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Future of electric canal boats


IanD

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20 minutes ago, magnetman said:

All leisure will be banned eventually ;)

 

Once you start letting the 

I'm the world's number 1 fan of electric boats but I really don't think 2kwh will go far propelling a 50ft narrow boat. 

 

I have done some experiments with my 40x9ft canal boat and yes a 1kw pod motor will move it but you would want slightly more power on balance and obviously some people like to do more than an hour or two per day. 

 

It will be excellent when it all comes together and works, which it will. 

 

I'm sure these same discussions, optimism and pessimism were had during the transition from steam to diesel power. And probably the horses too. 

 

Silent boating (not all electric boats are silent) is definitely pleasant in a big way. 

 

I've been doing the math and I reckon for about ten grand I can fit a 4kw pod motor to the rudder, install a decent amount of lifepo4 battery and a couple of KW of solar.

 

Certain amount of DIY needed. 

 

That will give me a very effective -secondary- propulsion system which may over time become a feasible primary system.

 

However I reckon taking out the dinosaur oil unit is not sensible just yet.

 

I use 3 kw cruising but have enough solar to sort that problem out especially on very sunny days

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That's pretty good and that's on a 30 tonne 57x12 boat if I remember right. 

 

It is remarkable how much less KW you need with electric due to the torque curve situation but it is also remarkable how effective range anxiety is at making the boating less pleasant especially if you do boating without having any advance plans ie just get on with it and see how it goes. 

 

This is usually how I do boating and if sometimes results in rather long days the longest this year being 15 hours with two 20 minute stops. 

 

Having said that a fair amount was locks and it's when you have a lot of locks that electric will really shine through as the most incredibly sensible way to be doing it.  

 

 

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28 minutes ago, nb Innisfree said:

Bit optimistic on propulsion there, assuming 3hp to cruise slowly that would be 4kw so my figure of  2kwh for propulsion would give 30 mins cruising. 

3bhp is 2.24kW, so at this power 2kWh would give 54mins cruising...

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20 minutes ago, nb Innisfree said:

My latest post attempts to correct that. 

You are out from mu experience its 3 KW and thats a widebeam I think its a lot less for a narrowboat an so does NB Shine

2 minutes ago, magnetman said:

That's pretty good and that's on a 30 tonne 57x12 boat if I remember right. 

 

It is remarkable how much less KW you need with electric due to the torque curve situation but it is also remarkable how effective range anxiety is at making the boating less pleasant especially if you do boating without having any advance plans ie just get on with it and see how it goes. 

 

This is usually how I do boating and if sometimes results in rather long days the longest this year being 15 hours with two 20 minute stops. 

 

Having said that a fair amount was locks and it's when you have a lot of locks that electric will really shine through as the most incredibly sensible way to be doing it.  

 

 

I have gone up and down Tinsley flight and used hardly any battery power, however the last time I was on batteries all the way up and most of the way down as it was the washout that was August bank holiday!!

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25 minutes ago, nb Innisfree said:

124 kwh for 4hrs cruise daily + domestic consumption would last 1 week. (70+ hrs charge from a 3 pin. 

124kWh would take 41h to charge at 3kW ignoring charging losses (i.e. lithium not lead-acid), say 45 hours allowing for this. Still almost days, but better then three...

 

(which means to be practical either a smaller battery bank, charging more often, or faster chargers)

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16 minutes ago, magnetman said:

That's pretty good and that's on a 30 tonne 57x12 boat if I remember right. 

 

It is remarkable how much less KW you need with electric due to the torque curve situation but it is also remarkable how effective range anxiety is at making the boating less pleasant especially if you do boating without having any advance plans ie just get on with it and see how it goes. 

 

This is usually how I do boating and if sometimes results in rather long days the longest this year being 15 hours with two 20 minute stops. 

 

Having said that a fair amount was locks and it's when you have a lot of locks that electric will really shine through as the most incredibly sensible way to be doing it.  

 

 

You really don't need much power to drive a narrowboat (or even a wideboat) at canal speeds -- nothing to do with the torque of electric motors, it's the same with a diesel, a prop hardly needs any torque (or power) when cruising -- 3kW/4bhp at 1200rpm (typical for a cruising Beta 43?) is 24nm, about 20% of maximum engine output at these revs.

 

The other big advantage with electric is power and energy consumed drops far more quickly at lower revs (zero in a lock) than a diesel which still consumes fuel at idle, so for a day's boating the average power will be less than 3kW, depending on time spent going past moored boats (maybe 1kW?) and in locks (0kW) -- average over a day is probably well under 2kW. Or much less still going over the HNC ?

 

OTOH any trip upstream on a river will absolutely hammer the batteries, maybe 10kW is needed normally, maybe 20kW against a strong current -- this is one big issue for people who need to do this.

Edited by IanD
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That last bit is why I would be keeping the diesel engine and building a small pod motor into the rudder for slow speed manueouvering. 

 

Slight disagreement about torque curve not being relevant because the simple fact is when boating on canals there is quite a lot of getting boat up to speed for example after locks. 

 

Diesels are not ideal for this. A well propped electric motor is ideal for this. 

 

It seems quite popular on buses to use electric to take up the initial load of acceleration followed by clutching in the diesel power unit. 

 

Canal boats are small but it's definitely a good strategy to do a similar thing. You could turn the diesel engine off five minutes before arriving at a lock and back on 5 minutes after leaving. But I would not personally want the agro of having both power units on the same driveline. I think a folding prop could prove useful for the electric pod, and learn to approach locks slowly and use strapping lines rather than waste power with reversing. 

 

All the time with the knowledge that the diesel engine is there on the button as and when needed. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by magnetman
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1 hour ago, IanD said:

Any other relevant ideas?

It;s a waste of time if you are simply going to dismiss stuff as irrelevant even were they were in fact entirely so.

 

So I won't bother. 

 

Particularly if you are going to further drop in silly comments and when somebody responds you start moaning because somebody has taken your thread 'off topic'

 

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5 hours ago, peterboat said:

It might be ok for some diesels,, but Bio diesel and modern high pressure common rail are an expensive mix  high pressure fuel pumps and injector problems are an issue now on normal diesel with bio added full bio is something I would not do.

But for boats it will be a different problem I used full bio diesel for 3 years and diesel bug is a serious problem which wasnt cured by additives so the efuel will I suspect have the same problems

 

Apparently the next generation of Formula One engines are going to run on efuel as they try to make F1 csrbon neutral.

 

5 hours ago, IanD said:

So ask yourself, if this is so brilliant and easy, why hasn't the world already adopted it on a massive scale?

 

It's because apart from finding the (huge) space needed to grow the algae there is a huge investment needed in both plant and energy to convert this to biofuel -- it all looks fine in the lab, but would need truly massive new industrial "refineries" building (at a big monetary and energy cost, and they have to go somewhere the NIMBYs don't mind) to do the processing.

 

And nobody -- businesses or governments -- wants to do this because it is rightly seen as only a stopgap solution to renewables, so the expensive refineries would become obsolete long before they've paid for themselves. The people who want to keep their diesel vehicles to avoid replacing them are not the ones who would have to pay for building a  huge biofuel industry.

 

Exactly the same applies to many of the other ideas people put forward -- very little uses any fundamentally new technology, it's almost all stuff that's been possible for many years, so why isn't it being widely adopted?

 

It's because either it doesn't make technological/emissions sense when the big picture is considered (where *does* all that hydrogen or biofuel come from?), or it just doesn't make any business sense when it has to compete against cheap (and getting cheaper by the year) renewable energy from solar/windfarms and batteries, or both.

 

If you want to see where things are going, look at where all the investment in the energy business is going, because this goes into things that will work economically and deliver reduced emissions. And it's almost all going into solar/wind power (with some hydro/tidal/wave where appropriate) and batteries/electric motors, for both transport and everything else.

 

[please don't restart the argument about what happens when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, everyone knows that either backup generation or mass energy storage or nuclear is needed, but the entire world is assuming that this problem will be solved and again throwing billions at making this happen]

 

This isn't a hippy green treehugger viewpoint, it's one being backed by large parts of the world economy -- and resisted by the fossil fuel industry (via lobbying and promoting some of the "alternatives" being mentioned here) because they can see the end of their industry that has made so much money for them over the years. Nothing wrong with making money, but their way of doing it is obsolete.

 

You don't think the oil companies would invest to try and save their future?

Edited by cuthound
Phat phingers
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27 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

Apparently the next generation of Formula One engines are going to run on fuel as thry try to make F1 csrbon neutral.

 

 

You don't think the oil companies would invest to try and save their future?

Formula 1 has the same problem airliners do, to work at all they need to store a huge amount of energy with the minimum weight. Difficult to see why this matters to narrowboats, in fact it's not impossible that Formula 1 will disappear and be replaced by an uprated Formula E. Not what petrolheads want to hear, but it'll be increasingly difficult to defend cars screaming round a track at 2mpg (or whatever) in the future, driven by a technology with nothing in common with new road cars...

 

Yes they might, but only if they think they can make money out of it. And I'm not sure encouraging the oil companies to do things which sustain their business model but still contribute to global warming (because they're better than fossil fuels, but still not as good as renewables) is really a sensible thing to do, given the rate that atmospheric CO2 is still going up at...

Edited by IanD
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11 minutes ago, IanD said:

Not what petrolheads want to hear, but it'll be increasingly difficult to defend cars screaming round a track at 2mpg (or whatever) in the future...

 

Are they going to stop traction engines having the odd day out, or steam locos keeping that nostalgic love of steam and engineering alive. It's only the mass use of fossils that cause a problem. Can't see that F1 would be chopped. The complete ban of fossil fuels is not necessary. 

 

 

Edited by Higgs
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26 minutes ago, The Happy Nomad said:

It;s a waste of time if you are simply going to dismiss stuff as irrelevant even were they were in fact entirely so.

 

So I won't bother. 

 

Particularly if you are going to further drop in silly comments and when somebody responds you start moaning because somebody has taken your thread 'off topic'

 

Fine by me ?

 

My "moaning" is simply to try and stop this degenerating into the usual political/philosophical/name-calling arguments and maybe -- just maybe -- see if we on this forum can come up with some genuinely useful ideas to help advance and secure the future of narrowboats on the UK canal system, which might even help prod the relevant bodies (CART and the government) to do something helpful to the canals, not against them. Because there are a lot of people on here who know a lot about the canals and genuinely love them, and might be able to make a useful contribution.

 

And I know it's not my job to officially moderate anything, but I'd much rather something positive came out of this than seeing it spiral into irrelevancy and bile. Wouldn't you?

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13 minutes ago, Higgs said:

 

Are they going to stop traction engines having the odd day out, or steam locos keeping that nostalgic love of steam and engineering alive. It's only the mass use of fossils that cause a problem. Can't see that F1 would be chopped. 

 

 

Traction engines and steam locos is the same case as traditional/historical boats, exceptions are and will be made for historical reasons. New-build narrowboats don't have that excuse, any more than new cars do.

 

You're missing the point of F1 -- it's financed for and the engineering is provided by motor (and other) companies who see it as a technical demonstration of how great they are, and the positive vibes from it promotes their image with the public. They certainly don't do it because they want to watch it, they do it because it's great advertising.

 

This is already starting to crumble as it becomes less relevant to road cars (almost all the new investment is going into electric car development) and is seen as climate-change-unfriendly -- why else do you think Honda has just pulled out of Formula 1? They won't be the last...

 

"Honda said the decision had been made because the automobile industry was going through a "once-in-one-hundred-years period of great transformation""

Edited by IanD
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3 minutes ago, IanD said:

Fine by me ?

 

My "moaning" is simply to try and stop this degenerating into the usual political/philosophical/name-calling arguments and maybe -- just maybe -- see if we on this forum can come up with some genuinely useful ideas to help advance and secure the future of narrowboats on the UK canal system, which might even help prod the relevant bodies (CART and the government) to do something helpful to the canals, not against them. Because there are a lot of people on here who know a lot about the canals and genuinely love them, and might be able to make a useful contribution.

 

And I know it's not my job to officially moderate anything, but I'd much rather something positive came out of this than seeing it spiral into irrelevancy and bile. Wouldn't you?

Then why make a provocative comment?

 

You asked a question, and I quote,

 

"So it all comes down to the recharging -- how, where, how many, capacity, who pays for it?"

 

it was answered it with a suggestion, another poster agreed with it.

 

If you felt you already knew the answer to the question and that any other suggestion was not relevant, why ask it in the ruddy first place?

 

 

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9 minutes ago, IanD said:

Traction engines and steam locos is the same case as traditional/historical boats, exceptions are and will be made for historical reasons. New-build narrowboats don't have that excuse, any more than new cars do.

 

You're missing the point of F1 -- it's financed for and the engineering is provided by motor (and other) companies who see it as a technical demonstration of how great they are, and the positive vibes from it promote their image with the public. They certainly don't do it because they want to watch it, they do it because it's great advertising.

 

This is already starting to crumble as it becomes less relevant to road cars (almost all the new investment is going onto electric car development) and is seen as climate-change-unfriendly -- why else do you think Honda has just pulled out of Formula 1? They won't be the last...

 

Well, I didn't mention new builds, but FI is not far off the attachment people have to the older technologies. TV rights pay as well as the engineering companies, probably more. 

 

As I say, fossil fuels do not need to be totally banned. The Earth can deal very easily with the modest use of those fuels. 

 

 

Edited by Higgs
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Just now, The Happy Nomad said:

Then why make a provocative comment?

 

You asked a question, and I quote,

 

"So it all comes down to the recharging -- how, where, how many, capacity, who pays for it?"

 

it was answered it with a suggestion, another poster agreed with it.

 

If you felt you already knew the answer to the question and that any other suggestion was not relevant, why ask it in the ruddy first place?

 

 

Can you point out what I said that you're objecting to?

 

People have put forward statements on things like "it'll all have be paid for by putting license fees up" and I gave some reasons why -- in my opinion -- this wasn't the case, this is called having a debate based on facts and opinions. People are free to come back and argue the opposing point of view, that's to be welcomed, it's what debates are about. Then I can come back and make my points, then tey can come back and make theirs.

 

The only things I've been trying to stop are ones which veer off into what is basically politics or arguments about why renewables won't work -- the first just leads to endless rows from immovable points of view, and we have to assume that the second one isn't true (and will be solved elsewhere anyway) or we might as well write the planet off right now.

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10 minutes ago, Higgs said:

 

Well, I didn't mention new builds, but FI is not far off the attachment people have to the older technologies. TV rights pay as well as the engineering companies, probably more. 

 

As I say, fossil fuels do not need to be totally banned. The earth can deal very easily with the modest use of those fuels. 

 

 

I don't expect that the man with the 130m megayacht which takes 20 road tankers to fill up will have any problems getting hold of diesel in the near future. 

 

Whether consuming 100,000 times more than your average human is "modest" is obviously a tricky question. 

 

 

Edited by magnetman
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7 minutes ago, Higgs said:

 

Well, I didn't mention new builds, but FI is not far off the attachment people have to the older technologies. TV rights pay as well as the engineering companies, probably more. 

 

As I say, fossil fuels do not need to be totally banned. The Earth can deal very easily with the modest use of those fuels. 

 

 

True, and I never said they should be banned, or that F1 should be. TV can have all the rights it wants but they don't build the cars and engines, companies like Mercedes and Honda do. They used to do it so they could claim that their technology was the most advanced and that this helped them make better road cars, you can find tons of adverts showing this -- even if it wasn't really true, people wanted to believe it.

 

But once road cars move inexorably towards being electric it becomes impossible for these claims to stand up any more, and this is what will stop F1 not protests from treehuggers or being banned -- the companies spending hundreds of millions on the technology to advance their public image simply won't think it's worth it any more.

 

Maybe this just means F1 will shrink and/or change, what's certain is that it will have to become *much* cheaper to run.

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4 minutes ago, IanD said:

Can you point out what I said that you're objecting to?

I would have thought it was obvious?

 

If it isn't then fair enough.

 

 

You bat on......

 

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1 minute ago, IanD said:

Nope, you said I did it, it's your job to point it out ?

Oh poop, fell for the bait again. Will I never learn?

 

Blocked now so I won't be tempted again. Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

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9 minutes ago, magnetman said:

I don't expect that the man with the 130m megayacht which takes 20 road tankers to fill up will have any problems getting hold of diesel in the near future. 

 

Whether consuming 100,000 times more than your average human is "modest" is obviously a tricky question. 

 

 

I don't think the maritime use of fuels would be a problem to the planet. It's the massive use by millions of vehicles, industry and the cutting down of rain forests. 

 

 

Edited by Higgs
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1 minute ago, IanD said:

Oh poop, fell for the bait again. Will I never learn?

 

Blocked now so I won't be tempted again. Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Hurrah..............

 

 

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11 minutes ago, Higgs said:

 

I don't think the maritime use of fuels would be a problem to the planet. It's the massive use by million of vehicles, industry and cutting down of rain forests. 

 

 

By co incidence I was down on the beach at today watching the ships holding and waiting for the tide.

 

I was struck by how much filth they appeared to be belching from their funnels. Low volume wise yes they won't be as bad as many other sources but it was striking how much smoke and particulate matter they were spewing into a lovely clear blue sky.

 

And that was while they were stationary or rather holding their position, underway I bet they are a lot worse. They were obviously older vessels and I'm guessing newer ones are cleaner but are they??

Edited by The Happy Nomad
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