The photo shows the original River Class Leeds Liverpool 'Short' Boat Kennet, pictured at Skipton Waterway Festival. Kennet is owned and operated by the the Leeds & Liverpool Canal Society having recently been handed over by British Waterways from their Heritage Fleet.

 

'Aries' is a 50'x12' new build along the lines of a Short boat and mimics (in steel) the shape of the canvas covered cargo hold of the originals like Kennet (above).

 Aries has many traditional features but will be 'all mod con' and fitted as a liveaboard, even though I may never make her my permanent home.

Steelwork was by XR&D completed the end of October 2010, so I am now stuck into the mammoth task of fitting her out. Click HERE for photos & progress reports.

She will be gas-free with cooking by Dickinson diesel cookstove and electricity (induction hob and combination oven).

The engine is a Petter PJ2WM (slow revving with shed loads of torque) and the Markon generator is also on a Petter diesel (Mini Twin) engine (see below).

I am keen to experiment with a range of heating methods according to availability of fuels as well as minimising the waste heat dumped into the canal. Both the propulsion engine and the generator will divert their waste heat into multiple calorifiers before dumping any surplus into keel cooling tanks. One or more calorifiers, acting as simple heat exchangers, will in turn dump heat into the under floor heating tubes.

The calorifiers will also be warmed by a heat pump when she is moored up with a shore supply. I am convinced that much of the under floor heating control can be done using simple mixers and control valves rather than the high tech sophisticated mains equipment that is becoming the industry standard. The heat pump unit will be the exception but will only be used when shoreline mains is available.

The Dickinson stove will also contribute heat to the calorifiers and I shall experiment with running this on free fuels such as used vegetable and other waste oil when available. The option to run the generator on these fuels will also exist if they are available in sufficient quantity.

There will be an Evergreen multi-fuel stove to use when free wood is available and I also have a small Refleks Stove, for the fore cabin, that should run OK on waste oils.

Finally, I shall even install an Eberspacher for those occasions when shore line is not available and I just want programmable, thermostatically controlled heating without running the genny and without any effort from me. The Eberspacher of course has a built-in circulation pump that can be used independently of its boiler.

On the electrics side, apart from the good old British diesel powering the genny, most of the equipment will unfortunately be of foreign origin. While I would have preferred my traditional English boat to have British equipment, it just isn't available: even the British companies selling under their British name source the manufacturing from abroad.

It will be Victron for the Inverter/Charger, Victron and Sterling for the monitoring and control equipment (and supplementary charger).

There will be a large bank of domestic batteries so that moderate amounts of electric cooking won't always require the generator to be running. However, the genny will provide up to 7kw of power when needed and the Victron Unit will be capable of topping up with an additional 2.5kw for short periods.

I also have solar panels and a Rutland wind generator to reduce my dependence on the shoreline and/or generator.

In the galley, the Dickinson Pacific cookstove will provide water and space heating as well as hotplate and oven. Furthermore, it will do so without any electricity, although it can also benefit from fan assist when it needs to work hard. Designed for use on diesel fuel, I am sure that it will be capable of burning other oils or mixtures so I will be looking into that and perhaps carrying out some trials/experiments of my own.

When the weather discourages use of the stove, a two-ring induction hob and combination oven will be available in addition to the usual small appliances such as electric kettle, pop-up toaster, sandwich toaster and electric frying pan.

My only concession to lpg will be a portable barbecue: there are some things that just have to be done when the weather is right.

For more about Low Carbon heating on a liveaboard, click HERE.