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No, we are discussing an anonymous rumour allegedly from someone in an unspecified marina. I don't believe it for a minute. The Ribble Link is being shut next week, but that happens every October to April.

Heel on the boat will make a difference too. You should always check the oil level whilst on level ground it said in my Austin 7 handbook, so find a bit of level water.......................................................

If they did more of that, I'd consider supporting them. A couple of years ago I was explaining to some good friends why I won't support or join the IWA, and they were horrified about my observations regarding the current organisation. They couldn't counter any of my points though, they had to acknowledge that the Aickman wing have completely taken over from the Rolt wing. As a (relatively) young person with a very deep interest in boats and boating, they insist I'm the sort of person the IWA need for the future. My counterargument is that you'd need to get rid of most of the national and regional committee members before I'd consider joining - I'd rather be playing out on the boat than bashing my head against self important twerps who did good works in the Sixties or Seventies but now just rant about the youth of today. I expect this viewpoint to be controversial on this forum! To add: The friends in question have been very actively involved in the IWA for more than fifty years, which is why they were so horrified. They just hadn't looked at it from an outsider's viewpoint before.

Its OK, the moth balls will kill the weeds off.

Llangollen basin

Just because you can add enhanced capabilities to something, doesn’t mean you should, just saying.

I just want a toilet smart enough to take itself to the Elsan point

There's a balance to be struck though. The electrical experts on this forum advocate charging daily until a tail-current of 1-2% of capacity is reached. The problem with that is that the last few percentage points takes up about half of the overall charging time. So you may be paying £3-4 just to get from a 5% tail current to a 1.5% tail current, every time you do it. If you don't bother doing this last bit (or only do it occassionally), your batteries lose capacity. Somewhere there's a sweet spot in all this but I don't have the patience to do the maths to work out exactly where that sweet spot is. So I go by my own hunch, and this is what I do: 1. Buy 3 x bog-standard 110ah leisure batteries. 2. Trust my solar to pickup most of my needs for about 7 month of the year. Run a genny when my consumption is high or it's very gloomy out. 3. Come early October, start paying more attention to what my batteries are doing. Especially what charge they're at first thing in the morning. Run genny accordingly, when needed for a couple of hours or so. Make sure I charge up everything while the genny is on. 4. Come November-ish, turn the fridge off and switch to outside cool-box. Start running genny more days than not, as needed. Once a week or so, run the genny for 4-5 hours. 5. Expect to replace batteries every 3 years or so. (£250-ish) Note: I work from home and have a laptop and connected monitor running for approx 8 hours a day. When the fridge goes off, that's by far my highest power draw. Now I could fork out a huge sum on fancy deep cycling batteries, but that would only be worthwhile if I was going to charge them properly. That would mean something like 3 times the engine or genny running for half the year, which would also cost me a lot of extra money in fuel, servicing and wear and tear. A very quick sum in my head tells me that it would come to a load more than £250 every three years. I also get the benefit of less annoying engine noise and pollution for me and other boaters nearby. Lithium is a different ball-game, and I may go that way at some point.

On this day in 2010 Hack Green SU

Hi Ewan, thanks for that but I did the big consultancies (URS, WYG) and their regime is the reason I went solo. Business is picking up now so not worried at the moment. Couldn't go back to an office job with managers looking over my shoulder LOL

Ok and the MT50.. I thought that was me Mttp? But the Mttp is the controller! See I am a numpty but if I don’t ask I won’t know. So thanks. Makes more sense. I think.

I think the sliding scale is entirely justified. The older the cylinder, the greater is the chance that it needs major refurbishment before it can be refilled safely. I have been to the plant (or at least, one of them) where Calor remanufactures its gas cylinders. It involves a lot more than a new coat of orange paint.

Only required on selected waterways. I won't go in to how most narrowboats with nav lights don't have them fitted correctly my boat included. I did come across a boat with nav lights on in a tunnel travelling in the same direction. Without knowing that the nav lights were on it was impossible to tell if it was coming or going. The rear white light could have easily been a dim tunnel light heading towards me, with no nav lights lit as normal practice. The fact that it wasn't getting any closer as we progressed led me to conclude it was travelling in the same direction. The only way a white rear light would work would be if all boats had nav lights and had to use them in tunnels, so you could tell from the red/green as well as the tunnel light that one was travelling towards you. Chances of that being mandated are zero.