Quote:
Originally Posted by Hopeso13
Would love to know more about your lifestyle. What sort of running costs are involved living aboard a narrow boat etc.
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It's said that narrowboating is either an expensive hobby or a cheap way of living. I pay around £720 a year for the navigation licence, around £750 a year for my farm mooring (this is very cheap though, a marina would cost double that), and around £200 a year for insurance. Most things on a narrowboat are charged "per foot" so a longer boat would cost correspondingly more.
When I'm on the mooring in the Winter I use a couple of litres of red diesel a day to charge the batteries and heat the domestic water, red diesel is 90p a litre from the fuel boat, and a £10 bag of coal for the stove lasts me 4-5 days. I also burn untreated pallet wood, which is free, if I have the time to break pallets up.
Then there's maintenance, which is cheap because I do it myself (£10 for 5 litres of oil and £2 for an oil filter every 6 weeks and about £8 for fuel filters twice a year. Boating starts to cost serious money when you have to pay other people, especially boatyards, to do work.
When I'm out cruising, my engine (a BMC 1.5 ) uses around a litre of diesel an hour so 5-6 litres a day.
So all in all,my standing costs are around £2,000 a year, and I couldn't even get a room share around here for that. However, anyone thinking of boat life purely to save money would probably find it difficult (periodically emptying the toilet isn't exactly pleasant) , you have to want to do it for its own sake.