Detling

A lot of cars use a 12 volt coolant pump for the heater circuit, readily available from a well known auction site or a good breakers yard. Life span may not be in the thousands of hours the Bolin seemed to give but the cost is more manageable. Beaten by Chalky

When you knock your Nicholson into the cut you fleetingly get upset about the tenner you have just lost, I think a smartphone costs a bit more. It does happen, I saw a very anguished guy on the north Oxford this September lamenting the loss of his iPhone to the great god of the deep. You will also find in many large sections of the more rural and pretty canals the signal is poor, if any at all, and data is a joke so your app will not work online and there are very few offline apps out there.

Yep I have a circuit diagram, but it does not tell me which of the 20 odd red wires leaving the switch panel goes where, They are all bundled and tie wrapped and put into the trunking, at various point along the boat some emerge from the trunking and go to their destination. All shown on a nice circuit diagram but you still cannot identify the one wire in the bundle you want to tap into or relocate.

I once many years ago saw a spanner welded across a very defunct battery it had fallen onto the terminals and they melted due to the current fixing the spanner permanently. The sides of the battery were also buckled. The battery was in a salvaged boat and had been under several feet of sea water for 24 hours but still packed a punch. .

Solar excels at the small things, It is great for keeping the batteries topped up in winter when you are out/away. It is great in summer doing the polishing off charging during the day. iI you cruise / run engine early in the day getting to 80% SOC or more before midday the solar will merrily top the batteries up in the afternoon whilst you sleep off your lunch, do you actually cruise every day or for 5 days our of 7 maybe. That last 20% and especially the last 10% of charge is very much current limited by the battery bank (my 550 A/hr will often only take 2-3 amps even with a 135 Amp alternator (@14.7 V ) so a lot of fuel burnt for very few Amp hours. If you recon it can save between 1 and 2 hours worth of fuel a day in summer that is a few hundred pounds each year, in winter as a live aboard it will only save a few minutes of fuel a day but every little helps, as a non live aboard the top up for the battery is worth a lot, no hook up required, so no earth lead to cause galvanic issues / worries, no standing charge / expensive units just to charge the batteries, no worries about flat batteries for the auto bilge pump etc. My 300 watts with mttp controller cost under £500 (I fitted) and in the last two years have probably saved me £300 at least, next year I should start earning.

Quote from advert "Not for use with steel or rigid fuel pipes" Rules out most narrow boats I think.

How huge are the cassettes? My 200 litre pump out tank is full in 2 - 3 weeks with 2 aboard and being frugal with flush water. Normal human waste is 3/4 litre solid and 2 litre fluid per day. So if you only go aboard then 2 weeks 2 people is 77 litres plus flush, which will be at least about the same.

We have just booked for blacking next year August was the earliest free slot.

We have a walk thro shower room, and it is great. The loo is on the side behind a door normally so not on show, and as the room has the whole width of the boat the basin is opposite the loo allowing the shower to be next to the loo. This means that only 1500mm of precious boat length is used and 900mm of that is for the shower, all the off corridor loo/shower rooms we saw were 1800mm or more so longer. We do only have two on board most of the time and on the few occasions we have had more we have had on trouble just remember to close both doors.

Don't think the sticky table tops helped and the food was pretty poor when we were there 15 months ago I even had white chips which were not quite raw but not far off.

I seem to remember that the standby tug at Dover was withdrawn by this government in 2011 in the first round of cuts. Whether any private enterprise has managed to come in and get someone to pay them to operate a tug I do not know.

As I understand it Smartgauge is not meant to be read like a 'Bible' and mine certainly doesn't work as one. If I run some equipment for a known time I know I have used X percent of the 550 Amphours my batteries theoretically can hold. Smartgauge does not drop by X percent straight away but wait a while and it will be very close. When we get back to the marina after a good run and SG states C100, when I connect shorepower the Victron goes Bulk, Adsorption to float in about 5 minutes so the batteries are pretty full. What I do know is that if it says C60 in the morning I need a good charge period today, if it says C78 then in summer the solar will probably be enough. It is also useful when you look at 5:00pm and realize that all is not well when it reads C65 so you had better run the engine for an hour or so to survive the night. It doesn't matter if C65 is actually 65 percent or not, it indicates that your batteries are below 70 percent and that may be important at 5:00pm otherwise Murphy states that by 8:30 your inverter will beep and turn off in the middle of that film / match. and it is too late to charge your battery!

Yes not sure what you mean by 2 volts , 600 amp/hours though If you really want you can make the wires to the left hand panel thinner than the ones from the right as they only carry the current for the left hand panel, the ones from the right hand panel to the batteries will be carrying three times as much current and to the controller and then the batteries so need to be bigger. your panel data PMax: 165Wp Imax: 4.72A Vmax: 35V ISC: 5.18A VOC: 43.8V The voltage between the + and -ve of the panels will be 35 when connected to the controller and can be 43.8 when not connected. The current from each panel in full sun perpendicular to the panel will be 4.72 Amps so from the right hand panel to the controller you need to allow for 14.6 Amps max (call it 15 ) and fuse the line at say 20 Amps for safety. The controller should convert that to about 30 Amps at 14 Volts to send on to the batteries.

In winter your solar would keep the batteries nicely topped up if you used no power at all, if you are living on board then the water pump and loo flush will probably equal your solar charge. On a good day with you adjusting the panel every half hour for the 6 hours of good sun you may also get a few LED lights on for the evening. You will need your engine or a generator to charge your batteries in winter. You ask what revs for 70 amps, there has been a recent discussion on the forum about this and it also explains a lot about charging batteries, i.e. when you batteries are 80% full it is unlikely that any amount revs will result in 70 amps and the batteries may well only accept less than 20 amps.

I know of 5 narrowboats with Double glazed windows and in 3 of them they have had seal failure within 2 years due to the flexing / vibration caused when using the boat to move round the system. They are regular users though 500 mile plus per year mainly narrow canals.

Another option is to buy a 12V inverter in the States and bring it with you, you can then have 110V 60Hz on the boat via the inverter from the batteries. You would probably need to bring the breakers and sockets to make it a safe installation, I suspect you may need a 240V 50Hz system for UK sourced items as well on the boat.

Check this When we were there in 2013 the Etruria museum was closed apart from a few weekends a year, yes there is the BW/CRT yard but that is only staffed as worker 'clock on' go off int their van and return in the evening. It was fine staying overnight but I am not sure about leaving the boat for 4-5 days.

You may want to raise the floor so you can see out of the windows, many people do it also gives extra storage but will cost.

I have the normal leesan supplied pipe and it is now going smelly (3 years of use). until the autumn we had no trouble but now a whiff is there. It gets noticably worse when we have the radiators turned on when we are cruising. The main explanation I have thought of is that the pipes to the calorifier coil and the radiators go along the behind the lining on the same side as the poo pipe, although the water pipes are 300 mm below the poo pipes. Now if you look at the standard tube (PVC not Silicone) it has a temperature rating up to 50 deg C the radiator and calorifier coil feed is at 70 to 80 deg C and that heat cannot escape from behind the lining fast enough so it heats the poo pipe causing / allowing the whiff. Turn the heating and the calorifier feed off and we have no smell. I am worried that solvent weld of normal B&Q type pipes will not be any better because of the heat, ABS is supposed to go up to 90 deg C so may be better, Silicone is rated up to 200 Deg C but at (£30 + per metre) is at least twice the price of leesan delux pipe and 4 times the price of the basic pipe I have. There is some Rubber laminated hose for Petrol and Diesel fuel pipes rated up to 150 deg C and very thick walled this is a cheaper and supposed to be impervious it is also coolant (alcohol and anti freeze resistant unlike pvc). I don't know of any reason why silicone pipe should be a problem if you can clamp it well enough, apparently it can creep under pressure but is supposed to be impervious to virtually all known chemicals and gasses. Of course if I could put the hot pipes somewhere else the standard stuff would probably be fine.

Prices this year are actually less than all the other marinas in the area including Crick, Cropredy, Calcutt and Braunston and probably others in the area. One reason is they don't have liveaboards so demands on rubbish collection etc are lower, they only have the marina workers as liveaboards. You can stay aboard overnight but they limit the time to 28 days (not sure whether that is continuous or what) but as I only need a few days in the winter for working on the boat and in the season the day before we go out and the night we return there is no problem.

I found 200 watts did not quite keep up with my fridge even in mid summer, but did save well over an hour of charging per day. This year I upped the 200 to 300 watts and have had days in summer with no engine needed at all, the solar replacing 90% of my daily usage on a sunny day and on a dull day they give me 60% of daily use (my daily use is about 100Ah). At the ends of the cruising season April and September the solar produces 50-60% of the summer charge amount , the batteries are of course fully topped up even in mid winter when we are not aboard.

I saw a trad with an awning (nearly a pram hood) this year in the sun. It was made of two U shaped hoops fixed outside the rails going across the boat. There was a canvas panel from the front hoop to the stern hoop and this went down at the sides to about 30cm from the deck. It gave a nice sun shade and would keep rain off, it was only about 50-60cm high in the middle and would fold down over the hatch.

Semi trad gives you a step (seat top) to access the roof if required but the centre line end up coiled at the end of the roof and is not easily grabbed by the steerer when jumping ashore. With both the trad and the semi trad anyone going ashore from the stern, at a lock or to moor has to pass through the arc of the tiller which needs planning and practice to ensure you don't impede any sudden required helm movements.

There seem to be several stretches which I have passed on many occasions and never seen a boat moored. I agree if they are not let and are not likely to be let as they are not on the auction site they should be marked, perhaps as temporary VM until either put on the auction site or discarded. Maybe some of these are a result of the agreements BW made with new marinas to remove x number of moorings. What BW may have done is not let them but did not changed the signage either thus depriving them from all moorers.

Having passed southward through Cropredy on the Saturday we were able to moor about 1 mile south of the festival site. We had no problems with the locks but we were the first boat of 3-4 boats. (we were following a young couple who had just bought their boat and needed to be trained on using locks from Fenny. They stopped above the first lock so we now lead). The water point and services had two boats moored on it. they were still there 3 hours later when we walked into town. There we no real problems otherwise but it was tight in places. The reason we went on that Saturday was to get past the crush on Sunday, despite being the last boat out southward and setting off at 7:00 am in pouring rain we were not the first boat boat down. We stopped in Banbury and a boater who moored behind 4 hours later said that Crorpedy was chaos that day. Of note the water did appear to be polluted but maybe it was sheep do-do, I certainly wouldn't suggest swimming.