15mm is proven

The leaking MDPE pipework was replaced today by 15mm.  It took no more than 10 mins to change the whole thing and it was immediately water tight.  I am very pleased with this.  It confirms the way to go and especially as the 15mm push fit is WRAS approved.

The new hatch for the emergency exit was put on too.  Awkward work but did the job.  A big chunk of polystyrene was put in to keep it nice and snug.

Porthole covers were added and some great thin metallic insulation was put in to keep the warm air off the hull.

It was not easy to make progress today.  Moving materials onto the boat was slow going due to heavy snow.  But once on board things progressed well.

The count down to moving on ticks on.

Snow fun this weekend

I have a terrible habit of moving home in Winter.  I had hoped that this move to the boat could be done one warm sunny Winter's day.  Nope.  As I look out the train window I sigh as there is a good layer of snow on the ground and more coming down.

Its not the cold, but marina walk ways are slippery enough already without the help of snow and ice.

Still, the boat should be warm enough.  Should be.  Get the fire going and all will be cosy.  Sort of.  Keep telling myself that.

The main jobs for the weekend are to get the pipes (the leaking ones) changed over to the 15mm ones.  Fingers crossed I can get these on leak free.  Dave has removed the last of the portholes for restoration.  Taking those off to Craig (another 6) should see the whole job wrapped up by the end of Feb.  Then I will have light back.

Apart from that, its making the place homely.  A few lights (always helps), some carpet and underlay for warmth and the curtains up at the bottom of the stairs to stop dust and cold.

Still no sign of my mattress yet though.  Starting to get nervous.  Without that its going to be hard going.

Piping in the new year

Forgot to add that we bumped into Dave at the weekend.  He had fitted the pipes for the new air ducts for the sewage tanks.  And a fine job he had done too.  You saw in a previous post the wardrobe and the concrete cruncher.  Dave fitted the pipes and they are ready to go.

Pipes under the main cabin

Sorry for the orientation.  This needs turning but shows the pipe from the hull through the wardrobe floor.  One pipe in each wardrobe.

Another view of the pipes in the hull.

Ring main live

The activity at the weekend was focused upon the fitting of the ring main.  This was the first time I have wired a consumer unit and it turned out to be relatively simple.  The unti came ready wired inside with all the RCD and MCBs fitted.  So  single wire into the unit to feed it power and then connected the 32 amp MCB to the new ring main.

I still need to sort the Mastervolt isolation transformer earthing.  They say some confusing things in the instructions which if taken literally make little sense.  More do do here.

The MDPE joints just won't stop leaking.  Nightmare.  So time to replace all but the one junction from MDPE to 15mm.  The 15mm pipe will do the job required and will not leak.  Off to screw fix.  Again.

There's and app for that

I was looking for aerials a week or so ago and a forum mentioned an app that helps to identify where the TV transmitters are.  The apps is Antenna Aligner.  It detects where you are and puts a pointer on the iphone compass showing the best signal for you.  You simply point your aerial that way and save a lot of time searching 360 degrees for a signal.  Neat.  Only cost 69p.

TV solutions

I recognised long ago that I would need to fit another 2 gzillion miles of cable back into the ship.  One of the things I was worried about was how to terminate the various cables in a nice looking and compact way.

I found this at screwfix. This screened socket has just about everything one will need in one place.

It has the two satellite cable feeds allowing me to feed a sky + box.  It has an FM and normal RF TV socket and also has a return socket.  That means you can take the feed out the back of a sky box and distribute it around the ship.  Finally, it has the telephone socket in there too.

I don't yet have to worry about how to distribute at the moment, I just need to wire each room with a full set of cables and worry about what to send down them later.  I may need to order more cable!

Christmas wishes

First task of the year - wish all the readers and followers of this blog a happy new year and I hope you all had a great Xmas.  I appreciate the support and interest.

I, of course, spent as much time progressing things on Gannet as I could and good progress was made.  It is always useful to get one's skills up to scratch ahead of doing the proper job.  Which was fortunate as I have decided to move onto Gannet at the end of January to help speed up the task of restoring her.

That means a lot of work in a very short time.  The plan was (and is) to convert the 4 cabins that have still yet to have their portholes put on into living space.  It will be basic though.  I was lucky enough to find a mattress company that makes custom mattresses which meant they were able to supply them for the odd shaped cabin beds.  The tasks ahead of me were relatively simple

1) Fit the MDPE pipework to the water supply on the marina (can't use hose as it has nasty chemicals in it, but you would be surprised how many boats have yellow garden hose feeding their drinking water supplies!).

2) Fit a toilet

3) Fit a sink

4) Fit electricity into cabins

It turns out that these were massively effective learning tasks and enabled me to test some of the technology that I would have to use on the main ship.  

If there is one single recommendation I would give to anyone doing this kind of thing its this.  Set up a room and do each of the tasks you think you will need to do before you start the main job.  Why?  Obvious really.  Yes it is a little more expensive (you would think) but it is cheaper to make mistakes here than on the main job.  The other advantage is that you will be faster and better when you come to do the main job and you will have seen how well certain solutions work (or don't work in this case.  So let's start with each of the jobs at hand and you can see what I mean.  One useful tip.  I have avoided the term 'dry run' as this involved plumbing and there is nothing dry about starting out testing plumbing systems!

Water supply.

MDPE is strange stuff.  It's the only plastic pipe approved for potable water.  I had looked into this extensively some time back and found that none of the other widely used piping was WRAS approved.  This is quite alarming given how many people will have fitted the push fit plastic piping.    The main problem with the 20mm MDPE is that it come coiled.  This makes it compact to send but it is almost impossible to straighten!  The pipe is so highly sprung after being coiled that if you try and straighten it and let go the force of the backlash as it springs back is dangerous.  Within 2 minutes of handling this stuff the air was bluer than the pipe itself.  But this also led to another issue.  With that much spring left in the pipe the joints themselves (see later para) are under constant pressure and this makes getting proper water tight joints very hard indeed.

I had ordered a 25m length and after wrestling with it like a snake in a black and white Tarzan movie (and there the comparison ends) I managed to get the pipe from the marina up to the boat, through the back door gap over head where the old wiring used to go.  That pipe was fed into the old bathrooms and down through an old waste (water not sewage) pipe and into the cabin where the temporary bathroom would be.  Running the pipe in one long piece without joints is a key lesson that many have said.  Because the joints (however good) are not reliable, you should use as few as possible and ensure that no joints are ever buried into walls or floors or ceilings without easy access.  They will leak for certain.  Only a matter of when.

Oh yes, and lesson on MDPE.  It comes with what looks like the inserts into the ends of the pipe.  But what looks like an insert is in fact a cap.  So when you connect the MDPE onto the tap fitting and screw it in removing most of your skin in the process in driving cold rain and switch it on, nothing happens.  Because it's not an insert, its a cap and without a route for the water to go down the pipe in a MDPE tap fitting there really is only one place for it to go.  Yep, out the side of the fitting like a high pressure shower!

The next job was to fit a macerating toilet downstairs.  I opted for a WC only Saniflo.  There is mixed opinion about these products on the web ranging from 'the devils own toilet' and a general view that it would be better to use a bucket than fit a macerator (they have a point) and some that have found them to be fine.  The only way to find out was to try one, so I did.

They are quite simple things to fit actually.  But the instructions are rubbish to the point that it takes longer to do trying to work out the instructions than if you just looked at it and did it through gut feel.  There are only three things involved in it.  A big pipe which fits to the back of the toilet.  It cable ties onto the macerator and jubilee clips to the toilet.  That was a fiddle (it was a tight fit) but simple in terms of what needed to be done.  The second bit is the exit pipe.  That is obvious and simply jubilee clips to the unit and then to whatever it needs to connect to on the exit side.  The third thing is to wire it in.  Why you needed pages of instructions and diagrams for that is anybody's guess.  There are do's and don'ts though.  They say use the standard solvent weld waste pipes or copper.  But they also say that every joint you put in will reduce the flow rate and therefore pump distance (and height).  Not useful then to specify only piping types that are rigid and require joints to get around the boat.  So ignored all that and fitted 22mm PEX flexible water pipe.  Yes, I know, its a decision that may come back and bite me.  I suspect the PEX is not suitable because it may not handle the chemicals for cleaning long term.  But this is a short term usage so it should be fine.  With this pipe of course there are 0 joints.  Just a single pipe which goes up through the ceiling of the cabin, out of a porthole in the upstairs bathroom (to be) and into a waste pipe and over the side of the boat.  No joints, no risk of leak.  Time will tell.

We were now at the stage where the inbound water pipe was into the cabin (unterminated, please please please nobody turn on the tap!), the toilet fitted (a cheap but OK one from screw fix, bargain) and the exit pipe fitted to the outside world.

Next I needed a sink.  Originally I was going to use a pedestal bathroom sink but in the end thought it better to fit a kitchen sink as it would be more useful.  Try buying a kitchen sink which is standalone.  All I needed was a sink on a stand.  Actually quite hard to find.  But Ikea came up trumps again and a large sink and draining board on a typically cheap metal Ikea frame (all in a kit) was acquired for about £100.  That included the waster trap etc was well.  That was put together in an hour and a cold tap fitted from B&Q.

With all the components now in place I just needed to connect it all up.  The MDPE is 20mm.  The tap and the toilet input value was 1/2 inch fittings.  Can you buy a 20mm to 1/2 inch pipe converter gadget?  Nope.  That would be too simple.  The only tap fittings at 1/2 inch nut were 15mm pipe push fit (or to copper).  So the final set up goes like this.

20mm MDPE pipe into a 20mm MDPE stock cock.  Plastic horror.  Out of the 20mm plastic stop cock value into a push fit 20mm MDPE T-junction.  Out of each 20mm exit from the T-junction comes a short length of MDPE into a 20mm to 15mm converter.  Out of the 15mm converter comes some 15mm PEX pipe which goes into the flexible pipe for the sink and out of the other one to the toilet input junction.  But this whole set up was so highly sprung that it was like a jack in the box ready to boing out at any time.  So I nailed it all to the wall with clips.

With all the pipes connected it was time to test.  This is of course tricky as turning on the tap at marina is about a 60 second walk back to the cabin to see if it is leaking, popped off and generally flooding the boat.  Help was at hand though so we switched off the stop cock (MDPE) and on went the marina tap.  All good.  No leaks at this stage.  Next step was to turn on the stop cock.  Fountains from a few of the push fit joints ensued.  A quick extra push in and the fountains stopped (Yes, I cut the pipe using a proper cutter and yes I had proper pipe inserts in place).  All in all only minor dripping remained which was incurable despite lots of tightening and pushing.  I think the push fit joints are under such tension that they struggle.  But I can live with that minor dripping.

Finally, we hit the flush and hey presto the whole solution sprang into life and I have a working new toilet.

The next stage of the work over XMAS was to fit the electrics.  A simple solution for now.  A single cable from the outside world into one of the cabins.  Into the Mastervolt isolator and then into a consumer unit.  One ring main to run through all four cabins with a twin socket in each and one socket at the bottom of the stairs.  The first one took 20 mins to fit and was touch and go whether it was sound, the final one I had down to a fine art and took me 2 mins.  Practice is well worth the effort.  All that remains now is to wire up the consumer unit.

The portholes are not fitted on this side but the place on the hull where they are had been exposed and will need to be re-covered until the rest of the ship is complete and this side can be stripped out and refitted to the new standard. 

So that was XMAS.  Some things took a lot longer than expected, some things went smoothly.

Lessons learned

1) How to wire a twin socket well and quickly. 

2) Don't use 20mm MDPE for anything other than the main run into the boat.  Convert to 15 mm ASAP as it is less sprung and easier to run/join reliably.

3) Ignore instructions on macerator toilets and apply common sense.

There is still a few things to do before the end of Jan.  Hot water will come from a catering boiler (new 10 litre one).  That takes 20 mins to heat up and can be put on a time to ensure hot water is available morning and night and in fact will keep the water hot if required.   That will sit nicely on the new draining board.  Heating will not be needed as such.   Fitting 100 Watt lights produces enough heat to keep the place warm.  The rooms are very very small so heat up very quickly.

There are a few things to do on board when I get there.  The first is to work out the wiring for the TV, phone and networking points.  There is no mobile signal below deck.  Therefore telephone points will be needed in each room, TV points (satellite and conventional FM and terrestrial TV).  Not sure how to connect up all that yet but if I have a good load of Cat 5 in place in each room, a twin satellite cable, an FM cable point and a conventional TV RF point that should be it covered.  How it all connects up in the utility room is another question for another day (I already have a Giga bit switch for the network, so maybe some VOIP phones may be the way to go.  Either way, I intend to fit double the cable into each room than is needed.  The first is that I cannot guarantee whether I will need to have a there and back set-up and secondly (even if I don't need there and back set-up) it is good to have spare cables into the room in case one gets damaged.  Refitting later will be all but impossible.

Portholes

The latest set of large portholes have been delivered and they look amazing.

Fuel Cell

Fuel cell technology appears to have made some progress in the last year.    For those who do not know what a fuel cell is it is a generator of electricity that runs on hydrogen.  You supply it with hydrogen and it creates electricity and water is the output.  Its a green technology.  So why have we not all got one?  There are a few reasons.  The first is cost.  Wow, they are expensive.  But they are coming down in price.  When I looked at them a year ago they were around £25K.  There is now one online that produces 3K Watts of power for just under £8K.

The price reductions are parallel to flat screen TVs.  As production ramps up the cost will fall.  I suspect within a few years they will be £2000 - £3000 (guess).  They will be immensely useful things.  The purchase price is only half the story though.  The second issue is the cost of the fuel.  They can use methanol, natural gas or hydrogen.  But hydrogen needs to be 99.999% pure which makes it expensive.

Current estimates show that it is cheaper to run a hydrogen power engine with generator than a fuel cell.  But that will change soon.

With 3K Watt fuels cells now available (one will run from LPG next year) you can see that at 240V you could get a useful 12 amps per unit.  This is a useful addition to the shore power of 16 amps.   At the moment they would not power systems directly as voltage fluctuates a lot.  But they can be used to charge batteries which would produce more consistent power.  The other option would be to feed a Victron Quattro system which would then stabilise the power and if too much power was being drawn it would take from batteries.

There is a solution in there somewhere.  Probably something usable by late next year.   It does then suggest that any design of the electrical system of the ship should enable this to be done.

Electrics

Having now laid out the rooms in terms of sockets etc it is time to start to look at ring main designs.  The trick is to try and make the ship comply as best as possible to standard house wiring standards as a minimum.  So ring main cable at 2.5mm seems to be standard.  But the distances to various parts of the ship are considerable when you start to run cables (recall what it took to get them out).

What is clear then is that I will need to have a network of local consumer units fed from the utility room consumer unit.   This will also provide a few advantages (but not cost ones),  The main one being that tripping a consumer unit (as seems to happen regularly) will not trip the whole ship (I am guessing).  It should also mean that I can run lighting locally so a tip will not wipe out the entire ship lighting but just local areas.  Not a major issue.  I am considering one unit for each of the cabin areas (so no stairs are required to reset a tripped MCB), one for the mess and toilets and bathroom.  One for the kitchen and lights.  One for the wheel house, radio room and battery room.  Finally one for the main chain room and front bedroom (as it will be).

The advantages are that I will not need to run hundreds of cables out of the utility room to various places but single cables (I think) to the satellite consumer units (the viability of this to be looked into).  My theory is the less cable running around the better.

Things not to do in a wardrobe

There are many things you should not do in a wardrobe and standing in one which is no more than 2ft by 2ft with a concrete breaking device in almost no light is probably well up the list.

But you have to do what you have to do.   There are two sea ports in the hull in two wardrobes.  Both are now sealed up but I have asked Dave to fit two pipes which will run from these ports down to the water tanks.  One will be for pushing air in, the other the vent.  This venting of the tanks is important.  All Dave needed to do was drop the two pipes through the floor.  No problem?

Problem.  Yet again, massive over engineering meant that about an inch and a half of concrete had to be taken out first.  I tried with a hammer and chisel and made a small dent after about 20 mins.  So out with the titan concrete buster and bingo, 2 wardrobes cleared in 20 more mins.  Its all about the tools.

The portholes are now fitted on the other side of the boat and the amount of light on that side of the boat is considerable now.  The views from the portholes is also wonderful.

The wardrobe (top of the pic) is where the new tank breathing pipes will go.

The material in the floor is strange and the smell is like tar with concrete layer on top.  This must be for insulation.

The portholes are now in the other side of the ship.  The difference is here that there is no other boat on that side blocking the light and there is a massive difference in the amount of light the portholes let in.  The good news is that the captains ready room is on this side.

This is the view out of the river side cabins.  Awesome.

Look at how light the rooms are.

Weekend progress

The weekend saw some good progress.  Two more portholes are in and there are two more to go.  That will complete the first 8 in the master cabin area.  Its quite a milestone.  A few minor issues for Dave to complete this week.  The air vent in the wheelhouse sprung a leak (it turns out that its good to have the ship being converted in bad weather.  If the leaks occur latter on we will have a lot more damage).  A few other air vents are to be restored.  They are useful things.   When we are not on board it is useful to be able to have air circulation without opening portholes.

The seaport values (huge bits of bronze) have been removed.  In their place two pipes will be fitted to run down through the floor of the cabin (they are in the wardrobe) to make the breathing pipes for the waste tanks.  The plan is to have one as air intake (pushing air into the tanks with a small fan) and one as an outlet.  This air circulation will prevent the build up of gas and smells (so I am advised).

Further planning work has been undertaken.  The wiring looms for the ring mains now identified and the consumer unit number and location identified.  I am going to go against the advice of the electrical industry and fit 4mm ring main cable rather than the standard 2.5 mm as they are being fitted in conduit in insulation and I prefer the extra capacity breathing space current wise.  The extra cost is minimal.  So why not.

The use of multiple consumer units will mean a huge reduction in cabling but I will need some hefty cables to feed them.  That is still to be identified.  It will mean that if a circuit trips it will only isolate a small area of the ship

Spray away

The prep of the ship continues but at the back of my mind there is still the problem of insulation to sort out.    I have written about spray foam and looked at the do it yourself kit.  But there are a number of challenges with the DIY kit and that is around heating the tanks.   The alternative is a professional company with a van.  The trouble with that is that we (and the ship next to us) is too far from shore and the van they carry the kit in will not be close enough.

I was checking the web again last night looking to see if the world has moved on.  It had.   There is a new machine out which fills the gap.  Neat.  Its a bit heavy at 70kg but it has many advantages.  The main one being that it will heat the tanks.   I could get one of these, do the whole ship and then sell it.

http://www.touch-n-seal.com/constantpressuresprayfoam.htm

Crunch time

Now that things are starting to progress well again I though it was about time I sorted out new toilet facilities.  This is not as easy as one might imagine.

There is starting to be a common theme emerging.  Nobody who sells stuff really is able to explain anything useful about what they sell.  Nobody even seems to be able to advise, if you do buy something, what else you will need.

I did manage to pick up an all in 1 toilet from Screwfix.    Nice and cheap and comes with all the parts.  I then bought a macerator.  What parts that comes with is anybody's guess.  The idea is to plumb that in with a single 22mm plastic pipe with no joints.  It will do for a while.

Blast!

Well, maybe a bit strong for a blog title but blasted they have been and the first set of big portholes are looking good.  Turns out they are not brass.  They are bronze.  Sand blaster bronze (purists with probably cry that one should not sand blast bronze but there really was no other affordable way to get 50 years of paint off) looks strange but the patiner will return.

The newly fitted cabin portholes look good.  A few pictures below.  The cabins now feel less like dark cupboards.  There is not a lot of light (obviously) through them and you will still need interior lights during the day were you to sit in there but the daylight makes a difference to the feel.  Less claustrophobic.  They also look superb.

The last set of portholes were taken up to the engineers this weekend.  They will be blasted and cleaned up and ready for refitting in the next few weeks.  The challenge of the bolts to fit them though turns out to be an interesting story.  It turns out that the bolts needed to fit the portholes (the old ones were all but destroyed to get them out) are rarer that hens teeth.  What else should I expect? So I will be getting the spec and doing a planet wide search for the right ones.  Otherwise they will need to be custom made at a cost that will make one think they were bought in Harrods individually wrapped in silk and hand delivered by an X-factor star.

The new ones look great.  Fitting to be completed but they look the part.

They are hard to photograph.  The rooms are lighter but the picture exposure works for the light outside and make the rooms look darker than they are.

This is probably the first daylight these rooms have seen for 30 years.

The big portholes look strange.  They are big lumps of bronze.  They will age nicely (so I am told) and will go back to the darker colour one would expect bronze to be (and the colour they started off as under the paint that had already come off).

Mushrooms and light

The mushroom is fitted!  This is the jammed air vent fort the wheel house (clearly no longer jammed and nicely restored.  The wheel house has no opening windows so the restoration of this vent was vital.  A simple screw thread allows it to be raised and lowered (shut).  Good job Dave!

The first portholes are in and they look amazing.  The first light these cabins have seen for probably 20-30 years.  I cannot wait to see them for real.

The picture below shows the gantry that Dave built so he could access the ship side without scaffold and mud!  Its going to be useful when it comes to painting the ship.  At some point.

Fast pace

Dave is now rapidly outpacing my ability to keep up with progress.  By last weekend all the portholes for restoration had been removed and ready for taking off to Craig.  Lots of work done.  The pipe work on the water tanks are now ready for connection to the pump.  The cabin portholes are now all cut out and the supports for hanging over the side to cut off the outer layer of the porthole covers are now complete and ready for Dave to start work there.

Phew, it wears me out just trying to keep up with his progress on the blog let alone the work.  Well done Dave!

He was kind enough to share some of his photos of his work.  See below with explanatory notes.


Before.  Note the square window closest to the camera.  This was used to replace the missing ones at the front.  It had that engine air vent right in front of it anyway.  Also all the rear portholes (the round one for example) are now gone too.

As you can see below the original front of the ship wheelhouse only had two windows in.  You can now see (later below) that all the slots have windows in (5 windows in the front in total).  Makes a huge difference to the view.

Dave on the scaffold.

The pipes below are lead.  They had to be cut into short chunks to make them liftable.

These two sea ports originally carried out waste water from various places.  One will now be taken off and closed up and the other will be the air vent for the sewage tanks (apparently, if you dont vent them you can get gas build up and a lot of smell).

You can see here below the first 4 round discs that cover the portholes up in the cabins. The first 4 from left to right have now been removed ready for the first restored ones to go back in.

All the large portholes from the living areas are now removed.  First 4 have been taken for restoration.

Pipes everywhere!

Cabin porthole spaces now cut out.  Getting close to the point where the new ones can be fitted.

These are the new windows in the front of the wheelhouse.

Hard to see but the two 6000 litre water tanks have now had their pipies fitted ready to be connected to the water pump and the filters.

Lead pipes still to be moved.  I feel my back aching already!