We have stayed continuously on the boat for over a month now and got lots of jobs done. Uncle David ran us up here stayed a few days then went home with a promise to pick us up and take us to Sue’s next hospital appointment.
The jobs we planned to do (or get done) during this period was : -
1. Install the composting toilet that we had been assured by the manufacturer was almost ready for collection.
2. Install the new solar system.
3. Measure and order the new mattress.
4. Service the central heating system.
Well we did get all four items done although not necessarily easily.
1. The new toilet arrived the Sunday the week completion was promised. The manufacturer (and his wife) realising we had said we would collect from the factory and knowing we were now without a car brought it out to us - how kind was that?? I had been putting off installing it as it is primed with compost and none of the supermarkets/DIY stores we had visited had any, wrong time of year I suppose, but blow me down the following Sunday Mr Compoost and his wife came back with a bag of compost and an apology that they had forgotten to give it to us the week before. Compoost Toilets is a new company with as yet just one employee who manufactures the toilets in his home workshop, he is currently desperate to find premises and staff to enable him to meet current demand and if the service they gave us is typical (and I am told by other narrowboaters that it is) they certainly deserve to succeed.
After getting the free bag of compost I had no excuse so set about taking out the cassette toilet and installing the new Compoost toilet. The old one came out in just a few minutes, a couple of screws to remove, a 12 volt electric supply to disconnect and a water supply to disconnect and cap. All went quick and easy - OK the water was a bit of a problem in that I could not locate the toilet water valve so turned off the valve to the whole system and the water pump. What I had forgotten was that there is an accumulator tank built into the system that pressurises the system. I’m sure I don’t have to explain further 💦💦💦😳😱💦💦💦 by jabbers that water was cold!!!!
Installation of the Compoost toilet was very easy, a few screws to hold it down, connect to the 12 volt supply used on the old toilet, plug the filter and its ducting in, add two litres of compost to the solids bucket, pop the pee bottle in place and voila - ready to use.
I will do a report on how easy (or not) it is to live with in a future blog.
2. I said “install the new solar panel system” our sole contribution was to pay the bill at the end of the process. Tim the proprietor of Onboard Solar Ltd arrived on time and although we had a bit of a confusion kerfuffle about which mooring we should be on for the install Tim, and his wife who was acting as his gofer, did the work in a quick and very professional manner. Solar systems are at this time of year of limited help but come the spring and summer it should supply virtually all our battery charging needs.
3. The mattress on NB RoJo is, to put it mildly, pretty damn poor. Beds on narrowboats generally come in two styles standard and cross, the standard is usually 4’ - 0” wide x 6’ - 0” long and generally accessible on one side only. This size and style of bed is fine for stick insect shaped people young enough to NEVER get up in the night but for people of our size and shape and whose age dictates they ALWAYS get up at least once in the night this is not an option. A cross bed, as the name implies stretches across the full width of the boat and is accessible from both sides. On RoJo we have a cross bed that is a full 5” - 0” wide. There are of course drawbacks in everything and cross beds are no exception, the main problem is that the person on the side away from the main living area must go to bed at the same time or before the person on the living accommodation side to save climbing over him/her and similarly “facilities” have to be provided on both sides of the bed if one occupant is not going to be woken, not only for their own trips to the loo but to allow loo access for their partners trips.
The new mattress has been ordered from Belfield Furnishings, it will be pocket sprung made in two separate pieces each piece will have a 50mm memory foam topper. The topper will not be sewn into the top of the mattress but loose so that the mattress can be regularly turned, important on a boat. Being bespoke it was close to BOA£ (see previous blog entry).
4. The last of the “big” tasks was servicing the heating system, that is the Hurricane diesel fired radiator heating system rather than the multi fuel Morso Squirrel Stove.
It started out well when the engineer checked the hours run meter and said that it had done around 10% of the hours a system of this age would be expected to run but soon turned into teeth sucking and mutterings of “ . . . dear oh dear, that will have to be replaced! . . . ” and “ . . . oh my! Thats likely to be expensive! . . .”
He was not wrong. The final bill was an eyewatering £700.00 (all but £0.80), can we now afford to run it? Our research tells us that it consumes around 0.75 litre of diesel an hour for which we pay around 89 pence so in a cold spell there is the potential for a £11(ish) a day heating bill, thats over £70 a week - WOW!! Still we have the multi fuel Morso Stove which we run on smokeless fuel. It has been alight several times on chilly evenings and keeps us warm as toast. Once the winter gets going it will be lit and then will stay lit till the spring. Our research suggests this should keep the boat toasty for around £3.00 a day or around £21 a week - quite a difference.