Arthur Brown

THE classic British wood for wet/dry jobs is Elm whether you can find any??? Fitchet and Woolacot in Lenton, Nottingham used to be my go to supplier for hardwood.

I looked at the Lithium ion booster batteries that Maplin stocks/ed -Close to £100 for less than two minutes cranking time and officially rated for petrol engines but not diesel. Once you have used one it's flat and needs 12hours on recharge, that's a lot of money and cycling for 2 minutes cranking then back home to charge it. Is the starter battery dead or just flat? Does the engine charge the battery -how fast? Maybe the solution is to buy a new battery! Pay the money and get it delivered!

Mad Max for moderator! Polite and interesting and motivates people to help, (e-help and real help)

Yes that meter will tell you the current that is passing wherever you wire it into the mains circuit

The further south you get the more necessary it is to have a mooring to go to, especially as you approach Bath, Bristol or London. It's a truck ride or a sea journey to get past the narrow section or the midland canals, The truck will do 50mph so will get there faster than a boat journey. but the crane at each end will cost £500 - 1000, unless you can get a truck to a boatyard with travelling crane that is suitably rated.

As above ^^^^^ All depends on the material of the hull and the position of the frames. Do not ask a GRP hull to take point loads or even linear loads where you can avoid them. Loads to be carried by a GRP hull need to be spread over an area. Steel boats will take a point load better.

When my boat's prop made funny noises and slowed to a stop, it had collected a pair of trousers fron the Nottingham Canal by the bend that is where Boots was in Nottingham. It was very obvious and lots of hard work in the water to clear it. What CAN you see? Is the inboard section of the propshaft free of obstruction? Can you see the whole outboard length or the prop and shaft through the weed hatch?

Which gives us, http://www.propellerhub.com/

The problem with amp hour counting is that electricity going out of the battery is used, but charging batteries heat as well as charge so the amphours that do the heating are lost from the charge - discharge process. Count 100AH out and count 100amphours back in neglects this IR heating loss, so for every 100AH taken out more than 100AH must be replaced.

The Smartgauge is probably the only fit and forget device that indicates current SOC of the batteries with any accuracy, not that it is perfect all the time, simply every other indicator dial is simply more flawed. What charging your batteries need is determined by the use that you make of them. An LED light in each cabin would be a small load but a fridge, freezer and auto washer running off an inverter would be a very large load. Your charge cycle must put back the energy that you have used plus some to keep the batteries happy. Despite the most careful use batteries are consumables, if well treated they will last for two or more years, if iltreated batteries can be scrap in two weeks. Protect your starter battery from domestic discharge so that you always have a means to start the engine as one way to charge the batteries.

Used cooking fat, soaked into paper, sawdust etc. Whatever you have as waste oils or fats into waste adsorbant.

Buying a pack of frozen veg say three times a week helps to keep the cool box cold too -just eat them within 24hours of thawing. There used to be eveaporation coolers for bottled milk, -a bowl of water with an unglazed terracotta pot to cover the bottle (eg a pot plant pot -no glaze) water evaporating from the bowl via the terracotta would cool the inside of the pot inc the milk. - Green as a no energy fridge.

If it's "your" dog then it's likely to be as settled as you are, If you worry, then the dog will pick up on that and worry too.

smallgains-marina.com Must be about the closest BUT you'd have a trek up the tidal Thames to do. BUT maybe the crane would travel with you to do both lifts in one price. The more sensible option would be to consider where you want the boat to be ultimately -Lea, GU, etc and get the lorry to take it there directly. Lorry 50 mph average boat 3 mph max. Anything like the North Sea in winter really isn't safe for a narrow boat designed for canals.

The voltage of a battery under charge or discharge has little connection to the state of charge sadly.

My personal suspicion is that several councils have acquired people on their care list who have never paid council tax and with the reducing government subsidies have to fund people's care from somewhere, so they are looking at where people hide for no council tax before going ashore to a care home at council expense. With "care" starting at £1000 per month now and people with no funds getting care at the council's expense, councils will need to find the money from somewhere.

IMO it's the charge controller that makes things difficult in a non OEM use. Getting charge control right AND discharge control right, with all the essential battery monitoring could be rather hard. However for people who cruise in the summer solar makes a lot of sense. The high solar summer months give lots of power for cruising with just enough for weekends in spring and autumn, and the usual "leave the boat for later" power to just maintain the batteries over winter. Current electric car makers are very secretive about their charge, discharge and battery monitoring electronics.

By now in the calendar Your panels will be producing about 10% of their rated power. You need to charge those batteries properly or they will let you down. Until you have a suitable charger you could go for a serious cruise. Your batteries need 400AH put in that's ten hours of cruising at 40A. A charger by a prime maker rated at 30 - 50amps should be enough. Are you sure that your bollard supply will be adequate for a big charger?

A search on RS components shows 875 MCBs with a DC rating. It's probably better to use a switch as well sometimes, at least they are cheaper to replace.

When I paid my car insurance by monthly payments it DID renew automatically, when I paid it by one payment it didn't.

I used to be an airport fireman. As an amateur you should expect to successfully extinguish a fire the size of an office waste paper bin You should hope to extinguish a fire in a skip with good tools (ext or hose reel) -Should it get bigger than that call the pro's. Sometimes you can do a lot of good just to cool the surroundings -neighbouring boats- to stop the fire spreading. I wonder which council is going to pick up the tab for housing people who "were not living there not paying council tax" but now need housing?

if it reconnects it's NOT a fuse or MCB problem, I'd look at the circuit and way that the mains and generator are connected, and yes any "inverter assist" would be a prime topic of investigation. Pull the plug on the washer out of the wall and run it directly from the generator, see what happens. I'm guessing that the changing load of the washer -especially any water heater, is causing the inverter to demand sudden surges of electricity that the inverter is struggling to provide off an engine running slowly. Do you have the facility to make the engine run at a constant speed rather than being load sensitive. Otherwise add a dummy, resistive load (tungsten lamp, or water heater) of about 10% of the generator rating, this can help with voltage regulation issues

If you have a thin wire that's long enough, wire it to regulator +ve and battery +ve and read the Volts dropped across the main wire, Double the volts dropped after the regulator for the volts dropped down both cores, if it's over 0.3v then you are losing that much, it's up to you to determine how much is too much.

Does the turbine have a regulator at the head or the battery end. Your turbine will make it's rated current in a howling gale when connected to a discharged battery, but not when the battery is almost full. Chinese amps are not the same as UK amps when flowing (chinese ratings always give you thinner wire). If your turbine has a recommended wire thickness, then buy that from a ISO 9000 approved supplier (RS, CPC/Farnell etc) BUT before you spend money have a good guess whether your turbine will ever produce enough power to justify the cable cost. _is your turbine high above all local obstructions and in a really windy part of the country! OK I do know an off grid home with a turbine, but it's a big one and they live on the edge of the Wash -right on the edge! but their input is always sub 10A but it's 24/7

Moorings are like properties in that ones nearer to good transport links are more expensive and harder to find. There is a skill about travelling to London, If you are far away sometimes it's quicker because you can use the limited stops trains. If I caught the KX train from Potters Bar the train from Peterborough took 17 minutes but the train from Hatfield was all stations to KX and took 45 mins for the same journey