Pollution

[Wussername]

http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/politics/transport_secretary_s_diesel_car_warning_as_norwich_battles_air_pollution_1_4869316

Is it conceivable that the above will have an impact on diesel craft on the broads in the future?

Andrew

Edited January 31, 2017 by Wussername

[Vaughan]

They are certainly a lot safer than petrol, in the confines of a boat.

Don't forget that all diesels on the Broads have wet exhausts, so the particulates are being washed into the water rather than coming out into the air.

I don't know whether that makes it any better but it certainly makes it different.

You'll be alright though, because you prefer quanting!

[Regulo]

Probably never! Have you seen the price of their cars?

[Vaughan]

Go on then - what's Tesia tech?

[Wussername]

12 minutes ago, Vaughan said:

They are certainly a lot safer than petrol, in the confines of a boat.

Don't forget that all diesels on the Broads have wet exhausts, so the particulates are being washed into the water rather than coming out into the air.

I don't know whether that makes it any better but it certainly makes it different.

You'll be alright though, because you prefer quanting!

I think that we can both remember the times when petrol boats would catch fire regularly. Lift the engine cover off with a woodbine on the go and woosh away it went.

Don't understand your comment about particle being washed away in the water by a wet exhaust system. If that is the case why has technology not taken advantage of this and introduced such an inbuilt filter system on say commercial vehicles. 

As for quanting I would have difficulty in lifting the pole let alone walking from Ranworth to Wroxham on a day with no wind.

Andrew

[Wussername]

Oh! By the way Vaughan I was down at Ranworth last week and lots of piling work is going on, together with all the electrical charging posts being removed and replaced. Will take several days by all accounts. Think it is going to take place late Feb early March.

Andrew

[grendel]

51 minutes ago, Jonzo said:

As someone who follows EV progress fairly closely, I'd actually really like to see a boat with Tesla tech replacing diesel. But that's decades away, I think.

I have been looking at the Zero http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/ and wondering If I can afford one for work - one of the few affordable electric vehicles with the range to get me to work and back.

[grendel]

about 125 miles a day, but could possibly get a recharge at work

[MauriceMynah]

Please gentlemen, let us not forget that electric cars are NOT green, In fact the running of an electric car is more polluting that running an internal combustion engine. The only difference is where the pollution is, ie, near the power station.

the power loss between the power station and the charging point is massive. the power to provide the charge is almost all from fossil fuel, given that most of these vehicles are charged overnight when all; our lovely solar panels are doing b****r all.

Do not confuse the political agenda with facts. They do not equate.

For the motor car there is little to choose between petrol and diesel for efficiency these days but should the private diesel car become the small minority group, the tax on diesel could be reduced significantly saving a whole stash on freight costs.

For boats there will be little difference politically, so no action would be profitable in that area.

[BryanW]

My son is paying the price for buying diesel, his DPF is blocked and it will cost him nearly £2000 for a replacement which is more than his car is worth.  His commute is about 30miles per day on single carriageway 'A' roads so not high enough speed to regenerate the DPF unless he stays in 2nd gear, he is now looking at a petrol replacement.  Everybody had better hope that the EU and our government don't try and get pollution control on boats at Broads speeds.

[grendel]

1 hour ago, Jonzo said:

Quite a distance then! Would a used Leaf be any good?

possibly, but I have to bear in mind that if the range drops to 80% it would be touch and go (80% range being the point that manufacturers recognise the drop in range as significant) add to that the fact the older cars have less range than the newer ones, 

[smellyloo]

I think the main issue regarding pollution from diesel is that it is worse in built up areas within cities & towns & this is where the majority of people live.

Moving over to electric powered vehicles would certainly reduce the pollution in these areas and contribute to reduced costs in the health service for treating respiratory illness.

It is easy to climb onboard the petrolhead "Jeremy Clarkeson" bandwagon and claim that electric is more polluting than deisel but if I lived/walked or worked on a busy city centre street I would rather have it filled with queing electrically powered vehicles than filled with dirty, pollution belching deisel cars.

[TheQ]

wussername 

New Diesel cars do have a Diesel Particulate Filters,  also you may have noticed petrol stations selling ADBLUE  wihich is injected into diesel exhausts to reduce pollution as well. As usual politicians etc are jumping on the band wagon just in time for most of it to disappear as the DPFs come in. They do have problems however, see BryanW's reply, they have to be regularly heated through to burn themselves clean,

 It's been shown that much of the diesel pollution in towns comes not from cars but Buses, taxi's and local delivery vans...try walking around the bottom of the castle when all those massed ranks of buses are sitting there ticking over keeping themselves warm...

[Vaughan]

I bow to Jonzo's knowledge of electric cars but in electric boats, don't think we haven't already tried it.

There is a great difference between a day launch - which is a small, fine entry hull with no other electric appliances and can easily toodle around Hickling Broad for the day on one charge of batteries - and a motor cruiser with living accommodation.

Horsepower is also expressed in Kilowatts and in the case of the Nanni 4190 this is around 29 Kilowatts. This is the electric power needed to push a 36ft, wide beam, displacement hulled cruiser at around 5 MPH.

I have done extensive calculations (as part of my job) into the domestic use of electrics on a boat and the average modern hire boat (a few years ago) will use around 220 amp/hours a day on 12 volts - if it doesn't have a television. This compares with the good old Wilds Caribbean, with gas cooking, heating and fridge, which used less than 30 Amp/hours per day. In fact, they didn't even have separate domestic batteries!

Nowadays with all the inverters (not including electric cooking) I am sure you are talking of well over 300 A/H per day just on domestics, before you start calculating the power required for actual electric propulsion!

This has all got to come from somewhere, in other words shore power points (here he goes again) but these need to be high power ones, for electric powered boats.

So imagine the "marketing hype" - the BA announce they are going green and installing power points on moorings for electric boats. There will be 2 at Ranworth, 2 at Wroxham, one on the town quay at Horning and next year, we will be expanding the scheme to Acle and possibly Coltishall. So you will be able to visit the main centres in your "green" hire boat and charge your batteries. But what happens if Richardsons let out 10 new electric boats out of Stalham on a Saturday and they all want to moor at Ranworth for the night?

There will be several breakdown vans on the Malsters' Quay on the Sunday morning. What's more, a diesel engine can usually be mended on the river bank by a mechanic in a van. The only way to mend an electric cruiser with flat batteries is to tow it home.

Please don't think I am being flippant : I have seen this tried on the Canal du Midi with 2 modern electric cruisers - built on the Broads - and the full co-operation of the canal authorites. It required hundreds of thousands of investment, by all concerned, and it didn't work.

I am glad to say I advised my boss not to get involved in this, and he was always glad he didn't!

 

[MauriceMynah]

Smellyloo, Personally I wouldn't trust Mr Clarkson to tell me the time, let alone which car is better than which other. My views on engines, pollution and what smut goes where is based on lifes experience and schoolboy physics.

4 minutes ago, Jonzo said:

But if you removed diesel cars from the equation altogether, then tackled the commercial vehicles too....

...then all vehicles in each city would be electric. How the hell could they ALL be charged? It's not the vehicles you need to remove to solve the problem, it's the need for them. Do that and you've cracked it. You have also changed society as we know it, industry as we know it and commerce as we know it.

Good luck matey.  

[MauriceMynah]

For as long as people want/need to move around there will be a need for transport. That can in some places be public, but anywhere even vaguely rural, it will mean a personal version. I live in Hertfordshire, but my boat is in Norfolk. Yes I can use the train, but I'm not sure how often the bus goes from Wroxham station to the Pleasure Boat Hickling.

We cannot get away from this issue of transport, all we can do is to aim for efficiency. If it is the populations health you are worried about then we need to increase awareness of Health and Efficiency. I have no idea how this can be done.

 

Sorry Jonzo, there is a limit to how long I can be serious on any subject... I just overran it.  

[Vaughan]

Just now, MauriceMynah said:

Sorry Jonzo, there is a limit to how long I can be serious on any subject... I just overran it.  

I thought you had been doing exceptionally well!

[grendel]

about 20 years ago I was advising anyone who would listen, that before you could reliably get electric vehicles introduced, that you had to get the infrastructure in place to charge them. this would mean that at a minimum 10% of parking spaces in every car park would have to be reserved for electric vehicles and charging points introduced. It is only now that I am seeing residential developments going in that have an allowance of vehicle charging points (some to their credit have a surprising percentage of electric charging points to parking bays).

all those years back I worked for the local electricity authority, and I said that it would need to be them that took the initiative and installed the charging points, one of the benefits of this being the income generated by all those people using our electricity.

Sadly Nobody listened.

Also at the same time I said that in ten to fifteen years there would be a shortage of electrical engineers as they were all getting older, but nobody was training up new apprentices to the role. 

Once again nobody listened. we now face a shortage of experienced electrical engineers.

I also predicted that unless we started building new cleaner technology power stations (10 years ago now) they would not be completed in time to take over from the existing (dirty smelly polluting) ones that are reaching end of life.

Well surprisingly- nobody listened,

So now we are running polluting power stations that cannot easily be modified to burn cleaner, and that are running into the first decade of afterlife - ie after their designed lifespan, yet we are still not building enough power stations to replace them.

I also said that smaller local power stations was the route to go,  local so as to reduce transmission losses, small, so that there was more diversity in the system, many small power stations- one goes down, can take up the load, few big ones, one goes down- the whole system crashes. Sadly it seems nobody wants a power station anywhere near their back yard.

If you think a boat kicks out a lot of pollution, then you should see the figures from the chimneys of old coal and oil fired power stations- one I used to visit had a monitor the figures were displayed on, and the SO4 coming out of the chimneys was always in the red, and well over the limits they were supposed to be emitting, despite having just had new scrubbers installed in the chimneys

[Regulo]

Well, I own a plug-in hybrid EV, and as far as public charging goes - forget it! For all the reasons given above, it's not going to be viable, especially if all the manufacturers are going to concentrate on EV's. I read in the paper that Torotrak, a company in the cutting edge of systems to make Diesel and petrol engines more efficient, have halted development, as all the major car companies are directing their efforts at EV's. As Maurice M says (in one of his serious moments), the pollution is still there, in the manufacturing process and electrical power generation, you just move it from the streets.

[JennyMorgan]

The Broads Authority, with all the very best intentions in the world launched an initiative to install charging points around the Broads in a move to encourage electrical propulsion. All very wise, or so it seemed at the time, but all that has happened is that boats, by and large, have remained with or returned to diesel power, with all the environmental problems that were there before. On top of that they now plug in, not to recharge, but in order to power all the comforts of home thus overall carbon emissions have been increased rather than decreased. Oh well, it was a good idea at the time

[JennyMorgan]

1 hour ago, MauriceMynah said:

For as long as people want/need to move around there will be a need for transport. That can in some places be public, but anywhere even vaguely rural, it will mean a personal version. I live in Hertfordshire, but my boat is in Norfolk. Yes I can use the train, but I'm not sure how often the bus goes from Wroxham station to the Pleasure Boat Hickling.

We cannot get away from this issue of transport, all we can do is to aim for efficiency. If it is the populations health you are worried about then we need to increase awareness of Health and Efficiency. I have no idea how this can be done.

Sorry Jonzo, there is a limit to how long I can be serious on any subject... I just overran it.  

Now everyone is aware of health & efficiency, and what one legged, nude ladies look like!.

 

[Timbo]

4 hours ago, Jonzo said:

Would a used Leaf be any good?

A bit unsightly as it would leave skidmarks! 

Once upon a time we used to have fleets of electric delivery vehicles in every town and city. Milk Floats!

I will be sticking with diesel thank you very much, both in my boats and in my next car. I currently have the petrol version of the QQ which replaced my old diesel one. I'm going back to diesel...simple economy. I use twice as much petrol as I did diesel.

 

[Regulo]

21 minutes ago, JennyMorgan said:

Now everyone is aware of health & efficiency, and what one legged, nude ladies look like!.

 

A scan from your complete set of copies, JM?

[Timbo]

I think this electric vehicle would be the perfect commuter vehicle for an NBN forumite like Grendel! Come on G it has to be your next project!

 

[Wussername]

44 minutes ago, Regulo said:

A scan from your complete set of copies, JM?

1947! I must say that you must have subscribed to this magazine at a very early age JM.