April heralded the start of our cruising full time on the canals. But first we needed to give the boat a bit of a “shakedown” to check everything would work OK away from the marina. I mean, we had been plugged into shore power since the start and had no idea how long the batteries would last on their own, how the invertor charger would handle the power on its own, and also for us to learn how everything worked away from the comfort and safety of a marina.
We planned to go to Foxton Locks, stay the night and come back. Wouldn’t undertake the locks themselves but turn around (or wind as its known) and come back to the marina before going out for real – and full time!
It was cold and the nights were colder so we needed to run our stove. You can burn coal (smokeless) or logs and we had a mixture of both on board.
When we moored up just before the locks, we set about lighting the stove. Our stove has a back boiler which, when the temperature in the pipe running from the stove reaches a certain temperature, it triggers the pump to circulate the coolant in the system to heat the radiators. We have two radiators, one in the bathroom and one in the bedroom. It had been working fine whilst we were in the marina so we had no thought that it wouldn’t work now we were on the cut.
The thermostat that is wired to the circulation pump is attached to a pipe which leads directly from the back of the stove, it’s called, funnily enough, a pipe thermostat and we had it set on 40 degrees.
Steam!
On this occasion as the stove was heating up from the hot coals, the thermostat refused to trigger the pump to start pumping. We moved the dial on the thermostat to ‘0’ but still nothing. At that moment, steam started to vent from the header tank in the bathroom and a loud hissing noise emanated from the back of the stove. We realised we needed to cook the fire in the stove as fast as we could!
What we needed to do was to remove the baking hot coals from the stove and put them into our metal ash bucket and douse the lot in water. So, carefully we removed the coals into the bucket, left the front door of the stove wide open, closed the bottom vent to prevent any rush of air into the main stove and get the ash bucket out of the saloon ASAP!
The issue then was to pour water on the hot coals….the result of that was a massive steam could that could be seen from space!
We finally got it all under control, the fire was out but it was freezing cold on the boat. Only thing for it was to wrap up warm and snuggle up under the duvet!
The next morning we headed back to the marina and ordered a new pipe thermostat and a failsafe switch to turn on the pump that we could use should the thermostat ever refuse to work.
Our new friend Charlie came to show Tony how to do a service on our Beta Marine 50 engine and have a look at the Onan Generator which had refused to work for more than 10 seconds before it cut out. Very frustrating!
It took a lot of head scratching to find out what was wrong with the generator. Even the guys at the marina couldn’t work out why it wouldn’t work. It needed specialist help.
Thankfully, this came in the form of the Goldsbough Boat Owners Club (GBOC) whose secretary had been watching one of our early vlogs when we’d said that the boat had been built by Stephen Goldsbourgh from Knowle Hall Wharf. She contacted us to ask if we would be interested in joining and naturally we said yes.
Whilst scratching our heads about what to do about the generator, we called GBOC and was put in touch with an engineer called Ian Taylor, who, as luck would have it, worked on the original build of our boat and several other Goldsborugh boats and now ran the wharf at Knowle. We arranged to keep in touch and notify him when we were getting close to him whilst we were on our travels. It was lucky that we had decided to travel to the Llangollen Canal on our maiden voyage and would be going through Birmingham.