magnetman

I remember in 1990 just after I acquired my lovely lurcher from Battersea dogs home when Argos was selling a product which had a chemical you could pour onto the offending article and it would break down into the ground assuming it was a soft surface like a lawn. They didn't sell it for long so either it was withdrawn or I just imagined it. Could be handy. There is also the balloon system of course.

One very easy answer is to not live beside a public footpath. I spent half of my 32 liveaboard years living beside public footpaths and the other half avoiding them. Guess which approach results in no dog shit on my shoes. Obviously it's rude that people leave it on the path but it is also reality. It is hard to change the behaviour of others. Much easier to change individual behaviour or accept that if you live in a poorly regulated public realm you will find people respond to the lack of regulation. Zero mooring fees and dog shit are part of the same story.

If your don't want dog shit outside the door maybe consider not living on a public footpath. At the end of the day living beside towpaths is (for now) very cheap so there will be compromises. Fixing locks is one of the functions of a navigation authority. Stopping the dog shit problem isn't. Maybe the towpaths should be managed by local authorities. They could start charging people money to tie up.

It should be done with the pressed aluminium plates because these are difficult to fake. Yes you could find someone to make them but would they be willing to risk their business by putting the CRT logo on it?

Was that from @NigelMoore (RIP) ? I wonder what he would have made of the suggestion that a scrappage scheme could potentially be used to encourage licensing of vessels. If the CRT offered a small payment for the 'end of useful life' vessels but this only applies to vessels which were on the canal with lawful authority it would be interesting to see how many people suddenly decided to license the vessel... It would need to be done carefully but it could be an interesting experiment.

Yes I know they ask that people don't contact them. I bet people do though. If someone did ring to report an apparently unlicensed vessel what would the call handler do. 1. Tell them to shut up and go away. 2. Spend time dealing with the report. I think it would be number 2. Having the licence displayed avoids the call in the first place. That was my point.

There may be some unusually erudite people there with terrific depth. Or not.

There may be an admin cost where someone routinely contacts the CRT to report vessels which appear to be unlicensed. I don't know if people actually do this but it is possible. There are all sorts. If it did happen then the CRT would need to use admin operator time to check it out and if they found that the vessel is actually licensed this would be inefficient use of the admin staff resource. Of course it is rather easy to forge a printed licence but that might be fraud. It is not at all similar to roads. There won't be nearly as much attitude about unlicensed vehicles as there is about unlicensed Boats plus there is an easy online check for anyone who is actually bothered. BW did at one stage have an online registration checker but I think the CRT did away with it for some reason. It is true that there are only two parties who need to know if a very is licensed. The owner and the relevant navigation authority. Nobody else actually needs to know this although there may be an argument suggesting that other users should have a right to know if a vessel has a BS certificate...

It's quite likely that a lot of licence evasion has nothing to do with financial means. There definitely is a group of people who take the view that the CRT are an authority which is too be disrespected so if the enforcement is lax they just choose not to pay. This is an attitude problem. It's a bit awkward really, The CRT need to sort this out as it is basic abuse of land that they are in control of. If the person genuinely can not pay and that are a citizen they can claim Universal Credit and the DwP will pay for the licence under the housing element of UC. If people are that disorganised they can't or are unwilling to access state funds then is it really appropriate for a navigation authority to be subsidising them? No.

Something similar was used to pull a nb back into the Thames at Wallingford but that had the advantage of going with gravity. May not have been as big. Nice toy. This one. Nothing like as difficult as the current recovery though. A tracked which unit was positioned on the opposite river bank in this scenario. I wonder where there is solid enough ground in the vicinity of the vessels in the breach. Presumably it would not be appropriate to use the canal bed itself as it's on an embankment.

You could get a hall effect culomb meter. Available on eBay. Clamp style non invasive sensor and a display showing V, A and total Ah. Put it on the wire from the charger. S About £25. Generic Chinese thing nothing special but probably works.

The vessels in the breach seem to be slightly older particularly the Sefton. That it might be a BCN style construction with full width base. Not checked the fabricator. It's probably on the Boat List. Comes up as Mike Heywood which makez it an older vessel I think. The other one is called Ganymede (not the Malcolm Braine cut down and motorised grand Union butty) but a modern Boat which comes up as Liverpool boats so that one almost certainly has the design you refer to.

The Commission suggested that the scrappage payment would only apply to licensed vessels... Could be quite a clever strategy.

A typical 55ft narrow would have a block coefficient (C_b) of around 0.85. Assume around 2ft3 draught. Doing it in metric the block would be around 0.7 x 2.1 x 16.8 = 24.7 Multiply 24.7 by the C_b of 0.85 result is 20.1 Tonne. If the draught was 2ft 6 the weight would be 22.8 T Draught 2ft weight 18.3 T Cut in half and lift pieces out with the Chinook then weld back together. All approximate as the C_b has not actually been calculated and the mean draught is not known.

Sounds like they want someone to fit a replacement fuel pump on a Diesel heater. Location and type are of course essential for this. Or a possibly a new water circulation pump.

Can you just subtract the solar input displayed on the victron MPPT app from the total input displayed on the Fogstar app? That would presumably give you the total input from other sources. Or is there an issue if the Fogstar app showing Ah and the MPPT working in Wh.

I think Pluto for it right about the ripples. 'got' it right.

It is an interesting theme. Having multiple devices to say what is happening seems to just cause problems. It's like the brain is being driven to think that it makes a difference if the battery is 65 percent or 75 percent full when that is actually irrelevant unless the installation very closely equates to daily use where it could possibly require charging by rotating electrics at antisocial hours. Other than that it seems unnecessary to know although I do like graphs and data.

Does the battery itself not do these things? I have never had a battery with a BT BMS so not sure but @blackrose apparently has Fogstar batteries, I seem to recall these are capable of switching input and output current so maybe the app records these things. Life was so much easier when the indicator that the batteries were low was when the displayed part of the screen on my 10 inch black and white 12v telly got smaller and smaller.

Out of interest in the given situation why do you want the BMV to tell you how much power has gone into the batteries when the MPPT has already given a figure (ETA I assumed solar only) It seems to me unless I am missing something that the energy delivered to the batteries, assuming you have not run the generator, is displayed in the victron connect app above. Are you looking at a way to display this as well as the generator input?

They need to get night vision drone cameras to see what is happening at night. All sorts of safety elfins come out at night keeping a eye on taught winch wires.

I quite like the idea of a flood plane. Wouldn't it be cool to come back to the Boat aboard one of these while the fields all around are all covered in water.

Why don't the water voles adopt the other side of the canal? It seems a bit dangerous for such a small mammal to be wandering around on a public footpath. The Sustrans mamil v small mammal Crunch. Maybe these voles are a bit thick and need signage. Similar to the two wheelers. Or do the voles specifically need to have access from one side to the other for social reasons, If we get water voles and mamils gaining too much priority maybe it's better not to have a navigable waterway in the first place. Just widen the path and keep a small water transfer channel with soft edges.

It's a bit awkward to do it with an Alde boiler. There is a way however. Lighting it must be done manually due to the FFD. The pilot will then ignite the main burner periodically then shut down if no coolant is moving ie coolant over temperature. So one way to do it is to put a timer on the circulation pump. That way when the pump is in operation the main burner will be allowed to stay alight. I had an Alde but made the mistake of removing it as it was never used. Every time there is a cold spell like now I am reminded why that was an error. I don't strictly need it but it can be a handy thing to have available.