of any of the expensive bits normally found in a boat like engine and transmission. 

 

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For a houseboat that won't be moving I'd think that finding a mooring and loving the place before even looking at the craft may be wiser. Real boats are great because you can move them at will, and well, you know, it's fun, but the nicest floating box in the world will only be able to offer the life and facilities of the area surrounding its mooring. No changing the scenery, night time noise etc. When people look for houses they always seem to choose the area first and then look at what's on the market, the same should apply with these things. In the near future people will go to the marina village to see what has come on the market in a terrace of these, all sold through or by them. The marina won't be looking for people to roll up with nice new ones, they can rinse and repeat sales of existing ones. Eventually they will be replaced and the older pods moved on down the market. Lots of once lovely static caravans end up as building site sheds etc because of their dirt cheap price when old and tired. We all know that boats don't increase in value like houses but these pods may well depreciate far more rapidly than a narrowboat. 

 

One of the joys of being on a boat is the ability to explore places away from home. My boat's home mooring is in a far nicer area than where I live, it's in rural Cheshire, but it is all the surrounding routes and towns that appeal so the boat potters about. Any change of boat would therefore be governed by the length restriction on my mooring unless I also found a longer but not too long mooring, at the same price per foot in a similarly decent location within the same distance from home. That could be a tall order but affordable moorings in decent locations for a residential houseboat pod may be more like rocking horse manure.

 

Like dmr and Mike say these modern pods may look sleek but that allows for a simple and cheap manufacturing process I'd expect. The price tag does seem way ott for a design (floating box with nice interior decor) that a lot of people on here who would never claim to be boatbuilders could have a competent go at constructing something similar. No challenging steel fabrication or elegant lines, no employing methods and designs developed over a couple of centuries, no easy way of moving. This is just a small studio flat that would be fun floating on a pond in a property's grounds but as a home relying on marinas and network moorings could be a nightmare. I wouldn't want to live on a caravan site and I wouldn't want to live in a floating pod either due to their entire reliance on  the mercy of the site/marina owners.

 

As someone who uses a boat, and echoing what someone said earlier, I too am concerned about the consequences of growing numbers of these ending up stuck in the navigation due to rising costs or fallouts with marinas. One of the forum members posted a picture on their blog passing the houseboat box in Manchester mentioned before and it  quite simply appears to be a major obstruction. As drivers we wouldn't want static caravans ending up blocking rural lanes but I can imagine these houseboat pods could become a major liability for some owners in the future and end up doing the same on the canals .

 

Ideal for park owners to buy and rent out by the week for lake holidays. Far from ideal as a home.

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31 minutes ago, BilgePump said:

Ideal for park owners to buy and rent out by the week for lake holidays. Far from ideal as a home.

 

As I mentioned earlier, gravel pits seem the obvious place for these things, not the canals. 

 

The really BIG problem with them is sewage. The type of person likely to buy one is unlikely to be charmed by the idea of lugging cassettes to an elsan, so it had to be pump-out by a visiting pump-out barge, or a permanent pump-out to land connection like a lot of the Thames flat-afloats have.

 

 

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12 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

As I mentioned earlier, gravel pits seem the obvious place for these things, not the canals. 

 

The really BIG problem with them is sewage. The type of person likely to buy one is unlikely to be charmed by the idea of lugging cassettes to an elsan, so it had to be pump-out by a visiting pump-out barge, or a permanent pump-out to land connection like a lot of the Thames flat-afloats have.

 

 

and then the gravel pit freezes over in deep winter and houseboat and poo-barge ne'er the twain shall meet. Same downsides as boats but none of the upsides.

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10 hours ago, dmr said:

Bugger me, surely not £45k for that ????

That's just the very basic starting price, for the smallest of the pods, there are no prices on the site so I couldn't say what the larger pods go for. 

 

29 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

As I mentioned earlier, gravel pits seem the obvious place for these things, not the canals. 

 

The really BIG problem with them is sewage. The type of person likely to buy one is unlikely to be charmed by the idea of lugging cassettes to an elsan, so it had to be pump-out by a visiting pump-out barge, or a permanent pump-out to land connection like a lot of the Thames flat-afloats have.

The website doesn't actually advertise these as house boats they seem to be focusing on the marina owner using them as holiday lets. 

 

 

I agree wholeheartedly with BilgePump, this is a lovely idea, and we do need to have big and lovely ideas because they fuel the creativity needed to takes us to our goals and dreams, but the practical side of this needs to be looked at really long and hard, there is a lot potential here for some massive long term problems with these beasties. 

 

If you are new to living on the canal why not try living on a boat first, give it a year or two see what you really think of it, you can buy a nice boat for less than your pod, it will be much easier to sell the boat if 1) you don't like it or 2) you do like it and want a better boat or still really want the pod. 

 

 

ETA I'm sorry Selena, I'm usually the queen of enthusiastic cheering on of ideas but from a financial stand point this pontoon pod make very little sense at all. Sorry. 

 

 

Edited by Tumshie
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2 minutes ago, BilgePump said:

and then the gravel pit freezes over in deep winter and houseboat and poo-barge ne'er the twain shall meet. Same downsides as boats but none of the upsides.

 

Yes. 

 

I feel the typical buyer of a £45k caravan without wheels is highly likely to expect a bog like in a house and that 'just works', with no input from their good selves (other than the obvious ?).

 

So discovering the need for it to be emptied periodically is likely to come as a very unpleasant shock. 

 

 

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6 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

I feel the typical buyer of a £45k caravan without wheels

Unfortunately when you see the photos of the construction they do rather resemble a caravan. 

 

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3 minutes ago, Tumshie said:

Unfortunately when you see the photos of the construction they do rather resemble a caravan. 

 

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Ah yes, wood. The material God meant us to build boats from.

 

I wonder how it will last.....

 

 

 

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25 minutes ago, Tumshie said:

ETA I'm sorry Selena, I'm usually the queen of enthusiastic cheering on of ideas but from a financial stand point this pontoon pod make very little sense at all. Sorry. 

 

This is only because it is an idea ahead of its time. Moored on a site geared up for whatever toilet arrangements it has, it will be great. The problem now is that these sites have yet to be developed.

 

We used to joke on here about marinas with no canal connection for boaters who never moved, but this product makes such an idea genuinely commercially viable in my opinion. 

 

 

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not just wood but loads of lovely softwood pine/spruce and some ply (or is it MDF?) The stuff of dreams when it comes to long lasting boats. Turn your back on maintenance for two seconds and you're in trouble. History has shown how long narrowboats can be expected to last if treated right but these things have no real known life expectancy, but a guess can be had. When they built the first mass produced GRP boats in the 60s they over engineered them because they didn't really know how long it would last. The same can't really be said for this concept. However, this isn't a boat at all is it. Take one or more pontoons, put a sleek caravan type shell on top, market as pod concept whatever.  Here's a radical idea combining it all, a trailerable caravan boat, you know maybe call them caraboat or caracruiser. Just don't get people's hopes up too much because yep, you'd have to cart your own porta-loo to the sanitary point

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4 minutes ago, BilgePump said:

not just wood but loads of lovely softwood pine/spruce and some ply (or is it MDF?) The stuff of dreams when it comes to long lasting boats.

 

to be fair the softwood might be tanalised or otherwise rot-proofed as used in modern house building.

 

Rotting roof timbers and floor joists seems only to be a thing in pre-1970s housing. Modern factory-rot-proofing methods seem to work well in a house environment. We shall see about in a boat (to use the term loosely).

 

 

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If we draw a comparison with the tiny-house building approach, with which it has a lot in common, (where the price for the pontoon floats can be seen as equalling the cost of a high quality trailer) the price for this example seems very high. No part of this box bit is intended to go near the water below so it isn't looking to be of 'boat' standards. If someone dropped a caravan in a coal barge we know which bit we'd think of as the boat.

 

It's as Mike says, the infrastructure just doesn't exist for these things yet. If there was a healthy availability of municipal and private lakes with affordable annual fees, cheap and easy ways to remove and relocate, slipways and cranes, then I can see the attraction of these to people who would want to live on water without moving on it. At the moment though the places where they make much sense must be very limited.

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5 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

This is only because it is an idea ahead of its time. Moored on a site geared up for whatever toilet arrangements it has, it will be great. The problem now is that these sites have yet to be developed.

Not in this country we don't. There are places in other countries where whole (modern) communities are set up on the water, but it's in places where they have huge lake like expanses of water, very calm and lots of room. But to be fair that company selling these are marketing them as holiday lets not housing. 

 

 

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8 minutes ago, David Mack said:

The thing is 3.5m wide and access is from the end. The OP is going to struggle to find an end-on mooring to accommodate that in the West Midlands!

So in old money that would make it 20x12 feet - I think. 

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11 minutes ago, David Mack said:

The thing is 3.5m wide and access is from the end. The OP is going to struggle to find an end-on mooring to accommodate that in the West Midlands!

We are just over 14 feet wide (4.3 metres) and access from the back or the side - its not a problem finding moorings it just takes up 2x narrowboat moorings side by side.

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4 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

We are just over 14 feet wide (4.3 metres) and access from the back or the side - its not a problem finding moorings it just takes up 2x narrowboat moorings side by side.

but you are not in the West Midlands which has mostly narrow canals.

 

...............Dave

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The blurb says these things are based on a Hotel Room, and that sums it up, somewhere to spend a couple of nights whilst you are out and about in the daytime. On a pretty lake these would make an ok holiday home.

 

The big danger is if these are marketed as cheap starter homes and a first rung on the housing ladder because they are not. They have all the disadvantages of renting, paying for a bit of land (water) and having no control over it, but worse they are a depreciating "asset", and looking at the construction are likely to depreciate significantly.

 

.............Dave

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