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Showing content with the highest reputation on 23/02/12 in all areas

  1. Not an issue, I didn't think it rude, just uniformative and not addressing the question, as indeed is the edit. 10% is not walking on the edge, it's where most equipment is designed to operate, that is unarguable, just look at the tech spec. Perhaps an example may illustrate my point better; let's take a 7a load which could be anything from a largish lighting circuit to a bilge pump, then let's assume a 10% voltage drop under load, to support that would require 4mm2 cabling over a 15m round trip battery positive to battery negative. Now lets go for a 3% drop, to support that would require 16mm2 cable from battery positive to battery negative, that is extremely heavy cable and I doubt it is what is present on any non critical circuit using on such loads, certainly I have yet to see it despite many years experience.Most,if not all narrow boats I have worked on it is more common to find 2.5mm2 supplying such circuits which really is small, I reiterate 10% is not on the edge because that's what most 12vdc (so called)equipment is designed to operate at. Even the falacy that heaters require loads of volts to start is a nonsense, most are designed with an operating voltage of 10.8v before problems occur, it's usually the heater, not the voltage, or a bit of both. BTW, a zero voltage drop is not impossible, it's just that it would require 70mm2 cable to support my example. Many believe that doubling the cable size will halve the voltage drop, it simply aint so.
    2 points
  2. The point being? Yes, of course all of our parents had kids, but if we as a species think that we can continue to increasingly over-populate the planet as we are currently doing, then the future for the kids that we do have will be very dire indeed (not to mention the future for the other species that we share the planet with, many of which will be forced into extinction). Do you think that Sir David Attenborough and the host of other acknowledged environmental scientists who have joined forces with the Optimum Population Trust have also missed the point? There are clearly several key points here. I may have missed yours, but it seems to me that you're missing an important point too.
    2 points
  3. i have a cuple from my short time aboard, you get to hot in bed alot and asume its a damp bedroom and get obsest with cheking for damp all the time. at first you have little faith in your boat and evry sound ceeps you awake until you do somthing to make you trust the boat in my case smashing ice up in the merina. trying to tell somone who dosnt live on a boat just how usfull a masiv pole with a hook on the end is futile thay will never understand. you permanently worry that your roaps are holding and wake up one day (at the verry leest) to realise your bow is happaly floating free. you become obsest by the metoffice website and the weather. you talk about things like your engen so much your landlubber mates just think you became a geek then you realise you did and love it. you soon see that some of the newer shinyer boaters look at you disaproving when you smash ice or run down your roof as thay wouldnt dreem of doing it because it may mark. (not all but some) you find yourself consernd about weather your bats have enuf charge in and weather there conditiond properly (by consernd i meen obsest) a thamomitor onn your boat id just an instrament to compete with your mate nextdoor about how warm your boat was when you woke up. in my case when i stay on land for a night or go to my girlfrends or somthing i am wishing i was back on the boat within a day. same but difrent when i am at work all i wana do is go back and be on my boat, not to do enything as such just be there with it. you feel good about eating beacon with a coal finger print cooked in to it, you will lern that toast from a gas grill tasts difrent to toast from a toaster and miss it. explaning to a customer why your shop opend late will now always becanuse you had to do somthing on your boat befor you left. that convo will always end with you telling them thay too should look at living on a boat as its outright awsome. you obses about those who drive with there fenders down yet offen forget to take yours up when you go. you will never seal that gap on the toung and groov stop thinking about it beter still put a post card or somthing over it. there is always a draft that seems biger than the vent can gov yet you can never find were its coming from even with hours of crawling round. centerd becoms a feeling that is no longer spiritule just when you have burn enuf fuel and use enuf warter to balence your boat out haha. you dreem of playing batleships on a masiv scale with a merina and trafic coans as markers. there is never enuf beer on board. sorry for bad spelling
    2 points
  4. A little list I made earlier on when I had some time on my hands and was feeling ponderful, about all of the little things that I have discovered and learnt since moving on board! 1. All of your clothes will smell faintly of ‘real fire’ or coal, regardless of how recently you washed them. Initially this is an inconvenience but eventually you come to rather like it. 2. If you own any white, cream, or pastel coloured clothes, they will soon take on odd black smudges, regardless of how careful you are about keeping them away from the stove, hod, or anything else coal related. This remains as an inconvenience and does not fade. 3. When visiting another boater, it is uncouth to ask to their toilet, unless you are at least a fifteen minute walk from another toilet facility (for women) or a wooded area/ bush (for men.) 4. If you have boater visitors over for more than four hours at a time, you will find yourself spending the latter half of their visit thinking that surely they must need to pee soon/ is your bathroom so nasty that they are too scared to want to use it/ how much more tea can you ply them with as a kind of pseudo-scientific experiment, just to see what they’ll do in an emergency. 5. Visits from other boaters will seldom exceed four hours without them either departing/ needing to go back to their boat for a minute/ having to ‘pop back to the car for something,’ see point four. 6. ‘Townies’ fill gaps in conversation by talking about the weather. ‘Boaties’ fill gaps in conversation by talking about water levels. 7. Pump out or cassette? Oh hells no. Don’t even go there. 8. It’s okay to insult a man’s wife, children, career choice, hair, or dress sense. But engines must always be coo’d over and spoken of in hushed approving tones, regardless of their size, condition, or maker. Shhhh! She’ll HEAR YOU! 9. If you are expected to go to work in anything approaching smart casual, you have likely got a pair of boots ‘for the journey’ that are generally covered in orange clay- like towpath mud, and also a pair of ‘smart shoes’ that are clean, patent leather, and walk less than ten steps a day. Plus a bag to keep each pair in, separately. 10. You become obsessed with what you can convince your stove to burn... Large, unwieldy or inflammable objects of rubbish will all be graded highly, according to your success in convincing the stove to eat them. 11. Ecofans. Having an opinion is mandatory. Having ever tried one is not. 12. If you have a posh new shiny boat, you are probably king of the marina. Conversely, that may also make you ‘king shit’ and/ or a N00b/ ‘more money than sense joker’ out on the cut. 13. ‘Online’ no longer just means that you have internet access, and committing the faux- pas of confusing the two meanings in conversation is verboten. 14. Portholes or windows? See point seven. 15. It seems perfectly normal to you to have both the stove/ heating going full pelt, and all of the windows open. 16. If you can’t manage to have a thorough shower, including shaving your legs, washing and conditioning your hair, and brushing your teeth in under four minutes/ four litres of water, you have failed as a boater and should probably consider moving back onto land. 17. Whenever you go to work in an office, visit a friend in a house, or have cause to use a hotel, you need an extra bag to haul along all of the things you want to charge up from their mains while you’re there. 18. Irons, microwaves, hairdryers and hoovers are all for posh people. 19. You used to own ten big thick jumpers for use in winter. Now you own two big thick jumpers, and a bottle of Febreeze. 20. And... You can make ten cubic feet of stuff fit into four cubic feet of space. 21. You keep a mop on your roof because everybody else does, but you’re not quite sure why... 22. When everyone else on the train home standing up is swaying about and clinging to railings, you are in the middle of it all freestanding, swaying with the flow and not falling down (until you do!) 23. Your mailing address is the same as your parents, for the first time since you were 16 years old. 24. Rosie and Jim are Bad People. 25. You probably started life on your boat with a novelty neckerchief, captain’s hat, pirate bandana, or “I’m on a boat, Mother F***er!” t shirt. By your third week therein, you have experimented with how that burns on the stove (see point 10) and roll your eyes and snort derisively at the fresh faced wannabe’s who have taken your place in committing aforementioned fashion faux-pas. 26. You have a beard. This is neither negotiable, nor gender- specific. 27. You can answer the question “is it cold on a boat in winter?” sensibly, only a finite number of times, before deciding to mess with people and saying “yes, it’s terrible, I have nearly died of hypothermia twice this year already, and I don’t know how I’m still alive...” 28. You thought you’d save money in winter by using the open bow as a fridge/ freezer for your food... Until you realised just how much alcohol you could actually store there if you stacked it all up right. 29. Upon hearing ‘man overboard!’ you reach for the camera first, and the life ring second. 30. When other people fall in, you are never there to see it/ photograph it. But you know damn well that when YOU fall in, there’ll be a group of Japanese tourists there, immortalising it on film and upping it to YouTube within the hour. 31. You can cook and serve a full Sunday roast for four, with less than two square feet of counter space to work on. 32. You stop thinking to yourself, “there’s some funny people on the cut” around the same time you realise that you are just like them, actually. 33. The 8pm engine/ generator off collective: You’re either with them, or against them. 34. You know that you have to disown any of your former friends who are apt to order “a pint of lager, please” in the pub, and you’re okay with that, actually. 35. Your hands and nails are NEVER clean, no matter how much you wash them. 36. You WILL have some kind of nasty toilet emptying related incident within your first few weeks away from mains plumbing. No one can teach you how to avoid your own personal initiation into boat toilet hell, you’re just going to have to grit your teeth and wait for it to happen. 37. When you started out with the boat, you had a little list of about five things that you needed to do/ buy/ sort out. However, due to a phenomenon I like to think of as ‘boat mathematics’ you learn that for every one item you cross off of said list, another two appear. Three months down the line, your list has about 30 essential and time sensitive things you need on it, and your earnings for the next two to four years are already committed to it. Oh well, spaghetti hoops for dinner again... Anyone have any they'd like to add?
    1 point
  5. I think the issue of human population is a perfectly valid topic for discussion in relation to environmental issues. I think a distinction has to be made between the social Darwinist ideas of the late 19th century and the idea of Eugenics , now thankfully discredited after it was taken to its logical conclusion in the 1940s and the idea of what effect an increasing human population might have on the demand for scarce resources. It could be argued that human beings stopped living in a sustainable manner with the beginning of agriculture and the production of surplus food, but having a vested interest, the idea of returning to hunter gathering and dying at the ripe old age of thirty shivering in a cave doesn't appeal greatly. The idea of living in a society where quotas are applied to children allowed doesn't appeal to me either so I'm not offering any solutions short of making birth control widely and freely available to anybody who wants it.
    1 point
  6. For clarity, any stove must be properly installed in the most appropriate space, it has to used and maintained with proper care and attention following the manufacturers instructions. So for example, combustible materials should not be stored next to, or where they can fall onto, the stove and its chimney. All stove chimneys of any diameter, depending on the amount of use and the quality of the fuel that is burnt on them, need regular cleaning. So for just for one example, if rubbish is burnt on stove designed to burn charcoal only, then it may coke up very rapidly, especially if the flue is narrow. Wider flues also choke quickly if wet or green wood is burnt, or if damp or inappropriate coal-based fuels are used, or if the fire is not run in accordance with the instructions Likewise, if any boater is less than fastidious in their management of LPG or petrol, and carelessness allows vapours to escape or travel to a source of ignition (like a solid fuel stove or an LPG fridge flame - both are low-lying examples) then trouble is likely to follow. Therefore, so much is down to the boat owner and the care and attention they pay to the various points of risk, and how they manage and mitigate the risks. So, perhaps the best first question to ask is - am I that type of boat owner? Then make your choices accordingly HTH the thread. Regards Rob
    1 point
  7. This post cannot be displayed because it is in a forum which requires at least 10 posts to view.
  8. 1 point
  9. Yes. I don't want that sort of volt drop on my boat Edit Sorry that was a rather rude and uncalled for reply. I want to have minimum volt drop on any circuit on my boat, I realise that zero is impossible. It is far better to head for the highest standard than to what is the minimum and acceptable. Why walk on the edge when you can just as easily walk in the middle of the path.
    1 point
  10. This post cannot be displayed because it is in a forum which requires at least 10 posts to view.
  11. My findings are based on common sense and first hand experience - a heady old concept from days gone by! A draughty steel box lightly skinned with foam is a highly inefficient way to store warm air. And making electricity with an alternator attached to a non-moving road engine, and then storing it in lead acid batteries is also highly inefficient. Sometimes you don't need research - the truth is right there in front of you! I love living in a boat - I just wouldn't call it 'green'!
    1 point
  12. The cheapest (and safest!) option would undoubtedly be to have false rivets put on your current boat, and just hope people are convinced. Buy a large mallet so you can whack on the head anybody you find peering at them to closely. (That was helpful, wasn't it! ).
    1 point
  13. Now there's an oxymoron... Tony
    1 point
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