£150 per 8 days, £18.5 a day, about £2.30 an hour so not stupidly more expensive than diesel, but still more even when diesel prices go up! Just read your other message, I worked on 8 hours days on a light use day!
We tend to use around 5 gallons on a heavy river run (Humber/Trent) a day (usually long days though, about 10 hours or more). I wonder if there is any millage in using steam-electric? A steam turbine with a generator charging batteries to run an electric motor. I guess to get up steam takes some coal on it's own, but you wouldn't need to run it all day as the batteries would carry it. Not sure if the losses in the system would make it worse than a steam engine driving the prop direct. This is the way most power stations are setup, but then there is often economy in scale, and they are running 24/7 (well most are anyway). Boiler tests are only every so long (every year/4 years? a fairly long time) so I guess that doesn't really increase costs to much and minimal maintenance on the engine probably less than replacing the oil and fuel filters cost on a diesel. Is running on wood any good? - the cost of wood is probably more than coal at the moment, but there is quite a bit of free stuff along the canal... ...and what about burning bio fuel oil - I guess you would need to alter the boiler to do this. Just wondered - I've always wanted to try out some other propulsion methods as much as I love the sound of a slow plodding diesel - it's just the costs and effort that puts me off! :-) Cheers, Mike On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 11:00 AM, Daniel Hutchinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Good evening! > > We tend to say we can get ten days cruising out of a tonne. 4x 25kg > bags a day. (one an a 'arf to two hundredweight) > - Emilyanne holds about 1.5t, which is about 12days or so, without > grovelling out the last dozen bags worth from the back of the bunker. > > On a river you will clearly use more than that. Possibly even twice > as much, if you going for it, against the tide. > - But at the same time, a heavy day of locks, and your only really > using the bag and a half your lit up with all day. > > Emilyannes boiler is a little bit marginal for river work (its > certainly the limiting factor of overall power output) so when your > running hard it does get increasingly less efficient, plus she weighs > 22ton, so unless you get her onto fairly open water, your speed is > limited anyway. Lower oxford you can forget about averaging 4mph. > > Coal at the moment is an interesting topic, where just working out > what we burning next. About 10 years ago we bought about as many > tonnes, palletised in 25kilo sacks. Which dry stored, we've been > using basically since. We now have 10 sacks left. > - I think back then we paid a close to £100/tonne as anything else > for some very burnable polish coal. > - Looking around now, you can pay upto £250/tonne. However the > current plan seams to be to mix some columbian bituminous housecoal > with some chinese anthracite. And see how it goes. Closer to £150/ > tonne. > > > > Daniel > > > > > ------------------------------------ > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > -- Michael Askin http://shoestring_DOT_zapto_DOT_org/
