Tony Brooks

Is this a wind up? 21x12V batteries can not be connected in a string to produce 24V. You need 20 or 22. Perhaps it is 20 for domestic use and 1 for engine starting at 12V but then 38Ah is rather light for engine starting unless it's a car size petrol unit or a smaller outboard. I also can't understand why anyone would use 21small batteries rather than fewer but larger. You seem to have about 380Ah @24 volts and a 40 amp charger. That seems OK as long as you run it for long enough. Your load looks like about 146 Ah per day, so if the batteries were new they are a tad undersized for optimum life. (don't discharge below 50% and fully recharge as often as possible, at least once a week). As time goes on they will sulphate, and have less or far less capacity. Google suggests that is a 6000 Watt generator so it should power the inverter with a some output left over for use on board, but it's an open frame site generator so will be noisy. Best moor well away from other boats. It is also petrol powered with that entails safety wise in resect of CO fumes petrol fumes. Not a nice item for a boat. You will have to run the generator for many, many hours to fully recharge, and even if we gave you a number it may not be enough to get the batteries fully charged. You need some form of battery monitoring to see when the batteries are more or less fully charged, so what instruments do you have? No instruments and assuming lead acid batteries 10 to 12 hours a day but maybe more. You may get away with 4 hours or so during the week, plus a very long charge at weekends, but this will be at the expense of battery life. Solar will help a lot in the summer. Please read, learn and understand the Battery Charging Primer that is at the top of the maintenance forum, ask for clarification if you need to.

I agree with all that, but must point out that you had the equipment and facilities to it. The average boater does not, so any advice has to recognise that. It is a case of doing the best you can with what you have. If anyone is still running a 13.8 to 14.2V regulated 10 or 11AC charging set up they will always suffer more sulphation than someone running a 14.4V alternator and will also never be able to get their batteries as fully charged.

That sounds very much like equalising and I suspect would not be done every day. I also think that you may have missed the bit about topping up as required and monitoring the temperature during the process. As MtB said, lead acid batteries are never totally and fully charged. Your process would convert a bit more sulphate than equalising at 15.5V and get them a bit more fully charged. I think it would be damaging to use that voltage every day or even once a week and would definitely destroy many types of sealed batteries.

Don't apologise. Those of us who have done the job know many people don't have a clue about what is important and what is not, and this is not helped by the quality of advice one often gets from essentially sales people. I always feel a little vulnerable when being asked for advice that is not best practice because if something went wrong, in theory my past would lead a court to consider me an expert and as such I am expected to have a higher degree of care than a lay person.

In that case I think it will be OK with a typical 2.5 to 3 bar water pump. PRV at least 5PSI (10 is better) above pump cut out pressure but not much higher, plus the expansion vessel pressurised to the pump cut out pressure.

Not unless he told you the test pressure. Please stop asking me to confirm what others have told you when you only supply partial specifications. I have given my opinion based on such information as you have chosen to disclose, I can't do more.

See this topic Reliable calorifier suppliers?

I have just had a quick peep at their website and it does not even give the grade for its cylinders. The grade is related to the head, and thus pressure, the cylinder is designed to work with. There is no information about the test or even operating pressure or head. I think it is an ordinary domestic indirect cylinder so is unlikely to be suitable, but without the vital specifications hoe can anyone tell? As you seem to have bought it then if you set your water pump cut-out pressure to 15psi or less and put up with the low pressure, then get a 1.5 bar PRV and finally fit an expansion tank also pressurised to 15 psi, it may last you a number of years but doing so is totally at our own risk. It could just as easily spilt in days or weeks. I can not advise this course of action.

If the Reflecks overheat is a real water temperature cut out and not a fire valve, that should be fine. As long as the engine cooling circuit is not pressurised there is no reason it can not be linked to an open vented heating coil, but you will have to watch the levels of the heating and engine header tanks. Both need to be pretty much the same height.

I don't see how a calorifier supplied for a boat can be open vented, so is this cylinder a proper marine calorifier or an indirect domestic cylinder? If the latter, it may well not be strong enough to cope with the 30 to 60 psi internal pressure from the domestic water pump. If it really is a marine calorifier then it should be fine but make sure it is fitted with a PRV AND expansion vessel.

In no particular order: 2. Solid fuel stoves in boat sizes do not normally have any overheat cutout. So unless the Epping has been converted to run on oil, it won't have an overheat cutout. Even if it did, there is every chance that you would boil the water and expel it from the header tank. Is the Kelvn tank/heat exchanger cooled, or direct raw water cooled and does it run unpressurised, unlike modern engines? 3. Both flap and spring type one way valves are available.

The only thing "special" about the Alde thermostat it that it is fitted with an on-off switch for the pump, it's brown instead of white, and it has Alde printed on the face. I bet it you looked at the guts, you would find a well-known maker's brand. Alde just buys them in. Apart from the need to fit a separate on-off switch that could be anywhere really wiring accepted, it is a standard mechanical room thermostat so it is a straight swap for any other thermostat. It is a question of seeing how the connections inside the thermostat (not on the switch) are identified (probably C, NO, NC) and I bet you will find any other thermostat uses the same or very similar identification. The tall Alde are now obsolete and as far as know Alde no longer supply spares, but may be wrong about that. If it is possible to organise a CWF delivery relay from Reading, I will happily get it on the way. I have to go to Oxford soon, so if you are in that area I can drop it off. Once the fuel thing is over I will deliver if up to about 20 miles. Front and back images It uses 2 x AA or AAA batteries to power itself. Ignore the AC rating, I am sure it will be just fine for an Alde which is what I bought it for.

You can determine how much heat each radiator receives by adjusting the normal radiator valves, but you also do it by controlling the size of the fire in the stove. You should not just fit a stove that you happen to like the look of. It's boiler output needs matching to the radiators. You can have simple and reliable that may not be as "efficient" as possible, or you can have efficient, complicated and less reliable. Most boaters prefer the former. You also need to consider that electricity away from shore power is very expensive to produce and store, especially in the winter months, so heating systems using little or no electricity to run may turn out to be as cost-effective as a more efficient one that needs electricity. A boat is not a house and worrying about the cost of heating a temporarily unused "room" is not, in my opinion, a sensible thing to do.

Normally you can either fit a lower temperature engine thermostat, or fit a thermostatic mixing valve to the hot outlet pipe from the calorifier so it mixes hot and cold water. In theory fitting a cooler engine stat would increase wear and fuel consumption, but in practice it's not detectable.

Back in the day, the plugs and moulds for GRP boats seemed to migrate from maker to maker almost by the month, so the moulds could have formed several slightly different boats over the years. On yours, it seems there may be a join in the top moulding at the back of the cockpit. That suggest to me that they cut the hull mould and inserted a middle section, cut the back off the original top mould and made up a new top mould for the back of the boat giving a longer aft cockpit version. I kind of assume yours is about 32ft long.

I suppose you are way up north or west because I have one I would be happy to give you. They have all gone Hive, smart, and radio now but this is the closest to what I have. https://www.heatingcontrolsonline.co.uk/avansa-2007-programmable-thermostat.html You would probably have to fit a separate on-off switch for the pump. As you will be running the pilot light when you are away from the boat, I suspect just turning the pump off but leaving the boiler alight would protect from frost apart from in the most severe weather. The boiler would just fire up for a short period now and again and heat would be vented into the boat.

Alde warn against running them at too high a temperature. Trying to remember from the manual, think the suggest 3 to 4 on the boiler thermostat. I once saw this explained, but can't remember it now. I think that they are ideal for your use and a programmable room thermostat would probably be more convenient and may not use that much more gas.

Absolutely correct. It is all just a guide to how to do the best you can for your batteries. If a boater has an old 10/11 AC system as set by the factory then it would be regulating at 13.8 to 14.2 volts and would never go any higher, so it would be of no use to the boater to say dogmatically 14.x volts. I suspect the OP's B2B will give an absorption voltage of around (not looked it up) 14.6 to 14.8 volts, so again it means you can't be too specific over the voltage for this purpose. I suppose even better is to say keep charging until the current has stopped dropping over an hour or so but the OP has B2B and I think those drop into float voltage and as soon as they do the current is likely to stop dropping. The same applies to many solar controllers and battery chargers

I agree with you. I fear that the old Ellis and to a degree tall Alde boilers gave gas boilers the reputation of being expensive to run, not helped by the prices charged by Calor for canal side gas. It's the pilot lights that use the gas but modern boilers use spark ignition.

One could view that as lest piss our employees off so they leave and we can use volunteers to do their jobs type of management.

A gravity circulated wet central heating system from a stove would distribute heat throughout the boat. FWIW I went for a gas boiler instead of a diesel one for short term "warm the boat up" type use.

Re Backrose's post about gloomsters saying using such heater will invalidate your insurance. I can't speak for others, but we have had a case quoted here where an insurance company did advise that any such heaters should be certified for marine use or it would invalidate the insurance. All I have ever done is to advise that you check your policy to ensure it has no such clauses. I think it was only on insurer and they seemed to specialise more in lumpy water boats, so probably think narrowboats leap about and roll like a sea boat will and don't want a heater falling over. I have never heard of a fire or accident being cause by such heaters, or tube heaters, but that does not mean that one should ignore the fact that it was reported that one insurance company would have the opportunity to void the insurance if an accident did occur. And not OK when all the others in the marina turn their heaters on a pop the main circuit breaker and shut power down for a whole section of the marina.