Michael Askin presented the following explanation :
> On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 9:55 PM, George Pearson
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I had often read that one should avoid running a diesel engine unloaded
>> <snip> However, it seems to me that narrowboat engines are usually only
>> lightly loaded. In the old days, only one horse (one horsepower) was
>> needed to propel the boat, though nowadays we prefer a little quicker
>> get up and go. I read somewhere recently that on a normal canal run,
>> only about 5hp are needed. However, boats may have 20-45 hp engines
>> installed. Clearly such engines are not heavily loaded, a so perhaps
>> bore glazing is to be expected with ordinary usage?
>
> Boatman used to recon that one horse on the ground was worth 10(?) in
> the water. I also suspect this was HP not BHP (so the BHP would be
> even greater). Although I do always imaging 10 horses swimming in
> front of the boat when I think of this! :-)
>
> It does all depend on how fast you want to go, and while a horse would
> pull a fully loaded boat at around 3mph, a 9HP bolinder would push the
> boat faster (where there was the depth).
>
Snip
I have just been doing a few sums and on our boat fitted with a Beta
BD3 our fuel usage is about 1.75 lts of fuel per hour. This amount of
fuel will produce approximately 16KWh or 12 hp This is the input energy
to the engine, if we estimate a diesel engine as being 45% efficient
then the output shaft energy would be an average of just under 5.4 hp
That is just over 10% of my maximum rated output of 45 hp.
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