Best Apps for Narrowboat Owners in 2026

The apps every narrowboat owner actually uses

The narrowboat and canal boat app scene has come a long way. There are now genuinely solid tools for navigating the network, proving you've moved under the continuous cruising rules, keeping an eye on your battery bank, and staying safe on a remote stretch of towpath — most of them free.

What's been missing is an app that answers the question every narrowboat owner with solar actually wants answered each morning: how much power are my panels going to generate today, at wherever I happen to be moored?

This list covers four genuinely useful, non-competing apps for narrowboat owners, then the one that closes that gap.

1. Canals.UK — navigate locks, bridges, and moorings across the whole network

Best for: Route planning, finding facilities, and checking Canal & River Trust notices while cruising

Canals.UK maps all 2,000 miles of UK canals — locks, bridges, aqueducts, tunnels, water points, and moorings — overlaid with live Canal & River Trust navigation notices. It's a genuinely useful day-to-day companion on the tiller.

What it covers in the free version:

• Every UK canal mapped with locks, bridges, and facilities — water points, boatyards, launderettes, canalside pubs, local shops
• A linear diagram showing exactly where you are on a specific canal, updating with your live location
• Canal & River Trust notices for navigation restrictions, stoppages, and closures overlaid directly on the map
• "My Boat" — store your boat's relevant details for quick reference
• Estimated boat speed, sunrise/sunset times for planning your cruising day

The one-time £12 "Go Pro" upgrade adds a route planner with turn-by-turn canal directions, a daily boat log, GOV.UK stream levels, and CRT winter mooring overlays — handy if you're a continuous cruiser who wants a built-in diary of where you've been.

Available: Android & iOS | Free (Pro £12 one-time) | App Store

2. Float — Canal & River Logbook — proving you've actually moved

Best for: Continuous cruisers who need a clean record of every mooring for the Canal & River Trust

If you don't have a home mooring, you're a "continuous cruiser" — which means genuinely navigating the network and not staying in one place for more than 14 days. The Canal & River Trust's boat licensing team can and does query boaters whose pattern of movement looks too local, and a clear record of where you've moored is the easiest way to settle that conversation before it starts.

Float was built by a liveaboard continuous cruiser specifically for this:

• Drop a pin every time you moor — takes a few seconds
• Set your current spot as "Home" so you always know the way back after a few pints at the towpath pub
• See how many places you've stopped and how many miles you've covered across the year
• Export your full mooring history as a styled report if the Trust ever asks for evidence

It's free and open-source, your data stays on your device, and it solves a problem that's genuinely specific to narrowboat life — no campervan or static-home app does this job.

Available: Android & iOS | Free | float-app.com

3. Victron Connect — leisure battery and solar monitoring

Best for: Narrowboat owners running roof-mounted solar into a leisure battery bank

If you've got solar panels charging your leisure batteries — and most narrowboats running any electrics beyond basic lighting do — Victron's MPPT charge controllers and BMV battery monitors are the standard kit in the narrowboat community. Their Bluetooth companion app, Victron Connect, is genuinely excellent:

• Real-time state of charge — see your battery percentage at a glance instead of squinting at a voltage gauge
• Live solar input — exactly how many watts your roof panels are putting into the bank right now
• Historical charge and discharge graphs — spot whether your evening telly and fridge usage is outpacing what the panels bring in
• Low battery, overcharge, and temperature alerts
• Works entirely over Bluetooth — no signal needed, which matters on the remote stretches of the network

Victron Connect tells you how much power you have right now. The next app on this list tells you how much you're going to generate today — together, that's the complete picture every narrowboat solar owner needs.

Available: Android & iOS | Free (Victron hardware required) | victronenergy.com

4. what3words — the app the Canal & River Trust tells you to download

Best for: Safety on remote towpaths, locks, and rural stretches of the network

Every 3m² of the UK has a unique three-word address in what3words — and it's not a third-party suggestion, it's official Canal & River Trust guidance. The Boaters' Handbook and the Waterway Code for Anglers & Boaters both specifically recommend downloading what3words, because long stretches of towpath are genuinely difficult to describe precisely to emergency services.

Why it matters specifically for narrowboat owners:

• The Trust's own water safety advice says: if someone falls in and you're not sure exactly where you are, use what3words to give 999 your precise location
• Locks, remote rural moorings, and tunnels are exactly the kind of spots that are hard to describe accurately under pressure
• Works offline once downloaded — critical on stretches with no signal
• Takes 30 seconds to set up and you'll hopefully never need it — until the one day you really do

For anyone working a flight of locks alone, mooring somewhere remote overnight, or just generally being sensible about water safety, this is the one free download the Trust itself puts in front of every boater.

Available: Android & iOS | Free | what3words.com

5. Sun Hours — solar forecast that follows your boat down the cut

Developer: AndyHQ, London | Platform: Android & iOS | Free — no account required

Here's the app that ties the narrowboat power stack together. You know where you've moored and that you're genuinely cruising (Float). You know how much charge is in the bank right now (Victron Connect). What you don't know — until now — is how much solar you're actually going to generate today, at this specific mooring.

That's what Sun Hours does. And for narrowboat owners specifically, the Travel Mode feature is the reason this app belongs alongside the other four.

Travel Mode: built for a boat that moves every 14 days

A standard solar forecast app calibrates to one fixed postcode — fine if you're moored permanently, useless if you're continuously cruising. Under Canal & River Trust rules, a genuine continuous cruiser moves regularly. Your latitude shifts, your cloud patterns shift, the angle of the sun on your roof panels shifts. A forecast tied to last month's mooring is wrong by the time you've cruised twenty miles up the cut.

Travel Mode fixes this. Open Sun Hours, tap Travel Mode, and either:

Use your GPS location — the app locks to wherever you're currently moored and recalculates instantly.

Drop a pin — useful for checking ahead what generation to expect at tomorrow's planned mooring before you've even untied the ropes.

Once Travel Mode is active, your entire forecast — today's kWh, the 7-day outlook, the hourly generation curve — recalculates for that exact spot. When you cruise on to the next mooring, switch it again. One tap, forecast updated.

The hourly curve: know your charging window before you turn the engine off

On a partly cloudy day on the cut, your useful solar window might only run two or three hours. The hourly chart in Sun Hours shows exactly when your roof panels are going to peak at your current mooring — so you know whether to leave the fridge compressor running through the afternoon or whether you're better off bringing the engine back on for an hour this evening.

For anyone deciding whether tonight's mooring spot, under trees or in open water meadow, is actually going to top the battery up, this is the single most useful screen in the app.

What a typical narrowboat solar day looks like

A 300W roof array in open mooring on a clear UK summer day:

• Peak hours (11am–3pm): 220–280W continuous — meaningfully tops up a 200Ah leisure bank in a few hours
• Morning and evening shoulders: 60–150W — enough to keep the fridge and water pump ticking over
• Daily total, clear day: 1.2–1.6 kWh at a southern mooring; 0.9–1.2 kWh in the north or under cloud

Moor under overhanging trees — common on the more scenic stretches — and those numbers drop significantly. That's exactly the kind of local variation Sun Hours accounts for once you've dropped a pin at your actual mooring rather than relying on a generic average.

⬇ Download Sun Hours — free on Android and iOS

Get Sun Hours on Google Play →

Get Sun Hours on the App Store →

The narrowboat app stack: putting it together

Each does a different job, and none overlap. Canals.UK gets you down the cut. Float proves you genuinely moved. Victron tells you the state of the bank. what3words keeps you findable if it ever goes wrong. Sun Hours tells you how much sun you're going to catch wherever you've tied up tonight.

Run all five and that's the complete narrowboat power and navigation stack — for free.