Money saving experiments

As if boating isn't inexpensive enough, boaters tend to be always looking for new ways to save money. A friend sent me a post from the canal forum about the exhorbitant price of toilet fluid and how to get around paying so much.

We spent many months trying out various brands when we first moved to the boat and the one thing I hated was the chemical smell, especially as our bedroom is very close to the bathroom and I would sometimes wake up in the night to that horrible chemical smell. We eventually found an organic fluid which didn't smell too bad, but then it wasn't too good at covering other smells if you know what I mean!

At the moment we are using a fluid which we get from our local chandlery, but bearing in mind that we empty our toilet cassette every other day, we seem to be buying quite a lot of it and it is quite expensive stuff.

The suggestion on the forum is that bio washing powder and a little washing soda does the job just as well. I bought both for a grand total of £3 from our local pound shop and they should last for about two months which beats spending over a tenner every three weeks for the blue fluid. You put in a couple of teaspoonfuls of washing powder and soda every time you empty the cassette. We have only just started trialling this, but so far our toilet smells of fresh laundry, so it is all looking quite promising. I will keep you posted.

We went for a lovely bird watching walk this morning as the weather was so lovely. I got a couple of nice but small pics of the birds:

Also one of a swan in flight:

And some grazing:

We walked along some lovely country lanes:

And the scenery was lovely:

What really pleased me was the discovery of a veritable wood graveyard! I had encountered lots of wood washed up on these shores before, but have never seen so much as we found today. It was all along the shore line and stretched for a couple of miles:

We collected as much as we could carry and I spent the afternoon chopping wood and filling the other wood store:

The beauty of the wood washed up along the estuary is that is has already been seasoned from being so long in the sea, so we can burn it straight away. I told Jack's owner about the find and we plan to go and fill a couple of car loads with it. It will take us a whole day probably, but we will be able to fill the middle wood store:

It means that we will then have another year where we haven't spent anything on wood. Our first year we bought logs quite regularly, but this year we haven't had to buy any logs or kindling, which has saved us a couple of hundred pounds.

I have had a lovely week off, but am back to work tomorrow and at the end of the week I am off to a conference for a few days, so I probably won't be posting for over a week now.

I'll be back soon

Al:)