the worlds gone mad

As I travel further north on the canals the mobile signal coverage is gradually getting worse so I decided to build a monitoring solutions to help with deciding where to moor. My initial idea was to use an Intel NUC or RaspberryPi with a 12v PSU, but then a friend told me about how he was monitoring his home lab using kubernetes on an old android phone, it sounded like the perfect solution.

At this stage of the build internally there is only really the bedroom, snags and trims (windows, ceiling edges and doors) left to do. I am currently in Australia having a bit of RnR so this is a reflective post to show the build at its present state and go through the things I have learnt along the way. I could plan all I like but as I haven’t lived on a boat before there was always going to be a few wrong design decisions.

Unless you plan to live by candle light and bathe in the canal you are going to need electrics and hot water. The two main players when it comes to boat electrics are Victron and Mastervolt, I went for victron as their whole eco-system seems a lot more advanced and customisable (are a lot more guides, examples and advise readily available online). In terms of hot water and heating a calorifier is the only real sensible option, for the diesel heater I chose Webasto over Eberspacher as I liked how they how they have incorporated the use of Heatmiser thermostat controllers.

You can only live for so long on laughing cow, pot noodles, soup and beans on toast, the boat diet is good for losing weight but not for your wellbeing. I got lucky with the weather as winter was pretty mild up until late October but when it turned you certainly did feel the cold on the boat. You would have to be crazy to try and survive on a boat in winter without a stove or some form of heating.

Now I had a design and a half empty shell it was time to get work. The biggest problem with working on a boat is space, you are forever moving things and constantly tidying up. All the materials had to be orderd to arrive just in time for when they were needed as there is no space on the boat to store them. The remoteness of the marina and not having a car didn’t help, I wasted a lot of hours getting local buses to go hire a van or waiting on deliveries.

I purposely bought a boat that needed work so that I could customise it to my needs and learn how everything works. The wooden interior was dated and gloomy, it only had 1 DC socket, no working AC (no fuse board or inverter), no hot water (water heater broken) and a rusted up stove with 1 radiator run off it. After 5 months of hardship and an ever decreasing bank balance whether that was a good idea is debatable…..