Boat Fire

[Dan]

28 minutes ago, Vaughan said:

....may want to hear about a fire that I suffered while running a hire fleet on the Thames, at Staines, back in 1991 :

T.....

 

 

 

 

Interesting to see Aquamarine, I have walked over that bridge since they closed but could never work out where the base was as at the time that basin seemed too small.  Were they also all along the towpath as it seems hard to believe they all fit in?!

[NeilB]

I'd forgotten all about that fire Vaughan!  Now that you mention it I seem to remember the shaver sockets used to get quite warm when in use.

Mines an ex hire boat and the battery wiring was not great so has been replaced.  No shaver sockets fitted and the inverter / charger is already placed very close to a hull vent.

[Vaughan]

2 minutes ago, Dan said:

Interesting to see Aquamarine, I have walked over that bridge since they closed but could never work out where the base was as at the time that basin seemed too small. 

The boatyard only ran for 3 years and the basin was later half filled in, so as to build another office block on the site.  So what you see now is less than half of the original basin.

[ExSurveyor]

I isolated this when I got the boat. Tomorrow I will remove the wiring to be on the safe side.

[Karizma]

3 hours ago, Vaughan said:

2/. Check the shaver points on your boat and make sure they are the new type, with a switch and a red warning light. The same sort of fire can be caused by inverters or battery chargers if they are not installed with good ventilation.  If not, they can overheat and may catch fire.

Thanks for sharing Vaughan.

As posted elsewhere, I've just started an upgrade on my boats wiring and as part of this I've replaced all the old Legrand fuses / holders with ST Blade Fuse Blocks / ST blade fuses, which had two old shaver sockets wired on the boat (though we've never used them). These weren't rewired into the new fuse banks as part of the upgrade, but have been left on the boat - I'll now be removing them altogether so they can never be connected back up in the future!

[Brundall1037]

This is the damage caused to Southern Crusader by a shaver socket. It was in use at the time by someone charging an electric toothbrush overnight! They were very lucky as were asleep went it went up.

[Lulu]

Thank you Vaughan and Brundall. We are now going to be removing ours at the weekend 

[grendel]

Water Rail pre dates electric razors, so I dont believe she has one (will check this evening when I get to the boat), should I replace the shaving mug just in case? (not that I ever use one).

[Smoggy]

I removed this one mainly as it took too much space in a cupboard (an open cupboard so had airflow), swmbo plugged a leccy toothbrush in to charge once and it got got pretty damn hot so glad I no longer have it aboard.

Luckily I had planned to unplug the brush when we stopped to save the batteries anyway but could have gone horribly wrong if I'd forgotten it.

[Vaughan]

There are some facts to add to this story, which I found very interesting and hope you do too.

I happened to get on very well with the Police at Egham (for reasons I shall not divulge   ) and when I showed this winding to them, they were able to have it forensically tested, to prove that it had not been melted as a result of the fire : rather that it had overheated and caused the fire. The insurers couldn't argue with that!

In the photos, you can see the gas bottles stacked on the quay behind the boats, where the fire brigade had recovered them.  But they were recovered after the fire, and after the whole back end of the boat had been burned away.  They were collected by the gas company and I was told that they were tested, re-painted and then re-used.

All 3 boats had full diesel tanks, which were not involved in the fire.  I imagine this was because they were a large volume of cold liquid, and diesel has to be heated up before it will ignite. Hence the term "compression ignition".  I suppose this large volume of liquid also kept the tanks cool and prevented them from rupturing.  There was a lot of diesel spillage afterwards, as filler pipes and other fittings had burned away.

In the boat which started the fire, all the copper gas piping and brass fittings, for 3 heaters, a cooker and a fridge, was lying around in the boat on the floorboards, as it was no longer attached to anything that had burned away.  It was still intact along all of its length and, out of curiosity, I was able to carry out a successful pressure test on it, with a water gauge. 

Gas on a boat, when installed and used correctly, is nowhere near as dangerous as we might be led to believe.

[LondonRascal]

20 hours ago, Vaughan said:

Check the shaver points on your boat and make sure they are the new type, with a switch and a red warning light. The same sort of fire can be caused by inverters or battery chargers if they are not installed with good ventilation.  If not, they can overheat and may catch fire.

 

When I bought 'Trixie' she had one of these very boxes - and being built in 1992 had seen a fair amount of use and around the side of one of the socket holes a clear brown 'burn' in the plastic where it had clearly gotten hot in the past. Some will use these to plug their rechargeable electric toothbrushes into which take a long time on charge not a few minutes an electric shaver would and I have never been too happy about that idea. I don't own an electric shaver or an electric toothbrush so it was one of the first things to go including the old florescent light fitting which it worrying shared the circuit with. 

As for the events in Wroxham, al i can say is I wonder if it had anything to do with the amount of rain that had happened in July and on the very day of the fire - water getting where it ought not and causing a short. A possibility..

[LondonRascal]

On 07/08/2023 at 21:17, oldgregg said:

Wasn’t it the split charger that failed on Belmore?

Just thinking there are quite a few things which can fail in such a way.

Of course there is gas, too. A small and very slow gas leak is likely to eventually be ignited by something.

We don’t know what caused this fire.

It was the Victron Argofet. These isolators allow simultaneous charging of two or more batteries from one alternator (or a single output battery charger), without connecting the batteries together. In the case of Belmore it began in this unit but soon got far worse when one of the wires to it, having overheated and becoming effectively an electric element melted off the outer insulation, in so doing it then 'drooped' down and came into contact with other, far smaller wires and began to melt through their insulation too. When this was complete the full Alternator output was now being sent where it should never have and all sorts of problems were arising in a chain reaction as high amp positive current was being sent down negative wires. The result was a terrible mess, Battery charger, Inverter and the Argofet itself were toast.  This followed me reporting something being amiss with the charging system and an engineer attending to it - while it took 2 days for the fire to present itself as I came onto Malthouse Broad, it may have stemmed from the wiring being loose/incorrectly wired from the time the first engineer attended the boat. I know not. What I do know is it being very worrying and panicked when you smell burning, then see smoke coming up from under the wheelhouse flooring and the first thing I did? Hit record on my camera..

 

[Vaughan]

5 minutes ago, LondonRascal said:

Some will use these to plug their rechargeable electric toothbrushes into which take a long time on charge not a few minutes an electric shaver would and I have never been too happy about that idea.

These were fitted in the late 60's, a long time before the days of mobile phones and all the other gadgets and were advertised as one of the "symbols" which were available on your luxury Blakes boat :

From Blakes catalogue of 1975.

 

 

Taken (at random) from the same 1975 catalogue.

So if the boat you wanted to hire didn't have all five symbols, it wasn't worth hiring!  At least, that was the marketing at the time.

The problem was that hirers thought they could also plug in their hair driers and overloaded the circuit, thus burning the insulation in the transformer windings.

Funnily enough, in these modern days of mobiles and I phones, the little shaver point is perfectly capable of charging them without overloading.

[marshman]

There must still be hundreds of those shaver points still on boats on the Broads and many even without the isolation switch.

Food for thought?? If they are a potential danger, I wonder why they are not included in the BSS??

[Lulu]

Same type as Smoggys. Now removed 😁

[Smoggy]

Looks like you are going to need a bigger mirror Lulu, the easy way to cover the holes.

[Lulu]

2 minutes ago, Smoggy said:

Looks like you are going to need a bigger mirror Lulu, the easy way to cover the holes.

It is a right mess. I’m looking for something to cover it up. Watch this space ….

[ExSurveyor]

I removed the wiring and left the fitting as it is on tiling. My excuse is that it adds to the character of the boat.

[Smoggy]

You could get a vinyl graphic of a shaver socket and stick it over the holes, then wait for someone to try and plug in.....

[Bluebell]

I’ve got one of these onboard Chiltern Lady, never used it since I tried to recharge an electric toothbrush, it, the shaver socket, got very hot…🥵
 

Would the best things to do be to just disconnect it, or does the wiring need to be traced all the way back and removed?

[Smoggy]

As long as you can insulate the cable ends properly just disconnect it.

You may well find it's connected into the nearest light (mine was) in which case tug the cables and see what moves, if you find it just snip the other ends.

Cables pulled out is always the best scenario but not if it takes 3 days of destruction to trace them.

[Bluebell]

Cheers, I’ll have a look tomorrow…😎

[BryanW]

You need to be aware of these shaver sockets at home as well.

The ones suitable for recharging toothbrushes (and rechargeable shavers) have a toothbrush symbol on them as in the attached photo.  It should also indicate this in the sellers description (eg Screwfix), all others should only be used for non-rechargeable shavers.

[Vaughan]

1 hour ago, BryanW said:

You need to be aware of these shaver sockets at home as well.

It has always amused me, that no electrical connections are allowed in the bathroom - where even light switches have to be on pull strings - except for the little razor plug point, right above the wash basin!

[MauriceMynah]

Yes Vaughan,  but don't forget that those sockets are low wattage and will only  electrocute you a tiny bit.