Neil T

‘Down south’ in Uxbridge dry dock for a week in a friendly boatyard is £300.

Audit your consumption. Crucial. I use very little power and with 750 watts of flexible panels sikaflexed to the cabin roof I can walk over all of them, and get enough solar in the winter. All the less enthusiastic comments here fall away if you can get into your batteries more than you use in winter. Size of yr battery bank also a big factor in tiding you over a couple of horrible days. In the end it’s what you can spend. 400w of panel and 300AH lead acid batteries will get you by in summer possibly. 600AH deep cycle 2V cells (making up to 12V ) and 800w of panels / MPPT controller etc might mean you’re light fantastic all winter. (It’s always fascinating to learn what folk think is ‘normal’ power consumption.) It’s such a personal habit thing. I only run my fridge in summer. In Winter the keel plate cold box is more than sufficient. If I had to run the fridge in the dog days of winter I’d probably say none of the above is possible....

Fine thank you. Three speed extractor fan needs turning up to the middle setting rather than the lower one but so what? I did cassette for 5 years and now 18 months compost. Way to go.

I'm late to this party but I have recently put X3 250w photonic universe flexible polycrystalline panels stuck with sikaflex onto my dark blue roof. Don't know enough about the ins and outs but they are straightforwardly bloody fantastic running all my domestic systems with 12V fridge, computer charging, wifi, lots of lights etc. They're all biased to one side of a curved roof. Roof is too hot too walk on this last few weeks but still plenty of output. I'll paint the rest of my roof cream when I'm all finished (some more panels to do) to cool things down a bit, but I suspect that the differences between poly and mono are just not great on a moving narrowboat with all sorts of different angles etc. These panels are kind of stippled and textured and non slip walkable on in trainers. I'd simply say put on as many as you can afford and go. Frankly you'll spend a lot more on mono panels, feel good about that extra 10% of power.... and then lose it all by leaving a cushion on one, or mooring in the shade of a treebranch. Two small layman's points I have realised in the last few months. With solar going all the time the bigger the battery bank the better (without going insane..) If you've got lots of capacity then solar will always catch up eventually. Nothing tastes as good as a G & T with loads of solar powered ice....

Just a quick thanks to all you guys - I'm following up everything, and will for sure let you know what I come up with, although with the kids' summer holidays approaching it'll be the worst time of year for solar before I get there I suspect.. thanks again. Neil

Great, many thanks. In Uxbridge tomorrow so may act immediately.

In brief - I have 750w of solar panels and want to add another 500w for which I have the roof space. A Morning Star MPPT controller controls the charge into 500AH of 2V AGM cells providing 12V to the boat. Most of the time in summer my batteries are full and the controller is stopping further charge, even with the fridge and small freezer (Vitrifugo) on, loo fan going, lights, laptop etc. I wish to pour all of the excess into my hot water tank which the controller is capable of doing. At present the hot water comes from the heat exchanger of the BETA 43, or a 240V element. If I switch on the inverter (Mastervolt) and simply flick the 240V heater element switch I draw 267A from the batteries.......... theoretically I could do that for 20 minutes and then turn off and let the solar recharge the considerable deficit in the batteries but I'm worried that eventually I'll damage them - especially if my mind wanders in that 20 minutes and I forget to turn off the heater........ Does anybody know of a good (great even) boat electrician who could help me or install the relevant equipment , including replacing the element in the tank with a 12V one? London area most convenient for me although I would travel for the right electrician. Or should I get more batteries and just invert into the 240V element? Help. Thanks - all advice respectfully listened to. BTW just in case I get 'why on earth do you want all that power' questions I am progressing in small steps towards 1.5 KW of solar and as electric a boat as I can have.

MMnnn - before we descend into too much vitriol, without even the excuse of beer, I am the owner mentioned earlier who bought Jenny Rose off that nice mrsmelly. I went though this lock backwards on my maiden voyage from the Aire and Calder to Tamworth via the Trent / Nottingham etc. in what is still my 70ft Hudson. I know from practical personal experience therefore that it's doable even when you've only owned your first narrowboat for a couple of days. End of. But it is tight, and the gates will push hard against your stern, fenders need to be up. Probably not doable for shiny boaters more proud of their paintwork than their locking skills.

Compost. There are always slightly urgent questions from blocked and broken pump-out / tank / cassette filling types on every forum everywhere. Ever wondered why? Get a head that will last forever.

Don't think your're paranoid. I've had 3 run ins with CART in five years of both CCing and having a home mooring. Each case resulted in an apology from personnel at the highest level of complaint , the National Boating Co-ordinator etc. Each case began with the usual very heavy enforcement style letter. Each case ended with a fulsome apology, the most recent being ' I can only apologise for our mistake. We are looking at further improvements in our processes to avoid this happening again.' The reason given for the mistake was that data 'wasn’t properly completed in an internal work flow and so was not updated correctly on the main computer system.' Do I feel persecuted? Of course not. Do I think that I am dealing with an incompetent computer system operated by a strange group of disconnected people half of whom don't know what the other half is doing? That the data checkers of individuals on the towpath don't interface properly with the main computer? Absolutely. Once you are in the complaint process you enter a virtual world where automatic 'Thank you for you enquiry which is being dealt with' emails cross over with other people saying no, and yes, and maybe. Staff forward your email to someone else, and they then consider the forwarding to mean that the enquiry is 'dealt with.' Many of the staff are decent people in a partly dysfunctional organisation not that different to many other organisations. BUT what many of them still fail to understand, or don't care about, is that enforcement letters of the kind that they send out , when read on your boat which is your home, can feel extremely threatening. And cause endless distress. And accountability is a real issue. My own experience is that if you have the time and ability to make many phone-calls, a fast internet connection, can quickly photocopy and email documents, keep stringent records, particularly always keep CART emails however old they are, and be extremely polite fair and decent in the face of system incompetence then you stand a fighting chance. Unless of course you haven't been 'properly completed in an internal workflow.' In which case having not been 'updated correctly' you are not who you know yourself to be but someone from the past , and if you act in your responses to the 'We want you to know that your email has arrived safely' emails as if you are the person you know you are, then you will be told in no uncertain terms that in fact what happened in the past was not what actually happened to you but what it says on that internal workflow. Woe betide you if you have no proof to the contrary because you are already in it up to your neck and the water is rising.......................

Well spotted - that comes from the sale of the Beta along with a lot of batteries. It's the last bit of the jigsaw puzzle. However, here's a question...........given the annual mileage of a lot of London cc'ers (and this is the compliant ones) could you power a ton of batteries just with solar and do your 50 miles a year or whatever it is? ie how many electric miles would X2 weeks of solar give you............?

Definitely wouldn't blame the boatbuilders. I'm constantly surprised at the similarity of people's tastes, and also the way the house mentality of keeping a boat bland, so that it is easy to sell again, prevails. It's the customers driving the fitouts. Add a bit of austerity and reduction in boatbuilder numbers and same same same. My narrowboat becomes increasingly unsellable in this context. First because it's not a widebeam, and second.... Took the oven and eye level grill out when I realised the gas consumption. (Iron disc on the gas ring for toast. Solid fuel stove with an oven on top.) Chucked the 240V fridge, and the washing up machine. Built in a keel coldbox. + very small Vitrifrigo 12V fridge with separate compressor on the keel plate. Removed real but fake pidgeon box on roof to create the final bit of necessary space for 2 huge solar panels. Working on chucking the beta 43 for electric motor. Composting toilet. Bunk taken out and converted to cot for one year old. Painted ceilings off-white. Four large (Muji plastic) drawers cut into and recessed under outer half of double bed. (FanTAStic drawers these, I recommend.) In other words a boat designed to live in a marina with a mains cable constantly stuck up its fundament has not spent one night in a marina since I bought her and is now emphatically off-grid. Who on earth would want to buy that? (If I was selling which I aint.)

Be all of the above as it may it's quite clear by now that you can do a fair few miles, have a home mooring, and still fall foul of ever changing (hence 'mysterious') rules. And those rules are applied differently in different parts of the country by people not always fully conversant with them, or happy to rule their own roost in their own way. The airing of personal politics doesn't change that. Nor does vilifying people as tossers. The Cut's a fractious place these days. Oh hang on - no it isn't. The virtual cut is a fractious place.

I put in a single (3' wide ) crossbed with a fixed 4'6" along the back bulkhead of a middle cabin running from cabin side to corridor. There is then a 3/4" plywood infill across the corridor with a mattress infill to fit. So the bed is fixed and allowing walkthrough until the child is 4'6" tall and then the infill goes in for a full length adult sized berth. From then on you either step over it, crawl under it or walk around the outside to get access to shower/toilet and double aft cabin beyond. Saves a lot of room when not in use, and for the first four years or more.

Stirling Engine fan. Morso squirrel at the front with Stirling on top gets warm air about fifty foot, so through lounge, galley and the sleeping cabin beyond. Only at top whack though. Lovely sound to go to sleep to.