IanD
Patron
-
Posts
11,379 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
89
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Gallery
Blogs
Store
Posts posted by IanD
-
-
1 hour ago, GUMPY said:
You generally only need 5kW to run a heat pump and heat a house so 3kW would be enough to run a heat pump to keep a boat warm.🤔
Heat pumps big enough for boats (e.g. Frigomar) only use about 1kW flat out and throttle down to about 200W at lower outputs.
-
1
-
-
On 13/04/2024 at 10:38, GUMPY said:
I found a fault!
Whilst is supports most bands on its internal antennas on external antennas only B42 and B48 on 4G and N78 on 5G are supported. So not much use on 4G if you need external antennas.
That's the well-hidden problem with external antenna connections on lots of routers...
-
7 hours ago, Midnight said:
I never claimed it would save £millions but it would prevent a few stoppages. Why would the government remove £10m from the grant? Therese Coffey said CRT's role is to maintain the waterways - never mentioned non essentials.
Because as has been said many times, the government sees the canals as a linear park for millions of people to use for outdoor activities, and to keep the government happy CART have to do all those things to make the canals more appealing to non-boaters -- it's all in the KPIs imposed on CART, and if CART don't meet them by prioritising 35000 boaters instead the likely result would be a cut in the grant. Why do you think none of the KPIs are related to navigation?
-
6 minutes ago, Midnight said:
Junior fishing courses on EA waters, two tone van livery, lock poetry, sponsored Facebook adverts ........(add your own here) and I promised not to mention blue signs again so I won't.
.... all would fix a paddle or two and prevent a stoppage.
...and would in reality make negligible difference -- unless the government decided to remove (for example) £10M from the grant because CART were no longer appealing to millions of non-boaters, in which case removing them would have a huge negative effect on the canals... 😞
-
1
-
-
16 hours ago, TheBiscuits said:
And you need to rest up a bit before or after doing that manual guillotine gate!
99 turns, and it's not that light ...
I thought it was closer to 150, but then I wasn't the one winding, I was in the brewery buying beer... 😉
-
52 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:
But when C&RT (at the highest level) denied twice that they had been issued with a previous version, and, not only was it proven that they had been, but when they still denied it, a copy was shown.
(C&RT has had a whistleblower for some years).
That is (at the very least) telling lies, and supressing the truth.
All documents have "previous versions" including drafts; most people would say that if they're not officially released that's all they are, preliminary unreleased versions. Lots of documents I do go through many versions before the final one, modifications are made, things are added or removed, corrections are made -- it's how these things work, no conspiracy theories are needed...
If there was an official "V1" and this was superseded by an official "V2" and then they denied that "V1" ever existed then that would be lying, but I haven't seen any evidence that this is what actually happened here -- have you?
If not, I suggest you get down off your CRT-bashing high horse... 😉
-
1
-
-
29 minutes ago, magpie patrick said:
Yes I read it - non-story the Daily Mail of the canal world.
I'm also fed up with the CRT baiters in this forum. We're soon going to have a fight for the survival of the canal system and all some people want to do is pick holes whilst the whole edifice (the canals,not those running them) collapses.
There you go, battle line drawn.
Especially the CRT baiters who are not actually on the canals any more, and seem to actually want to see them deteriorate and close -- maybe because they think it would prove they were right to leave and that their predictions of doom proved correct... 😞
-
9 hours ago, Alan de Enfield said:
Move forward a couple of months and the ban on wood burning stoves (in new builds) is announced in Scotland:
The Scottish National Party has been accused of launching an attack on rural Scotland following a ban on wood-burning stoves in new homes.
Housebuilders cannot install "polluting heating systems, which include log burners, following the introduction of new regulations to tackle climate change.
Alasdair MacMillan, who runs an Argyll-based architecture and planning company, described the changes as "seismic".
Meanwhile Douglas Lumsden, an energy spokesman for the Scottish Tories, said: "It is vital that Scotland achieves net zero and cut emissions - but banning heating systems that people rely on is not the right way to go about it.
"Many people living in rural, off-grid areas rely on wood-burning stoves to heat their houses, especially in emergencies. This ban would leave them without any way to heat their homes.
"Yet again, the SNP-Green Government are showing their contempt for rural Scotland, ploughing ahead with rash ideas without considering the significant impact on individuals and their lives."
The move, which came into force at the start of this month, has raised concerns among pensioners and remote Highland communities relying on off-grid forms of heating.
The rest of the article :
SNP quietly bans popular item in green crackdown with pensioners in firing line (msn.com)
My Son (up in the highlands) actually burns peat, it seems every crofter has a 'right' to dig and burn peat) no doubt this will be banned in any new builds.
This policy -- as introduced in Scotland, if the reports are correct -- is also idiotic... 😞
The problem with wood-burning stoves is not climate change (CO2 emissions) but PM2.5 particulate emissions in densely-populated urban areas, where they are estimated to be responsible for something like 6000 deaths per year -- hence the (justifiable) moves to ban them *in urban areas*, especially since the vast majority there are lifestyle accessories not essential heating.
(unfortunately this will also hit boaters who moor in towns and cities, they'll have to switch from wood to smokeless fuel).
The situation is very different in sparsely-populated rural areas, where the wood is likely to be locally grown (and replanted, so it's renewable) *and PM2.5 pollution is not a problem*. There is no good reason to ban woodburners in such areas, whether in houses or on boats.
-
2
-
-
5 minutes ago, Halkyon said:
Unfortunately I am still 31 years from retirement and work full time remote from a laptop!
When you've got the boat you can get this sorted easily in a couple of days, see my post above.
-
1
-
-
-
8 minutes ago, PeterScott said:
On this day in 2001
Scout Tunnel HNC. and Lock12W
Copperkins was the first boat to journey from Stalybridge since the restoration and the closure for the Foot-and-Mouth outbreak. Fred Carter and A Hemingway, are in BW's then jolly-green-giant workgear (it was not a popular set of work clothing iirc)
Compare 26May1979 9Apr2001 14May2001 (#2) 14Oct2008 4Apr2010 10Jun2013
and earlier at Stalybridge Lock No 6W, above lock 7W, lock 9W
Nice new paving in Stalybridge, not covered with goose sh*t... 😉
-
4 minutes ago, Tony Brooks said:
And as that looks like a Vetus stern tube setup that uses a single rubber Cutless bearing at the back of the shaft then the shaft does have a degree of compliance within that bearing, so the engine can wave about A LITTLE without wearing the front bearing (because it does not have one) or banging the shaft onto the tube.
I think Vetus say use one of those hard plastic "flexible" couplings, but as you have the thrust block and the motor bearings to hold everything in perfect alignment I am not sure what it gives you, unless it is being used as a fancy shear pin in case of the prop jambing.
Don't know if it's Vetus but it's the standard setup Finesse use, I think the various couplings are also to allow easy dismantling/replacement of parts if needed in future as well as extra noise isolation which Ricky is really hot on, there's also an acoustically-lined fibreglass cover over the whole motor frame assembly which wasn't fitted in that photo.
If the prop jams then the motor (running in constant torque mode) just stops dead with no damage -- the motor inertia is lower than the propeller so no need for a shear pin, unlike a diesel where the engine inertia is many times higher especially with a stepdown gearbox.
-
51 minutes ago, johnmck said:
Thank you for that. I just thought that whilst the roof was being stripped, it was a good time to upgrade. I have gone for the 4x4 antenna as a bit of future proofing, ready for a 5g router when required. I will have a play with the connections when it all goes back together and forget the splitter.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/404865017361?_ul=GB&var=0
NR5103E for £120.
Don't get the newer V2 version, this only has 2 external antenna sockets.
Use some short (right-angle) TS9-SMA adaptor cables to connect the antenna and tape these to the case of the router to keep strain off the (fragile) TS9 connectors. I used these (you'll need 2 pairs):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/BOOBRIE-Coaxial-Antenna-Adapter-Broadband/dp/B09MLLB1FP/
-
14 minutes ago, bizzard said:
The drive line with universal flex like Aquadrives are not even fitted to most very expensive premium build mainlt cruiser stern narrow boats, your new boat probablt hasn't. In the past I've had to renew many badly worn stern tube bearings and shafts because of engine misalighnment, sinking engine mounts and even when the engine have been in alignment.
If I'd had a diesel or series hybrid boat built, I'd have specified that it had an Aquadrive or similar.
Mine doesn't really need one since it's electric, but it still has flexible couplings between both motor and thrust bearing (in the flexibly-mounted motor drive cage) and between thrust bearing and stern tube -- with cutless bearing and greaseless stern gland, so a bit more misalignment tolerance (and less vibration into the hull) than a greased bronze sleeve bearing.
-
1
-
-
9 minutes ago, bizzard said:
The modern way of mounting engine and transmission in most narrowboats is horrid. Shoved right up the back as far as possible to give as much cabin space as possible, with no room for decent proper marine flexible universally jointed drive with thrust bearing to allow the engine to move at will and not be restrained by Poxy centaflex units and the like that don't do much.
I suspect it's not just the space though, Aquadrives and similar (and their super-flexible feet...) cost a lot more than simple flexible couplings...
4 minutes ago, cheesegas said:Of course. I was just saying it's more common on newer boats than older boats. Still pretty uncommon compared to the 'standard' shear mountings and flexible Centaflex etc coupling though.
Surprisingly, the best setups I've seen were on old oil rig lifeboats; hefty thrust bearing bolted to an aluminum stringer glassed in securely, then a good 1-2' drive shaft with CV joints at either end. The Pythondrive setups prioritise distance from gland to engine and have a tiny 3-4" drive shaft.
Nothing wrong with that if properly designed (large shaft diameter is really only needed to prevent torsional whipping on long shafts), and it means they can be fitted in a lot more boats. Still too expensive for a lot of boaters though...
-
55 minutes ago, MtB said:
Thinking laterally one could swerve all these problems by putting the motive force on the bank, and pulling the boat along with a line.
I'm surprised no-one has thought of this before. That nice Mr De Bono would have been delighted with this solution
Horses don't make much noise or vibration either, and their emissions are both more useful and less harmful than those from diesel engines... 😉
-
27 minutes ago, johnmck said:
Sorry to resurrect a very old post, but it does give context.
The set up fitted in 2016 has served us very well, even enabling due to a change in circumstances, Ali to work off the boat over the last few summers.
At the moment, the boat roof is being repainted and removal of the Fullband dome antenna is required, so it seems a good time to upgrade our system a little. The Huawei mifi is still working, but becoming some what old technology now.
As previously stated, I am a technophobe.
I propose to replace the existing dome antenna with a Fullband FB4X4MINIDOME and the mifi with a TP-Link MR600 (V3) router. In fact I have these ready to fit once the roof is ready. Already linked the existing antenna to the new router on our trip to the painters and it worked fine. But...
The new antenna has four leads. The router has two sma antenna ports. Do I try using just two of the leads, or could I try using a Tuolink sma splitter cable (sma male to dual sma female), or would this compromise signal quality?
Appreciate your thoughts.
Don't use splitter (or in this case, combiner) cables, they'll make things a lot worse not better -- just use two of the antenna cables, it'll work fine. If two are marked as "primary" use these, otherwise pick any two -- you could try different pairs and run speedtests to see if one combination is better than the others.
If you want to make better use of the antenna you need a 4x4 MIMO router, and it would make sense to get one which supports 5G. Lots of people (including me) have had success buying secondhand Zyxel NR5103E (ex-Three) routers, these are about £150 on eBay.
-
1
-
-
17 minutes ago, Rob-M said:
When we used to hire we often hired a boat that had no hire company details on it so looked like a private boat and I found we got a different reception at locks to when we hired something that had a company name on it. With the unmarked boat people would be happy to slate hire boaters, but I then liked to point out we were hiring.
And that's the problem with judging by appearances -- I've come across (plenty of) friendly helpful scruffy boaters and nasty arrogant shiny boaters, skilled/knowledgeable hirers and incompetent/ignorant owners/liveaboards. And the opposite in all those cases... 😉
-
21 minutes ago, dmr said:
Yes, the 1E (rotational frequency) component is actually a pitch. Many off the shelf 3 cylinder engines will have an out of balance flywheel and front pulley to turn half of this into a yaw as a best compromise.
A proper (automotive) design would establish the sensitivity of the vehicle structure to the various force inputs and design the mounts and pitch/yaw split correctly. This is also sometimes done on big plastic boats but I don't know if it has been tried on a narrowboat, it would be an interesting project.
Balance shafts use/waste a bit of power and would have limited gain on a three due to the various frequencies, they work a treat on the I4 (standard inline four cylinder engine) as this has one major harmonic (but do have to run at twice engine speed).
Traddy boats have a rigidly mounted big heavy engine, I don't know how well a lighter modern regidly mounted engine would work but suspect boaters who choose not to have a "proper" engine aspire to near xero noise and vibration so mounts are the way to go.
Putting the engine right at the back of the boat is probably good for noise but maybe not optimum for vibration.
If you really want to cut down engine vibration induced in the hull, the best solution is probably the one that generators use in critical applications like hospitals which is an inertia base -- the existing flexible engine mounting feet are used but onto a heavy frame (usually a steel one filled with concrete) which is in turn mounted on soft vibration-absorbing feet to the hull/building.
This is what I did with my generator and it made a big difference, there's a lot less vibration and noise inside (and outside) the boat when it's running than the normal mounting method.
But to work properly (and avoid introducing new resonance problems) it has to be heavy (at least as heavy as the engine/gearbox), and mounted on relatively soft feet -- on mine the frame plus steel plate infill under the generator (almost 2" thick!) weighs about 200kg so was not exactly cheap to build along with the Aquadrive feet... 😞
To do this with a diesel engine you'd need to modify the engine beds, both to lower them and to get enough space to fit the frame in, and I guess most people wouldn't think the extra cost and complexity was worth it (but I was going to do it when I was considering a diesel or series hybrid boat) -- you'd also definitely need a good flexible drive coupling (Aquadrive?) to cope with any increased engine movement.
It also adds several hundred kg of weight right at the stern, which can make things interesting when it comes to ballasting the boat... 😉
-
56 minutes ago, MrsM said:
I think it could best be summed up as 'patronising'. I guess when our boat looked well used they assumed we knew what we were doing, but when our boat looked shiny and unscathed they assumed that we hardly ever left the marina (which couldn't have been further from the truth). Quite logical I suppose.
Aah, the "BMW" problem... 😉
Mind you a lot of people -- boaters included -- have a similar attitude to hire boats, regardless of the fact that some hirers have spent far longer actually cruising on the canals over the years than most liveaboards... 😞
-
1
-
-
33 minutes ago, dmr said:
In a modern car one or more mounts are often quite high up to give a "neutral axis" installation where the mounts are on the axis about which the engine wants to rotate. In boats the mounts are low down and not "designed" so more engine movement is likely. The three cylinder engine is quite difficult as it produces two harmonic series, one at the firing frequency (1.5 times rotation) and one at rotation frequency, so its difficult to steer clear of all the resonances.
There's also a big low-frequency (rotation frequency) rocking couple which is hard to suppress, it's why modern cars with 3-cyl engines use complex and carefully placed engine mounts, often soft and with added damping, and sometimes added masses, as well as sophisticated computer analysis of all the vibration modes -- it's all this which has made them usable (and popular) in modern cars.
In boats which don't bother with any of this (modern technology, uurgh...) the vibration can be a problem with 3-cyls, the rocking couple wants to make the prop shaft wiggle up and down (and side to side) which is not good for flexible couplings and/or stern tube, especially if there's an engine mount resonance within the rev range -- which there probably will be unless the mounting feet are very soft (e.g. Yanmar), which they often aren't... 😞
Technically speaking, the proper solution is either to use an internal balancer shaft (e.g. Bukh) or have a slower speed engine bolted to the bedplates instead of flexible mounted, which is what trad engines do, but at the cost of vibration throughout the boat -- which can be really bad if this then hits a hull resonance, like the Bolinder-powered boat (yes, a single-cylinder...) I saw on the Trent where the entire stern was bouncing up and down by several inches. Most marinisers seem to just use flexible feet and hope there won't be a problem, and they usually get away with this -- but not always, as cheesegas has found... 😞
5 minutes ago, cheesegas said:I'd rather have one, if only because it's under a cruiser stern and lifting the boards above the engine always results in a bit of grit etc falling into the engine bay. The intake end of the manifold is also perfectly positioned to suck in belt dust from the alternator
It's a full cast iron block and head so yeah, probably quite top heavy. I haven't tried adding weight to a point lower than the mounts but I'm not sure how feasible it is to get weights down there because clearance is quite tight.
The problem is that to affect resonances like this you need a *lot* of weight, especially with a heavy cast iron engine like yours -- a few tens of kg is unlikely to fix the problem.
-
1 minute ago, cheesegas said:
To be honest the replacement is so small, made completely of rubber and mounts directly onto the intake I can't see it resonating at all. Should be delivered today so I'll fit it and see how it goes.
The existing filter assembly has a thick steel bracket that bolts to the manifold into blind threaded holes, then the canister is bolted to that with a short flexible hose to join it to the intake. One of the bolts sheared flush with the manifold and my stud extractor can't get it out so I think it's easier to scrap the whole assembly!
Should be fine then, a rubber assembly will have plenty of damping unlike a steel one.
-
Just now, MrsM said:
I have no idea why, but it was quite noticeable that some lockies treated us quite differently after the boat looked all fresh and shiny.
Better or worse? 😉
-
On 07/04/2024 at 09:33, cheesegas said:
It does seem to be a high frequency, low displacement vibration so this might work, but as you say, there's no suitable strong mounting points nearby without welding something on!
The chap at R&D actually suggested a weight above the mount that's most lightly loaded - I've tried this with both my own 80kg mass and varying cast iron ballast weights on top of the gearbox but movement is in the wrong axes. Appears to be the reaction force spinning the block in the other direction to the crank each time a cylinder fires, so the weight would need to be high up to have an effect... It's got a fairly hefty cast alu camshaft cover but I don't think its bolts would hold up to a weight on top!
If the problem now is just the air filter resonance at 1000rpm, adding some mass to it (bolt on a lump of steel?) could help -- an extra 20% (of the air filter mass) will bring the resonance down to 910rpm which could still be a problem, adding 40% will bring it down to 850rpm which should be fine. Your suggestion of a lighter air filter assembly will move the resonance up the rev range which might be an even bigger problem when you're cruising...
5g MiFi WiFi 6
in Boat Equipment
Posted
Usually the answer is yes. However if you're inside a boat with no reception using the internal antennas and these are used for setting up the link (which is what happens with 5G) then you're scuppered... 😞
They make the routers this way because it's cheaper, on the assumption that external antennas will improve reception on the 3.5G bands which don't penetrate walls as well as the lower frequency bands.