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The main objection seems to be "reports of night-time cruisers leaving lock gates open and paddles up". This sort of implies boaters shouldn't cruise in the daytime either, as the same thing sometimes happens in daylight.

I feel a night protest cruise when this little interruption is over....it’s the start of slippery slope if it goes unchallenged.

That requires brains to think that, this crisis has confirmed that the majority of people are rather lacking in that department.

Through the summer CRT banned night time boating by closing several lock flights overnight, claiming that boaters were leaving paddles open and so wasting water during the drought. Then when that made no difference they claimed that people/vandals/fishermen/moored boaters (take your pick) were opening paddles to run water down overnight. They even put up notices to that effect (eg at Claydon). It never occurred to them (they said) that leaking paddles/gates were letting the water run down. Any excuse ...

Night time cruising has provided quite a few of lifes magical moments, but I really fear that as the cut gets more and more non-boaty liveaboards that we are going to loose it. ..............Dave

Bonkers. Night cruising is awesome. How many of the CART staff live on a boat? come to think of it how many have even seen a boat?

The only valid reason to have something as stupid in design as a narrowboat is so it fits through 7 feet wide locks in a 3 foot deep ditch. If the narrow English canals hadn't already been built to that size we wouldn't have them either! There are much better designs of boat for anything else. I accept your point about there being a variety of places where they would work in the USA as well as they work in the UK (ie not very!) but I suspect that there are already many different boats in most of those locations that are a better fit for local conditions than a narrowboat.

Diodes work in conjunction with MPPT controllers. Silicon solar cells have an open circuit voltage of 0.5 to 0.6 volts, so a panel suitable for direct charging a 12v battery might have 28 cells in series to get the voltage high enough to charge the battery. If you shade two cells, the voltage drops by a volt, goes below the battery voltage, and charging stops. Add an MPPT controller that can boost the voltage (or drop the voltage less, on a longer, higher voltage string) and the loss of a few cells doesn't matter beyond a proportional loss of power. MP.

Firstly it definitely can’t be used with a Combi as it is for unidirectional current only. Secondly I’d guess, as suggested, it is to do with the switch-on inrush current. The first time I disconnected our Combi to move some wiring, I got a right shock (metaphorically, not electrically) when I reconnected it. A massive fat noisy spark almost as if I’d shorted the batteries. I hadn’t, but what I had done is to connect the batteries across now-discharged very large capacitors inside the Combi. These present an effective short circuit for the few milliseconds they take to charge up, so a very large current flows. Even though this is only for a short time, semiconductors junctions even for 220A devices are small with little thermal mass and thus heat up nearly instantly. And it is not just the inrush current with the device’s semiconductors switched on, there is also a (very short) period when the device is in the process of turning on - it doesn’t go from off to on instantly (although it is very quick) and as the FETs are going from open circuit to conduction, they pass through a period of resistance for a microsecond or two which adds to heat dissipated. The 220A device quotes a peak current of 600A but the instantaneous current on reconnection of a big inverter will be much more, albeit for a very short duration. If you can manually control when the device will reconnect, you could “bodge” it by means of a push button and resistor bypassing the isolator. You would press and hold the button for a few seconds prior to switching the isolator on, to recharge the capacitors. I would expect it to be fine when disconnecting the load with high current flowing. I know all this because I have been working with electronic devices since the 3rd century BC.

But first you will have to train the CRT desk jockey which end of the hammer to hold as well as convincing the other H&S desk jockey that their risk assessment does not require the use of ear defenders.

There are some good cruising loops. When we were in Chicago a year ago we visited the lock at Lockport in Illinois. They had a steady stream of boats coming up the Erie Canal (in extremis the St Lawrence seaway), then from Chicago down to the Mississippi, Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and then up the Intracostal Waterway. More recently I have been reading a fascinating book about how the St Lawrence seaway has been an ecological disaster for the Great Lakes. https://scholargypsy.org.uk/2019/03/13/illinois-waterway-and-other-chicago-sights/ https://scholargypsy.org.uk/2020/01/06/wisconsin-new-year-2020/

When was the last time you understood the relationship between power factor, va and watts? Weilding a few spanners, screwdrivers and wiring something up in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions hardly makes you an expert on the science behind it. Unfortunately for you, this post says it all.