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After our 2 small spring cruises we knew we would have some time at our home mooring to get on with various jobs. We have avoided cruises in July and August for a couple of years as the canals tend to fill up with aggressive Dutch boaters taking all the available moorings and shouting at any boaters that get there first. Anyway, we had plenty of jobs on the list.
The biggest and most important for this year was to get a gas certificate to complete our TRIWV European certification. We had failed the gas test last year because the pipe entered the boat in an area common to the engine room and there were numerous joints through the boat with the potential to leak. We had used 3m lengths of pipe for a 22m run to the cooker.
We bought a 25m coil of thick walled 15mm copper pipe and then set about running it through 3 steel bulkheads and a partition wall, in order to get a straight run with no joints. We avoided the engine room by going directly forward through the wheelhouse and lockers and then through the accommodation.
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Here Lawrence is feeding the pipe through the paint locker with 'drilled out' bulkhead fittings loosely in place in each. Drilling holes in steel in a steel box in midsummer was hot sweaty work!
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Lorna got all these pieces together so we could have 2 bottles connected with a change over valve followed by regulator, bubble leak connector, electric isolation valve, test point and then off to the cooker with no joints.
It took 2 of us to handle the copper coil and push the pipe right through the boat with no joints and then to make 2 gentle curves to bring the pipe to the back of the cooker. Quite a fete we thought but well worth it. When we got the Belgian gas tester along he liked the system very much, used his very sensitive gas sniffing machine on it and then passed it. Hooray, we had completed the TRIWV completely and could safely say that Waterdog would not end up worthless because of regulations!
There was one heart stopping moment when we showed off the flame failure device on the new cooker by blowing out the gas flame and then watching in horror as the flame carried on! Two or three seconds seemed like much more as we waited for it to cut out, then it did, phew!