One Thing After Another...

It's been another fantastic day weather wise, to say its only mid-February. It's been 11 or 12 degrees for most of the morning and afternoon and full on sunshine. It really was lovely and meant we could even sit outside again for a little bit with the radio and a coffee. The best part is that the engine hasn't needed to go on yet either and the batteries have charged from 81% up to 99% this morning. Another plus is the stove is just on tickover - just a small handful of coal and all the vents closed off - its been like that now since yesterday and I've not even used a full bucket of coal in nearly two days! Well, Rob never came yesterday as the job he was doing was running a little later than it was supposed to. He is coming tomorrow though, which is better in a way, as Pawel will also be here then to go through things. ************************ Breadmaking My first job this morning was to start making the bread mix that I was talking about yesterday! It was pretty simpl...

So is that now the end of winter? The end of the snow and the frosts and temperatures below zero?! Or is that wishful thinking? Today has been a lovely day. Around 10.30 this morning the temperature was over 10 degrees outside. It's also good news as it means our solar array is becoming more relevant again with the brighter days and more sunshine. I had a look at how many amps we were getting on our Outback MPPT controller just after 10:30AM: That is the most I have seen in a long, long time - 13 amps! I did briefly see it jump to 14 amps before hovering around 12-13 amps for most of the afternoon. If you have a look at the picture above, on the left hand side, above the "aux" figures, you'll see '0.180kw' - that equates to 180w of power that we were getting! Not bad for a February morning. It will be fantastic once again in summer when we don't have to have the engine on at all! (Only for hot water like I was discussing in my post Yesterday I'm sat he...

We are always thinking of things that need to be done on the boat, out of necessity or just because we want! You can see more about that HERE Anyway, it was Pawel's final evening at home yesterday before his work patterns returned to his normal evening hours, so we were having a chat about the possibility of installing central heating. It won't be something that we will do now until next year, ready for next winter as there's not much point now with the summer ahead of us. When we originally bought the boat, we originally bought a wood burning stove with a back boiler with the idea of connecting the back boiler up to a towel rail in the bathroom and a radiator in the bathroom. To cut a long story short, we attempted to do it using the thermosyphoning method, but due to a lack of knowledge (at the time!) it kept blowing off the walls!! This started to become quite dangerous after one night when we were sitting there and the pipes just exploded right next to us with scalding ...

Brrrr! It's cold, stormy and snowy here today. The winds are coming from the south and hitting the boat at the back end causing mayhem with the solar panels and causing the boat to crash into the towpath bank quite a bit! Not only that but we've had snow today and it literally has been coming down horizontally! I had to go into Manchester city centre today to sort a few things out but we're back now and it's lovely and toasty inside! The clear out of the stove yesterday has worked wonders and the air flows on the stove are responding well too (ie: when opening and closing) Before I headed out, I made us a flour-less carrot cake. It makes it a bit lighter, more moist and not so stodgy without the flour and makes it more suitable to have after dinner. Its not really anything fancy either, as there's no frosting like with some traditional carrot cake recipes but for some reason, I feel that this recipe is a bit more sophisticated than "normal" carrot cake. It...

I needed to get out of the boat today, regardless of how a bad it could be for my knee - I just needed to move. Pawel suggested that we go to Buxton as we've both never been and its only about 3 train stops from our local train station. We left before mid-day and the journey is a lovely scenic route, much like on the train coming here, but we were shocked as we got nearer to Buxton to see how much snow there was as there's nothing around here at the moment. There was a noticeable temperature difference as well and it was really cold - with Pawel telling me that its because Buxton is one of the highest towns in England! Arriving in Buxton: We only went around the town which had some nice little shops and a few shopping arcades. One of the arcades is an old bath house though with some of the original fixtures still present:- And here's some pictures of the bath house in its day: We found a coffee shop/chocolatier in the arcade as well and decided to have a nice cappuccino whi...

We were both off today and have had such a busy morning. In contrast to yesterday, I awoke at 7AM and but was in bed for a bit thinking about things and dozing before finally getting up at 8 as I knew we had to move the boat to top up our water tank and I wanted to get on with it. When I looked out of the window, I noticed that we'd had a bit of snow overnight and the winds were still strong but not as bad as yesterday evening. The curtains at the front door were looking a bit grubby and the other day I accidentally got a couple of coal marks on them so I firstly took those down and filled the twin tub up to start washing them. A lot of people cannot believe I have a twin tub, but they use a hell of a lot less power than a normal washing machine which means we can run it through our inverter. We have a Sterling inverter and its only rated at 1600w which isn't sufficient for washing machines as they usually use over 2000w. The role of the inverter is to basically take power from...

Last night was a strange night. It was one of the few nights that we truly didn't sleep. There was no particular reason for it as such, although on my side its because I'm worried about a few things. But basically, every half hour we were awake with one thing or another. Firstly, we heard some little legs on the roof! We don't think it was a duck, and Pawel is convinced that whatever creature it was, had four legs. It ran the whole length of the boat and back again. Bizarre! At one point, it then happened again and Edward freaked out and got out of bed and started barking (or, shouting as Pawel describes Edward's bark!) so we were awoken again! (Thanks Ed!) Next, we heard Edward licking his lips which drives us both crazy! So at 4:30AM everyone was awake once more! Next at 6AM, an alarm started going off. We didn't know where it was coming from at first - it was inside the boat, however. We then we realised that it was from a pocket watch that Pawel had bought from ...