IanD
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Posts posted by IanD
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38 minutes ago, LadyG said:
No no, it was a tiny road tunnel in Huddersfield, rather difficult to see the entrance due to sun. I would definitely remove them all before Standedge.
If you're worried about your boat in Standedge, put something like a cut-open/flattened tyre on the front cabin corners to protect them, these are the most likely points of damage.
Leaving the fenders down is a bad idea, if they get do caught and ripped off they'll then sit in the water waiting to wrap themselves round somebody's prop, which is *definitely* not desirable more than a mile underground... 😞
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14 minutes ago, nealeST said:
That's first night sorted then...don't think my slow cooker will be seeing any action! It's an investment for the future...
You could also moor at Middlewich VM which are a bit closer to the junction and restaurants along Wheelock Street.
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Just now, haggis said:
I can't really understand fenders being left down when underway. So often when a boater does this you see an area of hull where the fender moving back and forward rubbed the blacking off . Also fenders can get pulled off in locks and bridges and then find their way to wrap round another boats prop. Fenders are great at protecting the hull when moored and to my mind that is the only time they should be used.
Or they can make the boat hang up in a tight lock, like a boat did in front of us at Foxton... 😞
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2 minutes ago, cuthound said:
If you overload a solar panel the voltage drops which in turn reduces the current from it. A complete short will result in zero volts output and hence no current.
That's not how solar panels work, they are silicon photodiodes and will still source current into a short circuit -- but the output power will be zero...
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21 minutes ago, blackrose said:
Yes the Smartgauge is just a guide while any charging is happening but it's pretty accurate in measuring discharge and during the day I'm also looking at tail current on my shunt monitor. I have both types.
I'm not sure that's correct. What many people don't understand is that it’s the rate of rise in voltage, not just the ultimate voltage, that determines when the panels switch on.
Series will always switch on earlier as the voltage has to rise to a larger value ultimately. This means it’s rate of rise (_dv/dt_ mathematically) is higher.
That last paragraph makes no sense -- if you put two panels in series all the voltages at the MPPT input double, both absolute V and dV/dt. The panel doesn't see any difference.
The output of a solar panel is basically a current source which drops off if there's too much voltage across it, so for each current there's a voltage at the MPPT input which extracts the maximum power from the panel. Tracking MPPT controllers wiggle this voltage up and down to find the maximum power point -- which might be 30V for one panel (ot two in parallel), or 60V for 2 in series.
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8 minutes ago, haggis said:
I middlewich you also have the choice of several carry out/ eat in Chinese and Indian restaurants
And Mexican, and others -- there's a whole string of them which get good reviews along the main drag, about 500m from the Big Lock.
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3 minutes ago, blackrose said:
Well, all I can say is I'm really happy with mine. My batteries never fell below about 90% SoC in April according to my Smartgauge. I use the toaster, microwave, washing machine and sit there watching too much TV until late at night. By 10 or 11am the batteries are generally back to fully charged. I can't really see the point of a more expensive over-specified controller if what I have does what it needs to do.
https://www.eossolarsolutions.co.uk/product/tracer6415an/
That's certainly cheaper than the equivalent from Victron, which is probably only worth it if you want to integrate with other Victron gear like a Multiplus/Quattro and lithium batteries.
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34 minutes ago, nottheone said:
Hi Ian I don't think I have ever seen max input current listed as a specification on an Mppt unit. Most are rated for output current which would be the same if wired series or parallel.Out of interest which units are you referring too ? Obviously input voltage does need to be considered.
Depends on the controller, but you're right that in many case (simple buck converter) it's the output current that matters. Doubling Vin does often increase the price though, depending on exact model range.
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8 minutes ago, haggis said:
The Big Lock at Middlewich has been OK the last couple of times we visited. It went through a not so good patch a few years ago but seemed to have recovered. One tip I would give is when you know where you wan to stop and eat, phone ahead and make sure they are still open and that they are doing food that evening and if you have to book. Nothing worse than finding a closed door or the choice of flavours of crisps 🙂
Even recently the Big Lock seems patchy going by reviews varying from great to terrible.
Same advice applies to all canalside food pubs in summer, always ring ahead to book, preferably at least a day before -- what's even worse than finding them closed or crisp-only is to find them serving delicious food but fully booked. DAMHIK... 😞
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19 minutes ago, nealeST said:
Yes exactly that! Great ice cream tip. That uses will be very popular. We definitely won't be stopping at pubs twice a day. I'm more interested in being on the move but being the only person on board with narrow boat experience my crew will soon realise exactly what all this is about....thanks for the pub info. We are scheduled to be near the Big Lock on our first evening although I can guess it's not what it used to be....
Idea not 'uses'. Helpful technology...
I don't think you'll have any problems making those stops -- plenty of daylight, longest day is well under 8h according to canalplan, and not too many locks. Only one night cooking on the boat, but with icecream for afters (so long as you get there before they close at 6pm, which you should easily do).
Day 1 : Big Lock VM -- 9M/0L/3h17m
Day 2 : Hurleston Services VM -- 12M/12L/6h15m (Snugbury's!)
Day 3 : Barbridge VM -- 13M/14L/7h9m (turn at Wrenbury)
Day 4 : BR189 (Salt Barge) -- 17M/8L/7h34
Day 5 : 3M/0L/1hr
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30 minutes ago, IanD said:
By "four days" I assume you mean maybe 3 hours on the first day after pickup, then 3 days cruising (about 7 hours each), then maybe 1 hour on the final day before dropoff?
There aren't that many good food pubs that fit with that schedule; if you get to Middlewich on the first night you could try the Big Lock but it's reported to have gone downhill recently. Day 2/3 the Barbridge Inn might be your only option. On the last night you could moor near the Salt Barge (BR 193).
I'd stop at Hurleston Services VM (above the locks) on day 2 -- no pub but you can walk to Snugbury's and pick up some delicious ice-cream... 😉
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4 minutes ago, rusty69 said:
My controller can handle the voltage of the two panels in series or parallel. The point is though, with my Tracer controller(s) is that they are much slower tracking in series.
There's no technical reason for slower tracking in series, that could be a "feature" of your controller... 😉
Parallel is better with partial shading than series.
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2 minutes ago, blackrose said:
Thanks, that's interesting. I have no shading issues at my mooring which to be honest is where the boat is 95% of the time and I'm 95% off grid and the panels/controller perform brilliantly. In April I didn't use any shore power and that's including running a washing machine a couple of times/week. Even over winter I only switched over to shore power occasionally. I guess if I do end up mooring somewhere where the panels are shaded I'll have to think about changing over to parallel, but I'm assuming fully shaded panels in parallel perform no better than they would connected in series? So it's only partial shading where paralleled panels which operate independently have any benefit over series?
Correct.
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12 minutes ago, rusty69 said:
I have 4 x 250W in two arrays. Up until recently each 2x2 were connected in series through separate Tracer controllers. I found the controller very slow at tracking to the full voltage when connected in series, so connected one array of 2x2 in parallel. This one now appears to perform slightly better than the series connected panels.
I expect later in the year though, when the sun is lower in the sky, it may be the other way around.
I think I saw somewhwere once of a configuration using switches that would allow manually changing between series connected panels and parallel. It struck me at the time to be a very good idea, though it is possible I dreamt it.
Switching between series and parallel will mean a more expensive MPPT controller, since it has to be rated to cope with 2x voltage (series) and 2x current (parallel). Also there doesn't seem much point, the panel voltage for maximum power output doesn't change much with light level, it's mainly the current that alters... 😉
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45 minutes ago, nealeST said:
Hello All,
I am taking a short break from the Anderton Marina with a hire boat for four days on June 19. My wife and two boys are the crew. It's a short amount of time but I fancy a taste of 4 canals. I have ‘Canal planned’ my route taking in the trip down the Trent and Mersey to the Middlewich Branch onto the Shropshire Union and then into the Llangollen. This means going through the Hurleston locks in the morning and out again the same day later in the afternoon after we have turned around in the winding hole at Wrenbury. The trip takes 8 hrs a day to make according to Canal Plan.
To experienced hands does this all seem feasible? It's a wonderful thing having a website create you a route but I wanted to see what folk thought here before hand. I see from this wonderful forum there is the Middlewich Festival the weekend before so I imagine there could be a lot of boaters still out on the system around the area.
Hoping for glorious weather. One last thing: any recommendations about eating in the various pubs on the route would be very welcome. My wife is very keen on pub meals for this trip and here was me with my newly purchased MrD’s slow cooker…..
By "four days" I assume you mean maybe 3 hours on the first day after pickup, then 3 days cruising (about 7 hours each), then maybe 1 hour on the final day before dropoff?
There aren't that many good food pubs that fit with that schedule; if you get to Middlewich on the first night you could try the Big Lock but it's reported to have gone downhill recently. Day 2/3 the Barbridge Inn might be your only option. On the last night you could moor near the Salt Barge (BR 193).
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You only want to have enough panels in series to get a high enough voltage above the battery voltage for the MPPT controller to work, this depends on the controller -- don't forgot to use the maximum battery voltage and minimum panel voltage. Once you have this more strings/panels can be added in parallel -- if there are a lot of panels it's worth considering having separate MPPT controllers for each bank to maximise power when partial shading happens, also several smaller controllers can sometimes be cheaper than one big one. But also with multiple panels one higher-voltage lower-current MPPT can be cheaper than a lower-voltage higher-current one. Having said that. most boats (OP included) don't have enough panels to worry too much about all this... 😉
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3 hours ago, davidwheeler said:
Am I going over old ground? All it needs is for a moderator to tell me and I will shut up.
But what I am looking for is not so much the early hire fleets but the early boat hirer. What stands out in his or her memory. What did they do it for. What did they get out of it? As to those early pioneer hire companies, I am not sure that Michael Streat's article in WW 1978 Oct. can be much bettered - he had 45 years' memory advantage.
Was Holt Abbot justified in his opinion? assuming that these days you can express an opinion without being shouted down by those who don't share it.
What opinion was that?
Certainly the most memorable hire we ever had was the steamer "Firefly" from Keith Jones at Foxton in the early 1980s -- the office was a converted guards van, see photo. Lovely bloke, built the boat as a labour of love -- small 2-cylinder oscillating engine (think Mamod, but much bigger) under the rear step, massive rectangular gas-fired watertube boiler off to one side just inside the cabin to keep the steerer warm, skin tank condenser and feed tank under it, huge (85 gallon) LPG tank in the bow plus a couple of 47kg cylinders in case you ran out, all filled from a big bulk tank behind the van.
Made maybe 3hp flat out on a good day, lovely hull which just slipped through the water but forget about stopping in a hurry. We hired it for 2 weeks and took it all the way up to Windmill End where there happened to be a boat rally, at which we got pride of place since President failed to make it.
Lovely boat but completely impractical today, must have burned about 30kg per day of gas, was converted to diesel a few years later. Travelling along in near silence with just a rumble from the boiler and a gentle tick-tick from the engine was glorious... 🙂
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22 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:
Lack of cooling seams a bigger problem
The other frequent problem seems to be dirty fuel, with the unaccustomed rocking of the boat stirring up crud or water from the bottom of the diesel and making the engine stop.
Neither cause is a lack of power as such, for example I've never heard anyone with a 15hp Bolinder (Spey, Colonel...) complain that it was too slow on a river to be safe... 😉
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1 hour ago, MtB said:
But was it just the revolting restaurant at the top that rotated? Or was it the whole tower?
The former I guess...
Otherwise all the wires into it would have got twisted up.
IIRC it was only the outer ring of the restaurant that rotated, a bit like the outer ring of a giant ball-race -- there was a circular sliding joint in the floor about 20' in from the edge which moved at a couple of inches per second, and all the services (toilets, kitchens, lifts) were in the central core which didn't revolve.
It did make going to and coming back from the toilets interesting after drink had been taken since the entrance could be anywhere, and where you came out wasn't where you went in...
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14 minutes ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:
Or once, when fitting new wheel bearings on a car that needed to be done up to a ridiculously high torque, sliding a scaffold pole on to the socket bar, then calculating how far along it I needed to stand, with the scaff pole parallel to the ground!
Or the same in reverse, to get wheel nuts off that had presumably been tightened by a gorilla with an air spanner... 😞
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10 minutes ago, Eeyore said:
The “F” is a commonly used abbreviation for the “universal adjective”. 😎 We was taught proper in the RN.
Adjective, pronoun, noun -- possibly the only word in the English language which can be used four times in a row to make a grammatically correct sentence by adding only "The" in front... 😉
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12 minutes ago, Heartland said:
I believe @Joseph has made a study of early hire craft. It would be on interest to see any input of his part
The first hire boat I used was a Bijou Line of Penkridge in 1978.
Similar time for me, except it was the memorably poor Gregory's Canal Cruisers of Wolverhampton. I found this in the photo album, that brings back some memories...
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5 minutes ago, David Mack said:
In our experience a very young baby, well-fed and newly nappy-changed; was very easy to have in a pub. It's when they get a bit older that the difficulties start.
That ought to be the case, but some pubs (and some pubgoers) don't always agree, especially if the baby is being breastfed as ours were -- but I agree that it gets more difficult later when they spend less time asleep. It also turns out that one-year-olds don't always dislike bitter things like beer yet... 😉
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9 hours ago, Ianws said:
If you go for it, everyone else onboard must be fully accepting that baby and you come first and second 100% of the time.
I think that's pretty likely given the OPs comments and who is on board... 😉
This might be telling my granny how to suck eggs, but bear in mind that with a small baby you're going to be eating mostly on board not in canalside pubs, and that there are stretches of canal with no nearby shops (or only local corner stores which don't sell much) where you may end up moored, so it's wise to go well stocked up with food for several days and restock at any opportunity -- this can be quite different to carefree baby-free boating. Speaking from experience there's also often a conflict between baby paraphernalia and available space on a narrowboat, so think carefully about what you actually need on board.
Just enjoy it, and do as much or little travelling and locks as everyone feels comfortable with 🙂
Solar - parallel or series?
in Boat Building & Maintenance
Posted
Panels don't output a voltage, they output a current, the voltage across them is defined by the MPPT controller to maximise power. If you put two panels in parallel their currents add together but they see the same voltage. If you put two panels in series the midpoint voltage will move until they both have the same current.