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BMC 1.5 miles per gallon - 134 mile journey


Amh300

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10 hours ago, TheBiscuits said:

Absolutely right.  45 foot boat, so we have had the gates closed and the paddles open before the boat has completely stopped.

IME the Perry Bar flight on the Thame Valley Canal is the best and quickest flight . 

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6 hours ago, cuthound said:

As others have said, depends on canal, boat, number of locks and your speed.

 

When I had my last shareboat some of the co-owners though the boat was suddenly using more fuel (it wasn't but the government had just started to impose a higher rate of tax on the percentage of fuel used for propulsion). I got tasked with minitoring fuel consumption, so I asked my co-owner to provide me with fuel used, hours run and locks & miles per trip.

 

The 58 foot boat with a BMC1.8 used between 1.4 and 2.2 litres per hour. The lowest was on heavily locked canals, where the boat spent more time on tickover and the highedt on the shallow  and lock free canal where most owners tried to go to fast for the depth of the canal.

The last time I checked our fuel consumption (after a 10 day cruise) we used 0.66 litres/hour ? (Lister SR2)

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On 03/08/2020 at 22:35, PhilR said:

As Tracy said, a typical narrowboat with built in tank will hold about 200 litres of fuel. That would be more than enough for your journey, Furthermore you will be passing several boatyards which sell diesel.

 

Personally, I would avoid taking extra fuel in 20 litre jerry cans. Filling fuel tanks from those often involves some spillage into the canal, or the bilge..

 

Phil

 

That is an often quoted arguement for not carrying fuel in Jerry cans, but it suggests that the person filling from a can is an unco-ordinated idiot. I always carried two  jerry cans of spare fuel, regularly filling my tanks from them and never spilt any fuel into the canal or inside the boat.  As long as you have a properly designed clip on spout, use a decent sized funnel and pour carefully it is almost impossible to spill any fuel anywhere. On the other hand I have had plenty of incidents where fuel was spilt into the canal by boatyards.

 

 

Edited by David Schweizer
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1 minute ago, David Schweizer said:

That is an often quoted arguement for not carrying fuel in Jerry cans, but it suggests that the person filling from a can is an unco-ordinated idiot. I always carried two  jerry cans of spare fuel and regularly filled my tanks from them and never sp[ilt any fuel into the canal or inside the boat.  As long as you have a properly designed clip on spout, use a decent sized funnel and pour carefully it is almost impossible to spill any fuel anywhere.

I always syphon mine in with a thin pipe, takes as long as a cup of coffee.

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4 minutes ago, David Schweizer said:

That is an often quoted arguement for not carrying fuel in Jerry cans, but it suggests that the person filling from a can is an unco-ordinated idiot. I always carried two  jerry cans of spare fuel, regularly filling my tanks from them and never spilt any fuel into the canal or inside the boat.  As long as you have a properly designed clip on spout, use a decent sized funnel and pour carefully it is almost impossible to spill any fuel anywhere. on the other hand I have had plenty of incidents where fuel was spilt into the canal by boatyards.

 

 

With a tank full of fuel lasting at least 2 weeks of daily cruising for 8 hrs a day, why did you feel the need to have Jerry cans of fuel?

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4 minutes ago, nicknorman said:

With a tank full of fuel lasting at least 2 weeks of daily cruising for 8 hrs a day, why did you feel the need to have Jerry cans of fuel?

Because I buy as much fuel as possible at Turners at a good price.

 

Or because I have sy pumped it out of the hire boat more behind in the dead of night, but I never suggested that.

 

 

 

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On 03/08/2020 at 15:18, Tracy D'arth said:

You misunderstand, canal planner will give you total trip time including doing all the locks, time run end to end. But the mileage over the ground will not allow time at locks, so 134 miles at 2mph is 67 hours  plus 107 locks at 20 minutes each is 35 hours.

Total time is 102 hours so fuel will be 130 to 150 litres. But why are you concerned about fuel?

???

Canalplan says total trip time (using default speeds and lock times) is 70 hours. That includes the time spent at locks. So at a typical average consumption of 1.4 litres per hour the trip will use 70 x 1.4 = 100 litres of diesel in round terms.

 

And if the OP's noviceness means he spends an extra 10 minutes passing through each of the 107 locks, his journey time will increase by 10 x 107 = 1070 minutes, or about 18 hours, which will consume an extra 18 x 1.4 = 25 litres. Except as most of the extra time spent at locks will be at idling speed, the actual additional consumption will be less than that.

 

As others have said, the boat's fuel tank should contain enough fuel for the whole  trip, so no need for jerrycans. And there are plenty of fuel suppliers, including fuel boats, along the route.

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10 hours ago, Tracy D'arth said:

Because I buy as much fuel as possible at Turners at a good price.

 

Or because I have sy pumped it out of the hire boat more behind in the dead of night, but I never suggested that.

 

Turner’s price on 22/7/20 was 64.9p. Fazeley Mill Marina price on 29/7/20 64p. I rather regretted filling right up at Turners and thus only needing 70 litres at FMM! It may only be 0.9p/ litre but I do live in Scotland.

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11 hours ago, nicknorman said:

With a tank full of fuel lasting at least 2 weeks of daily cruising for 8 hrs a day, why did you feel the need to have Jerry cans of fuel?

Several reasons. We did not moor in a marina and the two nearest to our mooring required us to go into the marina, and then waste a lot of time trying to find someone prepared to deliver very expensive fuel. We also found that some boatyards on line were extremely careless delivering fuel (which we were paying for), depositing quite a lot into the canal.  We prefered to use Fuel Boats whenever possible, and unless Jules had been past the mooring recently whilst we were there, we often had less than a full tank when setting out. 

 

P.S. I am half Scottish!

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8 hours ago, Flyboy said:

When planning I use lock miles per hour which gives a good approximation for hours needed.  Add the number of locks to the number of miles and divide by 3.

 

Yes I use that timing too. 20 minutes per mile and 20 minutes per lock. It works well, although I usually slightly better it, particularly if the locks are closely spaced.

 

WhenI i first started boating 47 years ago  I used 3 miles per hour and 10 minutes per lock. Just goes to show how much more traffic is on the canals these days.

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27 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

Yes I use that timing too. 20 minutes per mile and 20 minutes per lock. It works well, although I usually slightly better it, particularly if the locks are closely spaced.

 

WhenI i first started boating 47 years ago  I used 3 miles per hour and 10 minutes per lock. Just goes to show how much more traffic is on the canals these days.

It varies so much with where you are, the type of locks, and when you are travelling. We normally seem to do Farmer’s Bridge in about 1:35 ie 13 locks in 95 mins which is 7.3 minutes per lock. Hatton can be done at similar speed. But plenty of locks are much slower for various reasons, including the need to queue at isolated locks during the holiday season. It can take an hour or more to do 1 lock on a bad day.

 

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43 minutes ago, nicknorman said:

It varies so much with where you are, the type of locks, and when you are travelling. We normally seem to do Farmer’s Bridge in about 1:35 ie 13 locks in 95 mins which is 7.3 minutes per lock. Hatton can be done at similar speed. But plenty of locks are much slower for various reasons, including the need to queue at isolated locks during the holiday season. It can take an hour or more to do 1 lock on a bad day.

 

 

Very true, but it is only intended as a rough plannimg guide.

 

Indeed before Canalplan it was pretty much all that was available.

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3 hours ago, cuthound said:

Indeed before Canalplan it was pretty much all that was available.

 

I use Chris Clegg's Canal Time map for quick planning.  As it's double sided I have two mounted side by side so I can just glance at them.

 

Canal Time Map

Probably the best journey planning guide - the four diagrammatic maps show the whole system, with places 2, 6, 8 and 10 hours apart

Size A4, double sided

£4.00

 

https://www.canalbookshop.co.uk/other maps.html

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