Storage

This weeks theme on the boat has been about storage.  When we go to France we are going to need to store more equipment and stores.

I am going to make some storage bins and seats for the rear deck.  This is the template for the side ones then once these are made I will bridge across the back.  So we will get lots of storage and a nice social area to enjoy the better weather abroad (well hopefully). I will probably make a demountable table as well.

Next it was under the stairs to the stern.  Having cut the floor board under the bow steps some time ago and doing some temperature checks it was noticeably cooler all the time than the room air. 

This is how it was before and we do use it for storage.

Now the floor has been removed we gain an extra 125mm depth and a cold surface being the base of the boat.  This space is ideal for tinned drinks, wine and beer.  Probably not cold enough to drink but certainly a saving on fridge running being cooler than room temperature. Anyway it cost nothing to do so why not?

And the final bit of storage.  Sort of :-)

This is a crate for our new crew member - Herbie. 11 weeks old now.

Seen here in his home crate

And not forgetting his big brother

Teddy (with a sore paw) and Herbie

Hopefully we won't need to crate him for too long.  Some people don't like the idea of crates, but our experience is that a dog makes it his own space, they don't see it as a cage like we do.  To them its a bed and a den.   Toys get taken in and out and if left open they will happily go in for a nap.  

A Bit Council House?

I have been up to quite a few things on the boat but nothing really blog worthy. I do have a lot to say about generators, batteries, alternators and charging but this is still a work in progress.

I have put the 12v toilet back in and fitted a better design non-return valve.

The 230v toilet was OK but had its issues, principally the amount of water used.  Since fitting this valve no backflow has been noticed.  The other issue I had with the 12v toilet was voltage drop on activation.  I have overcome this with a small sealed 12v battery in a cupboard very close to the toilet.

This was the original toilet swap blog.

It's a common joke in the UK that mounting a TV on the wall is a bit "Council House".  It just happens on the boat I decided it would be a good idea as it frees the surface of the unit.

Before

After

Much neater as all the wires are in the wall now.  The extra height is better, more comfortable viewing angle.  It was a bit low before.

Happy "Floatday"

Well, one year ago today Avalon was gently lowered into the water.  Where did that year go?

Launch Pics again

 Well we've had a great year of cruising the Gt. Ouse waterways and meeting an making new friends. We have clocked up 187 hours which equates to about 750 miles covered. We have learnt how to mostly keep control on her. We've had friends come to stay, tried most of the pubs and restaurants on the riverside, and most of all enjoyed it more than we can say.  I have still managed to find things to tinker with a couple of days a week.   

France Here We Come

OK not quite yet but we have the necessary qualifications to go.  Sorry to get you all excited.

Over the last month we have both been studying for the necessary qualifications we need to be in charge of our boat when we take it to France.

To be legal unless you are on a hire boat in which case you need no training, knowledge, experience what so ever! the master of the vessel needs to have a VHF radio licence, to know the CEVNI rules and demonstrate your competence to handle a boat, in our case over 10m, this is the ICC part.

We did the VHF first about 3 weeks ago on a day course.  This we both found very interesting, I especially liked the DSC part, but this is pretty useless on inland waterways accept for group calling or calling a known MMSI of another boat, a bit like a phone number.

Once we had our license I bought a fixed radio and a handheld.  Two are recommended for France.  We chose models form Standard Horizon.  The fixed set also has GPS which is a bit of an overkill for inland waterways but it was only a small amount more and it gives speed and heading information as well as the time. The handheld is a just simple VHF only set.

This is the main set. But ours is in black

Full details 

This is the handheld.

 

Full details

 

Once we had the VHF set it was then necessary to apply for Ship Radio License to get an MMSI number.  This was easily done online on the Offcom website and resulted in our own MMSI number 350974?? and our UK call sign 2GHQ6.  Part of this registration my personal details so the MMSI is tied to a user in case of emergency and I suppose misuse.  Once we are in Europe I will programme in a the ATIS

Then it was down to studying the CEVNI signs.  It's a bit like learning the highway code but for the river, except it’s not as well organised as it's (IMO) a bit of a dog’s dinner as it's compiled by bits from all over Europe.  As well as the signs there's also lots of different signs on various types of boat by day and night and differing in the type of vessels and what it’s doing.

This is the full CEVNI and here is a set of flash cards I compiled (with permission) from the initial work done by Bryan Griffin.  In the end the multiple choice paper was passed by both of us simply because we drilled ourselves with the cards for a good couple of weeks off and on.

Meet our new crew member MOB.

 

The practical part for the ICC Involved us taking our boat our with our examiner for the afternoon and demonstrating MOB (Man Over Board) recovery procedures and other boat handling and mooring skills as well as questions about river  craft, safety, emergency procedures.  Most of the handling was simply demonstrating what we do each time we take the boat out, but we did have to practise the MOB as we had never done this so  a good few ours were spent pirouetting around retrieving our very own MOB, yep a  buoy tied to a bucket.   The bucket acts as the simulated weight and sea anchor. Each time we practised this MOB it really got the adrenalin going.  Even though it was only a buoy and bucket it becomes so real.

Anyway, after that the instructor / examiner showing me my boat WOULD go backwards under control despite my insistence it wouldn’t and a final few questions he told us we had both passed.

I have also registered Avalon on the SSR and now sport the Reg. No.SSR1535623

I do have a massive blog to do on the very complex subject or Generators batteries and charging. I will get this done ASAP as I have learnt a lot with the help of Clive one of my blog readers.

Toilet Talk

It's a fact, when a group of boaters get together it's not long before the talk turns to one of several subjects and pretty much every time toilets will crop up.

Another topic is voltage drop, cable thickness, etc.  Well this bog blog post covers both.

It was my intention to have all essential services on the boat running on 12v.  These I figured were water pump, lights, central heating and toilet.  

Since being on the water we have had problems with the toilet back flowing into the bowl about 1 in 5 times this of course is more noticeable on "longer" visits.  Initially I thought it was the non return valve being faulty or damaged, but having serviced this and the macerator unit the problem still existed.  

As winter drew on I noticed that when the toilet flushed the lights would dim significantly on the initial start start of the flush cycle.  As the batteries are working harder this time of year the charge will drop to 80% overnight with the fridge freezer running.  It was noticeable that when I am on the boat alone the problem was less frequent as I don't bother with the fridge for a couple of days at a time which keeps the batteries up to 90+% overnight.  Also it eventually became apparent the problem was worse in the mornings where the batteries are at their lowest, so my thoughts turned to the performance of the macerator and in particular with all the clues the likely cause being voltage drop.

I tested the voltage after a good charge. At the main 12v distribution board 12.83v, which showed 12.37v at the toilet no load.  On start up the voltage dropped to 8.5v rising to 10.5v for the rest of the flush.  This was a water only test and of course would take less power to macerate than a "full" load.  This combined with the run being about 2/3 of the maximum recommended put the system under great strain.

Clearly this was less than ideal although I had used wire gauge theoretically ample to cope with the run distance and load.  My next idea was to run another wire of the same gauge which I did as a temporary.  This had very little effect, improving voltage by about .5v.  I then connected a well charged battery right next to the toilet with a cable run of the same gauge but only about 600mm long.  This proved highly successful with over to 12v being delivered right from the start of the cycle.

I was faced with 2 options, run a massive pair of cables to the toilet which would cause problems because I didn't have room for them without some major carpentry or abandon my original remit and use 230v for the toilet.  The latter choice won out.  OK, I know we are reliant on the inverter being on to flush the loo and if this went west we couldn't flush but in reality if the inverter packed up we still have the generator.  I have further made future emergency provision by using a standard 3pin plug and socket so I can if necessary connect a small inverter to the original 12v supply and simply plug it in to there.

The fitting of the new 230v toilet has necessitated some butchery of my original neat installation.

This is what it looked like from behind before, 3 nice neat holes through the wall.

This is what it looks like now. Power was easily available from the sockets that supply the AV equipment.

Not quite so neat but effective

And with the new toilet all fitted.  No sight of the hole now.

Technical details

Initial tests are encouraging!  Certainly the flush is much more powerful.  The flush is now by a button on the side of the toilet which is not what I expected from the details.  I still have the 12v toilet panel just visible at the top of the photo.  I'm going to see if this can be connected to the control in the toilet as its more convenient and I won't have to devise a cover for the panel & hole.

Once I'm happy with it all I will bolt it down securely although as it is it's pretty stable and usable.

More Ballast & Winterising

As we carry over 2000L of water in the bow tank the trim of the boat is affected between full and nearly empty.

In order to minimise this I decided to put some ballast in the water tank.  As my brother owns a stone worktop company Granite Unlimited he gets plenty of cut outs from the sinks and hobs.  The beauty of natural stone is it's free for me, very heavy 30mm is 90kg per Sq/m and its totally unaffected by water.

 This small amount is 750kg worth

Now it's in the water tank the leverage being right at the front of the boat has brought it down nicely.  It has displaced about 175L of water so the net effect on a full tank is about 500kg of extra weight and on an low tank nearer 750kg.  It's true we have lost some capacity but is not going to be a problem as I see it because we will simply have to fill up that bit sooner which in turn will mean a more frequent refreshment of new water. The stone is nearly 3000kg a cu/m whereas water is 1000kg

 In the water tank

Since being on the water we have filled no more than 4 times from taps along the river, and the tank was freshly painted when we launched.  So where has all this come from?

 New 5 micron filter on the left

The one removed after around 8000l

Hmm! makes you think.  We also have the 0.5 micron drinking water filter for next to pure drinking water.

While I had the tank empty I moved the stop cock to be right on the copper exit stub from the tank.  I feel a lot happier about that. It was close before but was in a plasticc pipe run.

All this was done mid week while on the boat myself.  We have a rule when we are both on the boat.  I mustn't do any work.  I did however slip a couple of winterising jobs past SWMBO.  I installed a frost stat.  It's actually the original CH controller that came with the Mikuni.  I opted to use the RF or remote version as we can move it around the boat depending on where we want to control the heat more fully, i.e. bedroom or lounge.

I have wired it in parallel so it will trigger if the temperature drops below 5c.  The remote unit which looks exactly the same requires 240v at the receiver end so won't trigger when the inverter is off.  This additional one is battery powered.

The other little job sneaked by was draining out enough water form the generator to top it up with antifreeze.  I never knew if it had any in as I acquired it used so to be sure I have put my own in.

The Nice Thing About Having A Boat Is:-

There is always something to do.  Always a problem to be solved, or a combining of my interests.

I arrived at the boat yesterday afternoon armed with necessary tools to sort out the grotty and dismal array of plants and mostly weeds on our mooring.  This is supposed to be done by the Environment agency who we rent from but there doesn't seem to be a schedule of maintenance but strangely there is a schedule of Direct Debits.  Anyway before I got on with the stuff I like I decided it was best to get this done and out of the way as the weather was reasonable and the forecast was poor.

 

About 2 hours saw the job done and all the dead nettles, thistles and sapling Elderberry trees were dispatched.  Hopefully this will allow some grass to grow.

I have been playing with  streaming CCTV for a while now and having bought a new Webcam decided I needed to run some new consealed wires to get the signal back to the laptop in the lounge and then out though the router to the interweb.  Knowing the limt for USB is 5m I saw an adaptor that extends USB over cat5e.  On my last visit to the boat I duly installed a length of cat5e cable in the bedroom ceiling down behind the wardrobes, under the bathroom cabinets and into the lounge drilling necessary holes as I went along all of which are out of general sight. All of this took several hours.

Once this was done I powered up the Webcam only to find for whatever reason that it would only send a 174 x 122 image not the 1280 x 1024 it was bought for.  A bit of digging on the canal forum as there are lots of very cleaver people there with a combined mass of knowledge on all subjects lead me to order a 15m powered USB cable.  Prior to installing the cable I tested it and all was good. 

How pleased was I that when I put the cat5e in the ceiling void I decided to put in an additional trace wire. The result was the new UBB cable was fitted in about 20 minutes.

The intention is to stream live video from the boat as we cruise along, or sometimes if we are just sat mooring.  This can be seen at the Vaughn site.  If you go over there you can become a follower and you will get an email when the camera goes live.  All of this is free and there's currently no adverts on the video feed.

Next up was to run some more cat5e (2 lots) so I can run the bedroom TV on an HDMI extender as this too has a 5m limit and get HD TV in the bedroom rather than just what comes down the coax feed.  While I had the carpet up to hide the cables I sorted out the creaky floor that has been anoying me on my seemingly evermore frequent visits to the loo at night.

This morning it was time to service the generator.  It has reached 2400 hours and the oil was looking decidedly black.  With the oil and filter changed and the diesel filter checked for water (none) and changed it was the turn of the impeller.  This as you can see was definitely in need of changing.

 

The fan belt was checked for wear and adjustment and both were found to be fine.

A while back I moved the Inverter to under the stairs See Here.  And having sorted out the charging so the charger works much harder it then got really hot which caused it to reduce its output so it remaind happy. Result back to square one after a while of running. See you solve one problem and another problem arises!  The only thing to do is to put some extraction fans in to dump the heat.  The easiest way to power these is from the inverters own fan power supply, that way they would only be on as required.  So this meant taking the inverter out again to gain access to the fan wiring.  I took no chances this time.  I photographed the wiring just to remind me not to wire it up wrong.

The fan on the Victron is 24v so I got 2 x 12v 5" fans and wired them in series, drilled 2 x 5" holes in the stair sides just next the the inverter, put in some wiring with an in line connector and hey presto it all worked.

 

I just need to get some nice covers for the outside of the stairs.

 

It's not too much of a problem as its very difficult to see them.  They are not in general sight.

The inverter now runs cold to the touch and is once again outputting maximum charge.