Category: Travel

 

 

 

 

 

We switched to lithium (LiFePO4) on our narrowboat this winter as we needed to replace our five lead acids and were alerted by a fellow boater to two second hand Valence U-Charge U27-12XP 130Ah packs at the ideal time. They’re about £1400 each new and we got them for £350 each, with 60 cycles on them according to the internal BMS. They were originally in an electric delivery van project (with 20 other packs) but the firm went bust. I wired them in parallel.They balance themselves internally and show their status with an LED which normally flashes green every 20 seconds.

Our boat is gas-free (electric cooking, built-in diesel generator) and we have high power demands – we routinely use a 1200W kettle on our inverter. We are not typical users (which itself justifies the higher outlay).

For us, our packs have freed us from many of the headaches of lead acid leisure batteries which I summarise as:

– slow to charge which wastes diesel, yet:
– having to think about charging up to 100% frequently except with mid-summer solar
– sulphate when left discharged
– can’t deliver much current (without a big bank of them)
– self discharge over time
– less available capacity: should only be discharged to 50% of capacity to preserve life
– heavy

though they they’ve given us other challenges:

– Resting voltage doesn’t vary much as you drain them: you can’t really tell the state of charge (at least between about 10% which is too low for comfort and 80%) from the voltage unless they’re under heavy load – a battery monitor with Ah counter helps. We don’t worry too much as I’ve installed some protective circuits which stop them being completely flattened by disconnecting the loads and turning off the remote switch of the inverter if the voltage goes below about 11.5v
– should not be held at high voltage – a problem when charging off the alternator during long cruises, although lead acid float voltages around 13.6v are fine
– prefer to be left partly discharged
– ruined if charged (even a few amps of solar) when below 0 deg C so in the recent cold weather we ran our Webasto which warms up the engine bay before thinking about charging.

We think of our lithiums as fine china plates. They should last well (good for conservatively 3000 cycles – eight years if we flattened and charged them every day) unless the resting voltage of the pack drops below 10v. Then it’s game over, like dropping a plate. One bad flattening and that’s basically it. I’m going to add some protection from high voltage too, which will quickly kill our batteries as well. We accept that we’re part of our battery management system!

If you want to know anything specific about living practically with LiFePO4 I’m happy to answer questions here.

Our jaded Singaporean friends at dinner on Saturday had advised us to use the Number 2 bus as a sightseeing option, and to take it to the end of the route, Changi Village, near the airport. This was the site of the infamous Changi prison, controlled by the Japanese during the war and where many atrocities were committed. Changi itself is now home to a Singapore Air Force base and the international airport as well as Changi prison, which is a very large new and high-tech facility, but Singapore deliberated oversized it and it is currently only a quarter full. They are intending to move many prisoners here from other places around the island. prison. Changi is also the jumping-off point for a number of boat tours, but the Singaporean anti-enthusiasts had rather dampened my enthusiasm for visiting Palau Ubin, (the famous “granite island” and home to some villages not unlike those of the 60s, before the mass expansion of building on the island of Singapore).

We emerged after an hour of travel on an air-conditioned bus into the most oppressive heat, right opposite the hawker centre. Neither of us was hungry, so we wandered through before crossing the main road and checking out a parade of cafes and restaurants. Mum espied an older, British couple chatting to a Singaporean man outside a small, but smart looking restaurant. We discovered that “Charlie” owned and ran the bar and he gave us helpful tips as I sat and drank exorbitant (as we discovered) imported beer. he advised us to take the 29 bus to an MRT (metro) station nearby and take a train back into town. After a sizable lunch in the hawker centre, we waited for a 29, letting many 2’s go by, though they probably would have been as good. I stood and chatted with a lady called Janice a former nurse, originally from Saskatchewan, now of Edinburgh from where she is sent worldwide to lecture on nurse management. We finally made it to the MRT station complex and after a little exploration found the platforms and pushed down to Harbourfront – the gateway to… Sentosa!

I’m sitting outside a shack-like house, listening to animal noises from the bush, maintaining my phone (backups and upgrades), drinking homebrew (with proper printed labels), waiting for Rotary dinner. Mum is naturally appalled by the location, which is running damp (there’s a small creek eight feet from my chair as I type) but I think it’s really rather fun, and much nicer than our noisy near to Central Station, Sydney. It’s well-located but far from plush. Everything is so expensive, from accommodation to food.

Sentosa is a beach resort on reclaimed land, easy dashing distance of Singapore’s municipal centre. It offers such delights as a viewing tower, indoor skydiving centre, marine life centre and two beaches. Inexplicably, the place is highly recommended everywhere and is accessible by a variety of methods in ascending order of expense: a “boardwalk”, monorail and cable car.

What they don’t tell you about Sentosa are all the things you rapidly learn when you arrive. Yes, there are beaches, but they were delivered on a truck at some point in the 90s. The sea looks none too clean, but then raising one’s gaze causes it to fall apon what looks like a substantial industrial shipping port across the bay, so that is far from surprising. Existential delights, like “the southernmost point of mainland Asia” and a number of dubious takeaway restaurants await the weary traveller

Singapore, Singapore; half sanitized, half raw for sure.

Singapore is a nanny-state plugged onto the bottom of one limb of Malaysia. The bits they want you to see are spectacular and quite artificial. The ethnic group regions of the city/island are not quite as clean, twice as busy, half as predictable, a half as well served by the public transport and two thirds of the price of the upmarket areas. That’s a summary, and here’s how today went.

We did a lot of walking, but first we left the hotel to have an argument at the bus stop on the main road. I’m very much a “let’s get on a bus going the right way and then we’ll sort it out later” kind of person. Mum is more inclined to plan before leaving the hotel. No, the process of selecting and catching the bus you think you need isn’t easy, especially without a route map (does such a thing exist here?), but the trick very broadly is to find a road you want to visit on your map, find it on the right-hand column of the bus list to see which numbers will take you along that road (but which end of the road? which direction?), get on the bus when it arrives, ask the driver for the price to your desired stop and have him pluck a figure out the air, normally about S$1.20 or more, then use your map to keep track of the route so that you know when you’ve arrived in the approximate area, then ring the bell and get off.

Mum wanted to go to the Bay Gardens, a beautiful, ultramodern eco park on reclaimed land by the Marina Bay area and the bus dropped us off between two impossibly huge buildings (a 5* hotel, the Marina Bay Sands and the “Shoppes”, or mall) and a very busy main road. We finally made it up a lift to a walkway over this road, which allowed us to walk through the upper reaches of the hotel and out the other side, putting us in view of the most remarkable “Supertrees”. These, we discovered, were all part of a water, air and biomass recycling effort which uses prunings from a number of municipal sites to run a biomass boiler which in turn powers the dehumidifiers in the two huge greenhouses you can see in the distance in some of these shorts.

Poor Mum was truly exhausted with achy feet. I started a beer and some work, but soon handed the laptop over, with the words “I’m too tired to do this”, and fell asleep before the can was finished!

 

 

Settled in the hotel, we stepped out and more or less across the road to a food centre. This one was clearly intended to look like a hawker centre, but it had a "big commerce" feel about it. I ate two dishes: some smoked duck and pork with rice, then lots of veg and tofu from another stall. I was eating vegetables that I've never eaten before, some tangy, some crunchy, interspersed with tofu in every configuration possible – balls, in a slice of sweet pepper, in flavoured slices. Mum had a very safe-looking prawn and vegetable noodle soup dish. Thoroughly overfed, we waddled down the main road, loosely in the direction of the Raffles Hotel. Passing it, we saw a single police officer off his motorcycle and beckoning to various lanes in a huge intersection. Everyone was very obediently stopping or moving on his command. He was allowing a large cavalcade of white vehicles and state cars to turn left. He then jumped back on his bike and continued to the entrance to Raffles. We were walking that way to follow our route "round the block" so we quickly came across the entourage pulling into the turning circle. It transpired that the queen of the Netherlands was paying a visit. We have a photograph of all the police bikes parked outside the hotel. It seemed all of the officers were invited in as well. There were more than 10 motorcycles parked up on the main road!

The walk back was uneventful except for picking up a drink at a 7 Eleven store. Two for the price of one on Pink Dolphin bottled drinks. One was peach flavoured with added vitamins. The other was enriched with… collagen! Well, that will put paid to any early onset wrinkles!

Too tired to pester locals in the bars and no hotel bar, so I will retire now. Breakfast at 0830 tomorrow. I will be wearing sandals all day, I think. We plan to go to the marina and Chinatown.