Rhyddid - live the questions now

Rhyddid update

Well after the fabulous weather this weekend and the first drinks on the pontoon, hardy folks us boating types you know, I’ve made a bit more progress on the kitchen front. As the cooker has moved next to a cupboard this will mean the side of the cupboard will need insulating, so Saturday was clear the dining room to give me somewhere to work and get the cupboard out so I could make a frame of 1”x1” batten, glue thinsulate to the cupboard and then cover in fibre board. Next I needed to make bracket to take the end of the worktop, so one of shelves from the kitchen cupboards that I held on to got cut up and fixed to the top of the cupboard with an end panel to support it. It all feels fairly solid, just have to wait and see. By the time this had all been achieved, the toilet cassette emptied, the sun was shining and an impromptu gathering was forming on the pontoon, so a quick tidy up and armed with a particularly fine Argentinean red, I adjourned to the pontoon; well it doesn’t do to rush these jobs you know!

So Sunday dawned and after church more work on the kitchen was the order of the day, well morning at least. As I had moved the cooker I realised that the floor under the cooker would need some bracing, so moving the cooker (all 270kgs) to one side I used the slats from the window blinds to brace the floor. As I had the floor up, I took the opportunity to extend the bracing I had already put it place to the heavy use areas. All in all a pretty productive weekend and a bit of socialising to boot! Plans are afoot to buy a patio heater between a few of us so we can enjoy the social side a bit more.

Boater preoccupations

In the short time I have been living on a narrowboat, just over 15 months now, I have come to realise that boaters have 3 main preoccupations. Top of the list is toilets, next is usually the weather and finally batteries. The endless conversations boaters will have regarding cassette versus pump out are amazing and my neighbour throws a fly in ointment as they have a composting toilet, very new wave they are. The cold weather over the last few weeks has left us cassette people feeling very smug as we walk up the pontoon to empty our cassettes at the elsan point as the pump out people fret as the boats are frozen in and so they can’t get across to the pump out point and are left having to ration toilet use on the boat to night time only and using the marina facilities during daylight hours. How it makes up for the times of emptying a cassette on a hot Sunday afternoon at a ripe elsan point because you forgot that morning and you know it won’t last till the morning!

Now if you live on a boat you are a lot more aware of the weather, if you are moored on the river it goes up and down in level by inches overnight, leaving the unsuspecting boater waking up on the floor with a boat at a precarious angle and when it rains the flow goes up to a sometimes quite astonishing rate and if you haven’t moored securely, it is the weir for you. So you do become slightly fixated with weather forecasts and every boater has their favourite forecast and many hours can pass discussing the pros and cons of your chosen forecaster, who is always spot on!

The choice of batteries for your boat is something you can agonise for hours over and everyone you ask will have an opinion, the type of battery, the capacity of the bank, 12v or 24v the choices are endless and as the weather gets warmer, well that is what my preferred forecaster is telling me, batteries will replace weather as the second favourite preoccupation of boaters, but I don’t believe anything will usurp toilets as the all time favourite.

Finally an update

It has been way too long since I posted, but to be honest there just was not much to say. Progress on the fit out has been non-existent or if anything backwards. To start with the shower was clearly leaking so during the freeze a couple of weeks ago when I started using the showers in the marina and found I didn’t need to change my routine much, I took the plunge, or rather a hammer and chisel, and started removing the tiles. Not good, the shower has obviously been leaking from day one, the floor underneath the tray will need replacing and the bottom 30cm of the bulkheads round the shower cubicle will need to be cut out and replaced. Then having found that on a Sunday morning the person who I hoped would make a flue for the cooker and connect the diesel arrived with some drain pipe to make a template for the flue, after much twisting of 15 degree bends and measuring, there is no way I can achieve 50mm of clearance between the flue and the wall, necessary for boat safety, so the cooker needs to move. So last Saturday, Dave kindly arrived to help me swap the cooker and freezer. In best NLP practice of always looking for a positive out of potentially negative situations, I will gain more storage, an extra 300mm of worktop and it will look much better with the front of the cooker facing you as you enter the boat. I can also move the pumps for heating and hot water to a much better location than they were in. It will mean running the pipes from the cooker boiler under the floor, but that gives me an excuse to buy a battery circular saw to cut the floor. Yes I know I could probably borrow one, just put it down to being a male thing and retail therapy is always good for you.

I decided a few weeks ago that even though they are more money I would put in a 12v fridge and freezer. It just seemed daft to convert 12v to 240v to run the fridge and freezer. This meant I needed more DC circuits and less AC circuits, so this weekend I have removed the Traveline that was included with the engine as I really don’t need it and have put in regular consumer units. The energy solution AC change over unit has a high load output which is only available when the generator or shore feed is available and a low load output for battery only running. The only thing that really needs a decent load is the washing machine so I have put a 4way unit on the high load output and a 10way unit on the low side. More taking things out, but I end up with a much tidier and safer install and reusing the AC distribution panel for DC gives me 22 dc circuits, enough for anyone!

So I am hoping that I have finished undoing things and I can start making progress again, we will see.