Detling

A generator will use less fuel per hour than main engine, it will also produce more electricity, but this is irrelevant when the batteries are limiting the charge current, often they are running under a fair load for the engine size unlike a 40 HP engine producing a few tens of watts this reduces bore glazing. If done properly they produce hot water like the main engine, something a suitcase generator cannot do. Having a Travel power unit on the main engine is a good alternative. though.

You may find the standby current on the 3000 is significantly higher than the 2000. Not an issue if you switch it on and off as required but if you leave on 24/7 you could be adding 24 amp hours to your daily load.

Bang for Buck for panels is cheapest per watt are domestic 36 volt (OC) panels in the 240 to 350 watt range middle per watt are '12 vol't 100 to 150 watt, 18 volt (OC) panels more costly are flexible of any type and many of them have a shortened life due to steel rooves getting very hot reducing panel efficiency and cracking bits due to differential expansion, and although walkon in winter in workboots covered in towpath grit is not the best mix. use a MPPT controller even for the '12volt' panels as the extra 20% is worth having, you have to be careful with small MPPT controllers which are often PWM with the wrong label. Put panels in parallel or at most 2 in series and pairs in parallel if more than 4, this reduces the effects of shading from trees, ropes, buildings etc as the current is limited by the shaded panel if wired in series. Do not expect the rated output in the UK, in summer you may approach 80% on a good day for an hour or so, but can have 10 hours above 50%. In winter you are very lucky to get more than 25% for a few minutes on an ideal day, normally recon on 10% of rating for 2-3 hours.

Love the Weetabix but so very true, no matter how careful you are the lower section will sooner or later get damp at the bottom, and the upper section somewhere will have a window leak. Plastic coated foam won't go to weetabix but Greenville tower was clad in that looked good but... Not to mention toxic fumes wood smoke is nasty but not in itself poisonous.

To make the system more complicated than it needs to be, the greater pressure makes leaks more likely. Domestic pressurised systems have much greater need of plumber visits than the old non pressurised systems, which often went decades between plumber visits.

There are similar baseless bike hire companies where the bike is horses then abandoned by the user, it has a gps locator and the company goes round in a van to collect them to recharge and rehire. They don't get them all and it can be a big problem, there are images on the web of mountains of uncollected bikes piled up by the council, one mountain it suggested contained nearly a million bike (it was in China), the authorities scrap them because the companies say it is cheaper to buy a new bike than pay the fine for littering the city. So much for green bike hire how much energy and pollution in building the thing. London has at least one company doing this and I have seen bikes abandoned well into parks which probably never get collected, presumably the hirer loses an excess/deposit but this is the modern world, scooters will be worse because they are smaller and cheaper.

Have similar plate heat exchanger seperate pump etc, great but the only problem I have found is when you cruise for an hour or so then reach a lock flight or a huge lock queue, after about an 40 odd minutes, on tickover, the engine temp falls. Because the thermostat opens at 75 (I think) but doesn't close until well below that. I have seen the temp drop below 70 before I have spotted, and then turned the pump off so there is no water flow through the rads and heat eaxchanger, temperature then climbs but very slowly as still on tickover.

They can get a thing called positive grid corrosion but I don't really understand it. I think is is may depend on the solar controller. A PWM controller will overcharge, a MPPT less so, As I turn everything off when I leave the boat on it's mooring I have a 7 day time switch and a relay in the panel feed to the controller, (Do not fit in the controller to battery lead) thus I set the panels to be connected two days a week, one in summer.

12 volt fridge around 500 quid 240 volt fridge same size around 110 quid. running power use very similar, so inverter losses are the big difference. I summer use boat with 400 watts or so of solar has no extra costs as the solar will fill his batteries every day. Totally different in December and January where you could be paying 2+ quid a day on fuel to charge the batteries.

Look at the no load current in the specifications, there can be huge differences, Victron's up to about 2000 Watts are under 1 amp but the 3000 is around 2 amps, a big difference 24 hours a day. Rumour has the new mastervolt 3000 is almost 4 amps but I havn't checked (misprint on spec or what, the old one was under 1 amp) Some older Sterlings are 4.6 amps my friend has one but as he has a 12volt fridge his inverter is rarely on for long.

What is a small solar system? for topping up batteries over winter you only need a 100 watt panel and that really is below MPPT controllers usually the smallest is 20 amp. A PWM controller is cheap and cheerful and will be fine, the only issue will be overcharging (no float mode), easily solved with a small 12 volt timer and a relay so the panels are only connected for two days a week. If you want a bigger setup 300 watts or above then MPPT makes a lot of sense, MakeSkyBlue have a range of controllers that offer good value for money, https://makeskyblue.com/ Tracer are good, and if you have 3 or more panels in parallel there are no issues, Victron also make a popular MPPT and again there is a range and people seem to like them. Parallel connection also helps with partial shading, where if you have say 4 panels all in sun they produce 360 watts, partially shade one panel and if wired in parallel you will still get over 270 watts, if wired in series you may find you only get 40 or 50 watts if it is dark shade (building edge) or 180 if it is dappled by a tree. In a marina shade is unlikely.

nothing wrong with using a sprint at the end you don't get on/off at what matters is thast you have lines at an angle to the bank/boat and not at right angles and one line at one end as a spring creating a triangle mooring at that end, that stops the boat moving back and fore. If you learned mooring on tidal waters you learn to use springs and long lines (sometimes bollard over 30 foot from the boat ) If you don't, that ladder you climbed up to go ashore is nowhere near the boat 3 hours later, the boat has moved back or forward, not just up and down.

3 wired in parallel have a potential current max of 15 amps, 2 wired in series have a potential current max of 5 amps. It is a lot easier to get the tracer tracking over 1.5 amps to allow it to set a max power point. When using Tracers best to wire in parallel or as in my case of 6 panels 3 parallel strings of 2 People say that as wired in series the voltage gets higher quicker in the morning it is better, it does but only for a few minutes before the panel is at max voltage anyway, and at a time when the panels are not producing much in the way of power, current in the milliamp range, as this delays the controller finding the maximum power point it is not a good idea. Tracers are among the worst at this, but they are have a good overload margin and are reliable, all at a reasonable price. If the wires to the batteries are to thin the controllers get tricked into thinking the batteries are full early. They measure the voltage at their terminals so if you have 13.8 v at the battery and 0.5v voltdrop on the cable the controller sees 14.3v and thinks the battery is fully charged. Use the fattest cable practical to get that volt drop down preferably to 1%, at half the controllers max current.

Tracers can and do get stuck. They track by loading the panels reducing the voltage going into the unit and checking the current at that load. They start testing at full voltage no amps and eventually load the panels until they are just over the battery voltage. They should then return to the highest load current value, but often a Tracer controller forgets to return to the highest current point. Another feature of the Tracer series is that currents under 1.5 amps don't seem to count when trying to determine the maximum power point. The OP has 4x20 volt panels but doesn't say what wattage, so likely to be at least 200 watts total (could be over 600) which should be enough to easily exceed 1.5 amps at midday. My Tracer sometimes sticks at a panel voltage of 14.5 in the morning as the sun rises, I normally check when I get up, and as I have a switch in the panel feed I can disconnect the panels for a few seconds and things then work fine. It is a known issue but Tracer haven't changed their tracking software for years despite knowing the issue. Additionally if the cables from the batteries to the controller are too thin then the battery voltage plus the volt drop from the cable reaching he Tracer causes it Togo into float before the battery voltage is high enough.

Have you ever found a occasion where said fender was in the correct place when the wind blew you off course and onto the stonework of the lock enhance, I have never seen one in the correct place but have seen several torn off.

No, it is a way of donating them to somone else's propeller. They make an enormous thump on the uxter plate as they go round.

Thanks for confirming my thoughts new MCB required preferably before tonight.

Surely an insulation leak would trip the RCD and not the MCB, I could be mistaken.

Not boat but home related. One of the MCB's in the distribution box keeps tripping very few hours (between 1 and 12 hours) it is on a lighting circuit. Even with all lights off it sometimes trips and sometimes trips with one or two lights on. It resets with no trouble. If it was a fault to earth I would expect the RCD to trip but it doesn't, and as I understand it, a MCB only trips on over current, which I do not think is happening here. Do they go dodgy as they get old like me, because this one is over 20? I can't think of any way an overload could be present with all lights off which is not present a few seconds later when I reset the trip. If it helps this has occurred after an old style bulb in an infrequently used light went bang, that took out the MCB and RCD. and is no longer in the light, but wondering if the MCB enjoyed it's trip and has developed a habit.

Probably not the best 1000 watts is unlikely to be able to start a 240v fridge. It won't power a microwave and most kettles are more than 1000 watts. Ideal inverter is 1800 to 3000 watts continuous sine wave peak power higher. A 20 amp charger is possibly too small. The MPPT is the right size but at 500 watts solar limit a bit restrictive my 40 amp controller can be connected to 800 watts of solar. You can easily get alternatives for the individual bits and being separate if one breaks you don't lose everything. You may save money as well.

There are several issues which make it unlikely they exist, the main ones are weather and distance. We needed to get some signwriting done to match so it needed the original painter, it took several weeks to find a day where the boat would be somewhere he could get to and park, the weather forecast had at least 6 hours dry, as we had no cover, and he did not have another apointment that day. You certainly could not do it as a business to live off, pin money maybe. It took 3 months of phone calls and several abandoned planned days before we got it done, even then it was not ideal weather wise as we had to cover the stern with a tarpaulin, as he left because rain was visible and approaching.

Try sailing a dinghy amongst the wet bods in their long 8's. I have had a few problems with them over the years. They stop for a coach or cox lecture, leaving you with a few feet of shallow water between their oars and the bank. They decide to try a racing start as you are crossing 20 yards in front of them, and wonder why you can't turn or move in the 1 second it takes their spear to cover that distance with 8 beefy men on the oars. Being of course mainly offspring of the great and good, you have no hope of explaining that they could possibly need to think of others.

Also used to drive a BMW now has an AUDI and owns the road.

I had a bang once engine stopped. B great log stuck between prop and skeg took a lot of shifting, worse bit B great log sank when prized free, waiting for some other poor boater.

But they are repairing lock gates and full before they fail causing chaos, maybe our friends at CRT could look and learn, a stitch in time saves nine.