PeterF

The trouble with the inverter low voltage shutdown as you have found out is that a single value is not very good. It needs to allow for voltage drop in the batteries and voltage losses in the battery to inverter cables when under a heavy load, but this means that if the units is only supplying a small load, or self consumption then it can take the batteries down to a very low level. I have left my inverter (same model as yours) at the default settings. You could increase the low voltage cut off, but that may cause a premature shutdown when the inverter is supplying large loads. In terms of the number of batteries, 3 is the minimum I would have for a 3000VA inverter and preferably 4. The power audit is a calculation of what power you take from the batteries during a typical day on the boat so you can assess what capacity of battery bank you need. You might like to do a summer / winter / best case / worst case to look at the range.

Its an inverter/ charger Multiplus type device, so it would have been running as a charger until shore failed when it became an inverter depleting the batteries, even the standby current could deplete the batteries over weeks. As Tony says, when you leave the boat, set the inverter to charge only.

If by Eurocruiser the OP means one of the designs with the square stern then that will have an impact on the maximum length on the shorter northern locks as they are based on curved sterns, the cills on the Calder & Hebble are curved so going down forwards the boat will not be able to use the full length and going up forwards the gates might not be able to close due to the corners not being rounded off.

You can only combine panels in series if they have the same or close Imp (max power current) or in parallel if they have the same or close Vmp (max power voltage). If they do not match then the combined set up will not harvest both panels and you could end up worse off as the lowest rated panel could pull the max power down to match it.

Think you are getting your pounds and pence mixed up. If an ad view is 0.18 pence with 3 ads in the video, then that is 0.54 pence, first sentence correct. If there are 100,000 views of a vid then that is 54,000 pence which is £540 if they have 3 ads per video. Not all of them insert mid video adverts and only have the ones at the start, so income is £180 for a 100,000 view video.

For our first boat we knew we were going to be based on Calder & Hebble, we were looking at a 55ft and a 57ft. The owner of the mooring said to go with the 55ft and I am glad because that 2ft difference made life much less fraught on that canal and much drier feet in Salterhebble locks. Just better to have a bit of room to spare.

We stopped there in September last year, no troubles at all, quite a few boats moored on the offside on permanent moorings at what I believe used to be a hire base.

We had a hire boat go passed us on the L&L at 2000rpm but moving slower than tickover with hardly any water movement around the stern of the boat. Shouted at them to pull in as they had something on the prop. When i helped get them.in and started they had a whole 10m of rope in a ball around the prop. The boat had bow and stern lines but no middle line. I asked them about this and they said they had lost their stern rope and moved the middle one to the stern. Never linked the higher revs and slow progress to the loss of the rope. To quote one of the crew "so that is where it went".

I got my new build in the water April 2021, lockdowns meant it was 7-8 months late the majority of the purchasing was completed before end 2020. During the final few visits the builder said he was having to start ramping up costs significantly for those in build during 2021 and those on the books but unstarted. My son runs a business using MDF as the main raw material, this has rocketed in price and sourcing it has become a nightmare.

Did whoever serviced the engine turn off the diesel isolation valve while they changed the fuel filter and then did not turn it back on again. I know this is odd because the filter would not have been bled in that case and most people servicing know to bleed the system afterwards.

Should have said sold it in 2020 (18 years old).

We had a 40hp engine in a 2002 boat, Yanmar based, sold it in 2000 running well. Only issue we had was that it ate fan belts because it had a single belt for both alternators and water pump but they stopped building them like that years ago.

I have the feeling that there are more stoppage notices now for Elsans out of service than there used to be, and sometimes they can be out of service for weeks. Is this just better reporting by CRT, or is the system creaking with increased use / improper use. We had a cassette on the last boat, got on with it fine, the new boat has a macerator with the tank under the bed and we are getting on fine with that and happy with the choice we made when we specified the new boat.

You an work out the power required for a pump or gained by a hydraulic turbine assuming 100% efficiency by Power in kW = 9.81 x V x h where V is volume flow in cubic metres/second and h is the height of the lock in metres. For Dudbridge above, assuming the power is taken from both locks with a total height of 5.2m this gives 0.43m³/sec, allowing for an efficiency of less than 100% lets take 0.6m³/s = 2160m³/hour. A lock full of water will need something like 100m³ of water so this is passing 21 lock fulls on this wide canal every hour, which is much larger than any typical canal has flowing around the bywashes. Lets say on a typical narrow canal that the bywash is worth two lock fulls every hour, that is about 100m3/hr, over a 2.5m fall, you are going to get about 0.5kW (500W) which is not really going to pay for the works. There are only a few examples on canals where this will work, usually where the canal is actually a modified water course and involves larger volumes of water flow.

It was on the engine, here is an image from my old boats manual, ignore the pencil mark ups because I swapped the alternator, the link is shown as the dashed line between the terminal posts with explanation box.

On my old boat noted above, the domestic alternator had a feed from the panel, I can not recall the purpose of it, but the feed from the panel went to a relay and the relay then connected the domestic 12V positive to the domestic alternator, may be an excitation feed. This kept the two systems separate, if someone replaced the relay with a direct connection that could give a way for voltage parity, but it could involve a lot of current to flow through thin wires.

Previous boat had a Barrus Shire engine, based on Yanmar, 2002 build, 80A and 40A alternators on single belt, gobbled belts like no tomorrow. Some Victron inverters have a trickle charge for the engine battery, which is basically a take off from the inverters 12V feed with a low voltage drop diode. My current boat has this and the starter battery pretty much follows the domestic battery albeit a bit lower. If thd domestic alternator over voltages then so does the starter battery. The same is true if the solar also over voltages.

PRO Cast Notts do a range of wood effect fibre glass porthole and window liners. They also do standard brass and chrome porthole liners. https://www.procastnotts.com/index.php/liners-fibreglass_liners/?k=48618:38:::

Went down to the boat today, lifted the knobs up 5mm and all 3 rings lit straight away. Common mode failure on 3 independent burners - cleaning the hob. Thanks for the advice on this, which was well received before I started trying to do anything else to fix it.

Thanks for this update, i plan on visiting my boat in a few days so I will be sure to take some kitchen foil with me.

The hob in question does not have a lid, the only commonality on the 3 burners / thermocouples / valve assemblies / knobs is the gas supply which makes it weird to work out the issue. The thermocouples do not have a common power supply, the voltage generated by the thermocouples is used directly in the valves.

This has happened to mine, boat is not used over winter, it first happened in early December when I went to winterise the boat and then again when I visited to check in January. I need to sort it before spring. The first thought I have is damp if it got into the connectors as we got a fair bit of condensation on the winterising visit. The second thought is lower than normal temperature on the boat when last visited which would have needed the knobs holding down for longer. My plan on the next visit is to hold the knobs in longer and if still no joy then check the connectors. Both of these thoughts would affect all 3 burners. The only other thing is checking the knobs as mentioned above because I recall that my wife removed them to clean the hob after out last trip. The thermocouples produce a very small voltage and anything impeding this could easily cause trouble. I found the following link with some info. https://www.caravantalk.co.uk/community/topic/143848-thetford-spinflo-enigma-hob-flame-will-not-stay-alight/

Cheers, confirms my thoughts were right, just worried I was missing something.

My boat has a beta 43 and I was pondering the 2 negative wires, one ostensibly for engine battery and the other for domestic according to the manual, but as both alternators are negative return via the bodies and the negatives are bolted to the engine rails, then the negative cables appear to be parallel return paths rather than dedicated return paths. Have i got this right, your post suggests I have because I have been thinking about adding a shunt.

Email Balmar, say you have on old unit with your firmware revision number and can not find the manual and ask if the have a copy of the manual that matches this version. You may come up lucky.