Electric boating
amp it up Ampère is based on a BCN tug-style shell and has a deeper-than-usual draught.
Malcolm Bridge, member of IWA’s Sustainable Boating Group, shares his experiences of building and cruising an advanced electric narrowboat My wife, Barbara, and I own Ampère, a 57ft 6in BCN tug-style narrowboat with an innovative electric propulsion system. It was completed in 2015 but I have a long history of boating, which started with family holidays on the Thames in the late 1950s. By the ’70s, I’d hired narrowboats on the canals with university friends and purchased a 30ft steel shell to fit out myself. The idea for the electric boat started back in the ’70s when a few of us were working on our boats at the same time, sharing just one socket. This used to trip fairly frequently, and in those days the chandlery where the power could be reset closed on Saturdays at lunchtime until the following Monday. I mulled over the prospect that if I ever built my own boat again I’d have a generator so that this didn’t keep happening. I also remember reading that electric motors were good at turning propellers – something that I filed in the back of my mind. My next boat was actually a 30ft Sea Otter shell that I bought in 2003. I never gave up on the idea of going electric, though, and the experience of fitting out two craft gave me a good working knowledge of boat systems. After Barbara and I got together in 2006, we consolidated our resources and realised we had enough money to seriously consider having a boat built. My training is as a chemist, although I spent more time doing engineering in the textile industry, including control systems for special purpose machines than Summer 2020 017-19 electric AH.indd 17
Barbara and Malcolm cruising Ampère in 2016. The solar panels have since been removed.
anything else. I thus have a decent background in electrics, so that all stood me in good stead when I started doing the research for Ampère.
Electrical experiment The shell was built by Roger Farrington and the fit-out was done by Wharf House Narrowboats. When Tim, the electrical engineer, and I put our heads together, we came up with the drive design between us. Tim’s very conservative and I had to twist his arm a few times to adopt technology that wasn’t 20 years old. On the other hand, he has the practical experience that stopped me doing stupid things, like putting the inverter under the bed where it would have cooked us or even set on fire. I’d done a bit of work with programmable logic controls (small industrial computers) and I would have used one of those to control all of the electrical systems on the boat. Tim wasn’t familiar with them and wanted to use individual units so, as he was doing the work, I let him. I think we ended up with a boat that wasn’t quite as good as it could have been as a result, but it still works very well. Undoubtedly, it was an experiment in designing an electric boat. When Ampère was launched in 2015, it was the most advanced craft of its kind on the IWA Waterways |
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16/04/2020 14:56
