IDS

We just got back from a week on the Midi with a plastic palace from Le Boat. Have to say Le Boat as a company were really good, with friendly and helpful staff. Willing to attend to any issues. However they charge an extortionate rate for fuel usage, calculated by engine hours. We turned off the engine waiting for locks, and inside locks, it makes a significant reduction in the cost. You get free moorings in other LE Boat centers that you may pass, with free electric hook-up and water. Good if you want hot showers in the morning, and a full charge in the battery without running the engine.

Does the pipe from your calorfier to the gulper have an isolating valve on it. If so maybe it is simply a convenient drain system for when you want to drain down the calorifier, using the gulper to pump it out. (make sure the water pump is off and some taps are turned on to allow air into the system)

If the underlyingpaint job is in good nick then hire a scabbler for the day and be done with the job in a few hours. If you have rust under the paint then a scraper will work quite well.

You might want to consider 3rd party liability for the occasion when the paying guest slips on the gunwale, cracks their head on the deck, ends up in the cut, and want to claim damages.

If the regulator is not directly attached to the bottle then the mounting position of the regulator will need to be within some maximum distance from the bottle valve. I seem to remember the high pressure hose is 1 m max.

No - not charged, and I had phoned them a few days in advance to say I was in the area and could they fit it in. I should try phoning them, and tell them what paperwork you want, they gave me a statement that I used with my insurance company which got me out of a 4 yearly hull survey requirement. Email is too easy to ignore these days as everybody is swamped by it.

We had our 1988 boat blasted/sprayed/epoxy in Aug-2013, the first one they did. Debdale lifted it out last summer for us for an inspection, to see how things were going and everything looked really good. They had a formula for pricing each phase according to square metres, so price depends how far up the hull you go, with blasting, spraying etc. They will give you this over the phone if you want to price up what you want done. We're very happy with the job so far.

Do you have a filter on the pump inlet, does it collect crud? If the little mushroom valves round the pump chambers don't seal well, then the pump will not achieve full pressure as efficiently, and so may take longer to shut off. Once the pump has shut off, does it retain pressure in the system well (for example if you don't turn on any taps or have any leaks then the pump should not cut in again for hours). I found a grayish deposit building up on these valves after long use. Have had similar issues with water leaking slightly from housing, fixed by tightening hold down screws, it is poor design. I intend to check pressure in system, higher pressures will make this worse.

An accumulator will also make your pump last longer (or at least make the contacts on the pressure switch last longer) Edit to add :- To answer the original question, before you start playing with the pressure switch setting you really need to temporarily fit a pressure gauge somewhere in the system so you can see what you are doing. If you have an accumulator, then there is a convenient schrader valve on the end of the accumulator where you can clip a tyre pressure gauge.

They are cheap enough to buy, as above, but also easy to make up yourself (ebay 5 mm elastic cord £1.40/metre) and a few spare metres of the cord are always useful on the boat. The trick to threading the 'bobbles' after you've the made the loops is to stretch the loop with a length of wire looped through it, then slide the bobble down the wire and over the stretched elastic.

I buy them from inline filters (http://www.inlinefilters.co.uk/), part no PF7824 FILTER-Fuel(Cartridge), £2.88 +vat . (together with fuel spin on filter and oil filter for my Thorneycroft) Good service from them,

If you fit isolation valves, make sure they are "full bore", cheaper ones usually are not.

The pump spec says it is good for dry running up to 30 mins, if it is still making some noise it is probably still running. If you drain it down inspect the pump chamber for obstuction. Prime culprit for no circulation is an air lock somewhere. Inspect the pipe runs for possible air traps.

Most water pumps have little valves built in as part of the pumping mechanism in the pump head. These can leak pressure, if dirt or foreign material gets into the pump. Check that you have a filter or strainer fitted between the tank and the pump to prevent this. These pumps are usually easily serviceable via service kits available from chandlers (but a bit costly, though cheaper than a new pump. For the Whale Universal pump the kit takes the form of a complete replacement pump head. However as a first ploy you can strip down the pump head and manually clean the valves, there may be some obstruction that has been sucked into the valve preventing it sealing. On my whale pump the valves are little rubber mushrooms which can be removed and cleaned up, after removing them from the pump head. If the valves appear damaged or perished then a replacement head is required. Check also that you don't actually have another leak somewhere else in the system between the pump and your taps, shower, toilet etc.

A sander doesn't get into the rust pits, which is where to want to get the loose stuff out. A hand held wire brush would work but is excruciatingly hard work.

I did this job in August, and you have my sympathy. For the initial scraping I used an electric scraper like the picture below. It was a great device, a scraper with a hammer drill action, but small and lightweight. Mine came from Lidl at £14 (branded as Parkside), it does a fantastic job. Unfortunately Lidl only stock them now and again, they come from a chinese manufaturer and are occasionally sold under other brands like the one below . Bosch used to market them but not any longer. Don't bother trying to do your tank at this time of year if your boat is in the water, it will be impossible to paint with bitumen due to condensation forming as you try to paint. Wait till next summer. I was fortunate to be able to borrow a 'fresh air full face mask' which made the job bearable, would highly recommend, and probably the only possible way to do it with an angle grinder. For painting the bitumen the fumes are not too bad but it helps to direct an airstream into the tank to flush fresh air in. I used a fan heater (with the heat switched off) positioned at the lip of the tank. Our boat has two tanks (one each side), so twice the pain. On one I simply scraped and then 2 coats bitumen. On the other I scraped, then cleaned off with with an angle grinder and twist knot cup wire brush, then coated with vactan, then 2 coats bitumen. In 3 or 4 years time I'll have a look and see how they are faring. Good luck, it's a terrible job to do Ian

Are the isolating valves on the 15 mm pipe 'Full bore' or do they introduce a restriction? Many domestic valves are restrictive and used on outlets.

These scrapers are brilliant and cheap for scraping rusty peely paint. It works a bit a chisel in an impact driver. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004WN52M2/ref=pe_385721_37986871_TE_item Lidl occasionally have identical units in their tools event at the same price After scraping an angle grinder with a hard wire brush gets the rest of the rust out. If you have a smooth surface (ie not rust pitted ) then 'clean off discs in an angle grinder are very good. You will need quality dust masks etc if you are wire brushing rust, especially if you enclose it in a tent.

If the PRM sump plug is very inaccessible (like mine), you can also suck the oil out of the filler hole with a suitable hand pump and a bit of plastic pipe.

Just embarked on some long overdue water tank maintenance, not done since I've owned the boat. Now I know why I've been putting this off for so long. My tanks form the sides of the well deck, so there are 2 of them, each 2 m long, one each side connected by a ballance pipe. So twice the agony. After draining and opening the side mounted access panels, the inside looked frightening with large encrustations down the sides of the tanks, which look like it could be rust. Photo of access panels shows the sort of stuff. My first thought was that it was lots of rust, but it yields to a scraper leaving a very pristine surface of the original plating, no obvious rust or pitting. The encrustations are very black, soft and crumbly beneath the crusty superficial rusty looking tint on the surface, I wonder if it is a degradation product of the previous coating, which I assume was some kind of bitumen. It has actually done a superb job of protecting the steel, even after many years (>9 ) of no tank maintenance. My question is what does the forum recommend as a coating now, since I discovered today that the bitumen product stocked by Midland Chandlers is no longer WRAS approved for potable tanks. I was checking the manufacturers (Everbuild BlackJack) Tech data sheet for coverage, and there they state there that it is 'not suitable for potable water tanks', On the tin it used to say it was. Edit to add: Everbuild confirm the product is no longer certified and should not be used for potable tanks.

I prefer my gauge at eye level, not below knee level

These work very well and are simple to fit in the delivery pipe from the tank. http://mcsboatproducts.co.uk/portfolio/fresh-water-gauge/ Had ours for 6 years with no problems, trivially small current drain from 12v.

It looks like a relay which may be part of your battery charging system. It gets warm because it has a poor connector or relay contacts which have some non zero resistance. The more current you put through it the hotter it gets. You must check where the wires go to find out what its function is. It needs to be checked and replaced by someone competent with electrics.