A couple of years ago (gee, has it been that long?) we pointed out Nick's Canal Route Planner. A recent comment points out the new Narrowboats.org site, which I have enjoyed looking around.

Not only do they seem to have a detailed route planning tool, there is also an extensive gallery of British canal pictures, and (for the boat-builders/designers among us) a very neat, interactive narrowboat layout tool. read more »

Jason King at the Bristol Fashion: life afloat blog points us to this neat site... something I hadn't considered is all of the various bridge designs in the British canal system. read more »

British Waterways has a couple of websites covering their organization (they maintain the British Canal system) and a "leisure" site that provides information such as cruising guides, boaters information and other things geared around the use and enjoyment of the canals themselves. read more »

Another British site dealing with electric boats. They have an interesting website with various boats and electric boating supplies (batteries, chargers, etc.). Might be worth a look. Seems like the British with their canal and river system are well along with their electric boat designs. read more »

The Electric Boat Association is a U.K. based, non-profit organization that any of us interested in electric power/electric boats should check out. They have a nice web site with vendor information (mostly geared around European suppliers, but in this internet age that's easy to deal with), technical hints, member pages, information on solar installations, picture galleries, etc. read more »

A British firm that specializes in supplying solar systems (on-board and propulsion power) for canal cruisers (narrow boats and wider).

There are apparently quite a few electric powered narrowboats cruising the U.K. canals now... slick. 

Thanks to a post on the Electric Boats mailing list for the pointer and some ballpark info:

Ball park figures are about 3Kwatts to drive a 40 foot boat at the canal speed limit of 4mph. about 8 Kwatts for river use. Reckoning on about 1K watt hour from a 100Amp hour battery its easy to calculate how many batteries you need for a given range.

Chris S

Oxford England

Solar Power books available from Amazon.

Jason King over on the Bristol Fashion: life afloat site points out this great U.K. canal cruise planning software... worth a look if you are going to be using those waterways, or just want to dream about it :-)

Welcome to Nick's Canal Route Planner - Canalplan AC. A comprehensive guide to the UK's inland waterways, it plans journeys, calculates the length (distance, number of locks, time taken etc) of your trip and shows gazetteer information on places along the way (pubs, shops and museums). Canalside events you might pass are listed. If you have never used the software before, I recommend that you read the introduction before going any further.

Books related to this topic.