It was in early May when buying ‘Quintessence’ became serious. Adnan arranged a hull survey and for that Quintessence had to be taken out of the water. James his mate went along, after all he’s called the “Tall Bastard” and his opinion and word can be trusted! Always!
It’s the end of March and we just came back from a weekend up and down the country, marina after marina, looking for a boat. It was an interesting tour, not without surprises. There were boats we both actually liked, where even Natascha could see the potential. Then there were boats, well, we wondered, who had such bad taste in boat interior design?
Then came Henley, a 70 foot barge in Leicester. Adnan immediately was ‘she’s the one’, but there was a young couple, also from London, before us who decided to buy her. It wasn’t meant to be. Quintessence, after all?
Henley, the one and only. But not ours.
A few more boats we could consider. Or shall we say Adnan, would consider… Nat really liked the one with the green kitchen, though.
And then the ones we couldn’t consider, didn’t like or were simply ‘shambles’…
It’s getting serious, Quintessence may become reality..?
This is where the boat currently resides, Harefield Marina near Uxbridge.
Oh dear, it’s February and London’s river Thames was recovering from serious flooding. Still, we sat on the train towards West London to view a dutch barge, a shell. We did find the location and the barge, the owner a tough cookie, a lady living on boats for a long time. The barge was in a desolate condition, would have needed quite a big financial investment to make it liveable. Worst of all, Adnan couldn’t stand upright in pretty much all the areas, but he still considered buying it! Antonios, a friend and already living on a boat, and myself had a hard time talking Adnan out of his excitement… but we did, eventually.
Oh dear, again, here we are on the road on a rather sunny Saturday towards some place outside London in order to view boats. Of course we got stuck in heavy traffic jam & we wondered if we are ever going to arrive on time. We did & we found the location relatively easy. The boat was rather big, the interior was shabby, old carpet every where, the wood work would have needed a good clean and a lick of paint, basically quite a lot of renovation was needed to make it comfy. We got the folder with all the specs and headed out to a Cafe near by. To discuss, at least so we thought. Antonios was with us again, Adnan’s enthusiasm was flying high and we couldn’t stop him. We headed back, the hands were shaken, Adnan owned a narrow boat. Natascha wanted to have another look around, as there was this wooden bed frame she didn’t like, pulled out the drawers and there it was: wet and rotten wood, mould everywhere. We lifted the carpet and all the wood floor was wet. We opened the hatch to access the bottom of the hull, there was water every where… The handshake was reversed, Adnan owned a boat for 20 minutes only. We left.
Our next stop was Harefield Marina, Natascha’s morale to view more boats was, well, low. Another stinking, rotten boat and she’ll have had a hissy fit! The first boat there for us to see was opposite the Marina, it looked like some floating S&M dungeon, fitted in black and purple, fake black leather L-shaped sofa. Not even Adnan could be persuaded that this is THE boat.
Next. We went to the Marina itself, asked the people there, if there are boats for sale. We got the keys to a boat called ‘Quintessence’. We entered and we found a boat smelling of engine/machine oil and had an interior fitting which resembled…. well, Nat’s design sense was profoundly hurt.
But Adnan…
As of today, our friend Anton owns a 50ft narrowboat called “Blue Morn”. She was build sometime in the mid 80s.
Chords
Computers’re bringing about a situation that’s like the invention of harmony. Sub-routines are like chords. No one would think of keeping a chord to himself. You’d give’t to anyone who wanted it.
(M, page 22)
Anton installed 2 more glands and painted the exposed metal with some hammerite. They are used to get cables out for sensors and a hydrophone at the moment.
The first of the three holes took 5 months to finish, the next two 20 minutes. Having the right tools help.
It is also funny that Anton ended up using those red and white glands after 8 years since scavenged them from an abandoned building in shoreditch high street. They even went to greece for few years and returned last summer along with Anton’s toolbox.
Battery Bank
Planning to replace the house battery bank. They haven’t been holding much charge for a while now, in fact they have never been in a good state since Anton bought the boat. At the time the previous owner had told Anton that they were ‘new, just 2 years old”
The only reason Anton kept them for so long apart from money is that Anton wanted to learn more about batteries and suitable charging regimes for my lifestyle. Even changing the batteries is lifestyle choice yes.
Now we know bit more now and are better equipped :
Blue Morn has 280w of solar installed
A small generator and a decent 30A charger for the batteries
What Blue Morn has not yet is better monitoring and metrics about the batteries and energy use overall. This is work in project
The current setup :
Four 12v el cheapo leisure batteries wired in parallel. Each one of them is supposed to provide 110 Ah therefore 440 Ah in total.
Anton is planing to replace them with four trojan T-105 deepcycle batteries. The new batteries are 6V 225 Ah each and they will require to be wired in two pairs in series makeing two bigger batteries that are 12V while halving the combined AmpHours. The two pairs are then wired in parallel doubling the Ah while leaving the voltage at 12V.
The new batteries are due to be installed on Saturday 18/01/14 if all goes well.
Batteries arrive in a pallet and is very complicated to get them in a boat with no fixed address. They are delivered at the kernel brewery, will reload them in the van, transport them at regents canal near the boat and for the 200 meters on the bike trailer!
Anton is replacing the engine startup batteries too while he’s at it.
Battery Bank Installation
The new batteries are in place. It took the whole weekend including the transport but just three hours on sunday morning from 9-12 for the installation itself which was quite good I though. I also managed to get smoke coming out of the inverter at some point so I assume I killed it. It wont be missed, it was crap and taking loads of space. My back hurts too although I tried hard to lift properly.
The new ‘house’ battery bank with 4 trojans
T105 installed.
I should have read the user guide before installing the batteries and not try to imagine what a parallel/series setup should look like.
Used the existing cables between the batteries, the connectors are not soldered on just crimped but I couldn’t find the motivation to fix them at this point. Next upgrade. I had to play some tetris to get the negative and positive poles that would feed my loads to the right place. The cables where very tight.
The batteries arrived half charged (12.45V), not sure what I should have expected. I thought they would arrive fully charged. They charger switch to green light in a couple of hours which I find a bit odd. Next morning they where at 12.45 again. Returning from work at 6:30, they looked like 12.55 on a sunny day and not much use apart from boat computer.
Happy days
The manual mentions that up to 100 charge cycles are needed until the batteries reach their full capacity. Also the cold weather affects them. In any case I will give them some more time and see how it goes.
The need for metrics is stronger now, graphs for voltage as well as the amps used and produced. Waiting for a promising 1 wire adc gadget to arrive from Asia…
TODO :
protective spray-on coating on connections and terminals
Revisit cabling between cells
Better ground cable.
Replace Battery bank switch with a split (relay|diode)
Tidy up the Yuk Nest
