There’s a lot of old fibreglass boats, both on Britain’s inland waterways, and in her coastal estuaries.
Many are now getting old… And the fibreglass is lasting … well, a lot better than old wooden wrecks did – they would rot away and … “recycle” themselves. Now, there’s hulls that cost to dispose of, and are a landfill nightmare. Even after sinking, the hulls remain in good shape, and last for decades.
Most of the abandoned boats, both sailboats or motorboats, have dead engines. Without that, it’s not worth anything, and … well, they can easily fall into disrepair. Sailboat rigging isn’t drastically expensive (less than a grand for the standing rigging most boats – shrouds and suchlike, less than half that for the running rigging – ropes and such). Sails can be pricy, but if you just want to get out, not to be racing competitive, you can get half-decent used sails for very little money from the folk who do want the latest and greatest…
Which got me to thinking; a new engine in a “weekend floating caravan” is about the value of a boat in decent condition. £3-7k, typically, depending what you’re looking at. Electric conversions from commercial places will run to well over 3x that; not really viable.
What about DIY conversions?
What would they cost? How hard are they to do?
I have the perfect background to try. Mechanical engineer, decades of experience designing must-be-right-first-time bespoke kit, including electric motors and … well, everything I think I would need to do it. And a lifetime of messing around on boats, both sailing them and repairing / building / tinkering on them.
So I did some number-crunching. And scoping design work.
From propellor efficiency calculations, hull drag calcs, scoping out what components there are on the market, what might fit, what’s safe in that kind of environment, how one might approach the design and specification side of things.
It looks quite viable, with some limitations: If you want to be able to run a boat, at speed, for significant portions of the day, it’s quite possible but prohibitively expensive. If you want to cruise at a sensible speed up the river (for an hour or so) to the pub, returning the next day, then leaving her for a week to recharge slowly off a solar bank; or if you want to sail around an estuary, with a decent power motor to get you out of problems if they should occur, but again are happy to just use the boat at weekends and leave it charging for a week (regen off the prop in a tidal stream or a few solar panels) then these are completely viable.
At best, this may turn into a retirement income (advising what is possible, and what isn’t, for a given budget; specifying and/or designing and/or fitting and commissioning systems into customer boats). At worst, it’ll be more expensive than I’ve estimated, and will just be information to help get Britain’s fleet of older abandoned boats back into use, and not rotting (very slowly) on some mooring somewhere.
So. Here we are.
Let’s see how it goes…
There’s a blog, updated with the progress (and problems) I make (and run into). Hopefully helpful to others of similar mindset; and amusing to anyone else…
http://www.kiss-engineering.co.uk/boat-electric-conversions/boat-conversion-blog/