Paul C

There's two answers: one is a motorhome and the other is a boat - it could be argued that being a motorhome squarely puts it into "chattel" category, and it is not considered for council tax to be levied on it. One could cite the fact that motorhomes predominantly do move, quite extensively, compared to boats which often end up not moving for long periods of time. The other answer is, there is no difference and they may seek to charge council tax on people who reside in motorhomes, which may very well have a negative knock-on effect for those with larger, and eventually smaller, motorhomes too.

What's your address? I mean, don't type it out, but do you have a land-based address that isn't the mooring? Its a pointer in the right direction, but ultimately its the valuation office at the council who determine if council tax is due. You'd think it were linked to planning permission, or housing benefit, or whatever, but it isn't (officially). The "stay at the moorings 3 days/week" maximum rule - who sets this? Your mooring provider? It sounds like its a non-residential mooring and they apply that rule to demonstrate compliance.

Why? Uber themselves didn't do it. The drivers are self-employed. No doubt the driver (if it indeed was his fault....) could be, but I suspect an insurance payout has already been done for the physical damage.

Using a car once a week, for a run that does 7-10 miles (so it warms up fully) and does about 40mph (so it uses all the gears) is pretty much ideal. The issue with low mileage cars is they may have been stood for a long time, and things like suspension rubber bushes, tyres etc degrade worse like this. But then most cars which aren't new, and even them before its first owner gets it, will have stood at some point.

Thank you for getting back to us. Looking back at my fumbled guesses, I wasn't a million miles away but still missed quite badly! Well done for getting to the bottom of this.

It’s not been a waste of time, it has revealed: 1 the “battery monitoring” regime is poor here, but there is a voltmeter which is better than nothing 2 the voltmeter shows that the battery is capable of supplying useful energy through the night 3 combined with the inaccessibility and the non-standard location and possibly wiring layout, it’s not worth altering anything just yet

I don't believe any professional installer would do this, because its a BSS fail and basically not done on boats. Its possible, but....

No immediate problem then. May as well leave as is and get a bit more use out of the batteries.

Voltmeter isn’t much use to determine battery state of health (actual capacity as a percentage of capacity when new). It’s better than nothing though, and can show if there is a clear issue. Voltage reading first thing in the morning before sunrise/solar charge would be useful.

I think your ammeter is connected to show alternator --> Bow thruster battery current (except its wired backwards, so negative values are current going in). Since this is only one "half" of what is going into and coming out of the batteries (and might be less than that - where is the solar connected) its somewhat meaningless in itself. Which battery bank is the fridge connected to? The fridge is the biggest consumer. A battery in itself, isn't a "consumer" in the sense that things either charge up batteries ie convert other energy into electricity; store electricity; or "consume" electricity by changing it to something else eg lights, fans. Talking of a battery as a consumer is just confusing terminology.

Personally, I use a Topdon Artibattery 101 and just follow its on-screen guideline.

Surely the tests would be: 1. Full tank - open H fitting: nothing comes out --> its blocked/nonfunctional, diesel comes out --> its connected somehow to the tank 2. Tank contents below level of fittings - open H fitting and arrange some pipework to apply vacuum (suck on it): air comes out --> there's no stand pipe, diesel comes out --> there's a stand pipe of some kind. I believe it is good practice to have a diesel heater stand pipe just above the engine fuel supply so that if you're really low, engine has priority.

I wouldn't use self-tappers into steel. Its possible, but you'd need to get the diameter exactly right so its not impossibly difficult to get the screw in, while not too big that it just flops around and doesn't grip. The steel and screw are just so different hardness. Aluminium, is another matter. If you really wanted to screw directly into the scaffold pole then drilling then tapping an appropriate size hole would be better - but obviously you're dealing with a hard material, see above. It makes much more sense to use scaffold clamps as shown above.

That’s absolutely fine, it’s my opinion and it’s fine to disagree. You’re probably right that there is a core of very active members but whether it’s 10, 30, 60 or whatever isn’t a big deal, because there’s many others who are less active, for various reasons. The forum is wide ranging and many things to many people.

I'll ask again - where did you get the number 30 from? Because you say you've looked at this thread. Then you say you've looked at other threads. But you've not looked at the whole forum, or even a reasonable percentage of it. I know you haven't because it would take too long to manually scrape the figures from the front end. The back end is powered by SQL and IS of course, queryable - to a much greater degree than the front end. Let's just say "in your opinion" there's 30 regular posters. "In my opinion" the distribution of activity spreads widely across many hundreds and thousands of members.

You're extrapolating the figures from one thread to the entire forum? That's a big distance to extrapolate into. In any case, the 30 figure is fair enough for what you might call "regular" posters. There's many, many hundreds/thousands more who aren't regular, and range from semi-regular to very occasional (remember the smooth bell curve of activity). "The Forum" doesn't need to worry about number of posters, or activity, or bandwidth, so long as there's enough contributing (with knowledge and financially) to keep it self-sustaining. Allow me to make my own extrapolation, that pass success might well be the indicator of longevity.