Our aim is to build completely sustainable, carbon-neutral, live-aboard house boats. Now that we have managed to get 90% of our propulsion and electrical energy from the sun, we have almost completely negated the need to burn fossil fuels. However, this relies on your boat laying in a south facing position and still won’t allow you to cruise throughout the winter.
Customers who are continuous cruisers and living in central London, find sunny moorings hard to come by and often need to move their boat every 2 weeks. A simple remedy for this, is a small back-up generator running very occasionally.
We delivered a boat recently to a loch in Ireland where we were unsure how much daylight (free energy) they would benefit from. Wind turbines need a constant breeze, so don’t perform well in a city or in between buildings - but Loch Erne is a very exposed location with uninterrupted wind coming over the water almost all year round - so our solution was a 1200w wind turbine mounted on a mast, which, so far, its going extremely well.
To bolster the heating capacity of a boat in the winter we use recycled eco logs which are made from compressed hardwood shavings, although this is burning a wood by-product, the original tree grew for many decades absorbing carbon, so with this type of fuel, in effect we are part of a carbon-cancelling cycle.
Other things we've done to make our canals boats sustainable throughout the 4 main winter months is to triple the standard insulation and add triple glazed windows - containing whatever heat energy we have created and our heat recovery ventilation system helps keep the air fresh clean and warm. We're also experimenting with water source heat pumps to be even more sustainable.
