Dr Bob

My god! Richard's still not going on about Brexit is he? Aye, still moored up somewhere east of Brum.

Happy new year to Mrs Rusty and yourself!! Hope your keeping afloat. How's life on here? Not been back here for ages! Dry is best? No. This boat's never been dry. Always lot of beer and wine available.

"......times have obviously moved on..." er No. Sticking paint, sealant or adhesive to wet steel has always been a problem and likely always will be. There has been no step change in getting better adhesion to damp or wet steel. Marginal improvements, yes. If a major change had occurred then it would be able to be used on all coatings and adhesives and change the whole of the industrial coatings market. That clearly hasnt happened. Typically only 10% of the cost of an industrial paint job is for the coating. 50%+ is for the surface preparation. It is the holy grail of the industry (well the guys who sell the coatings anyway) to make a step reduction in surface prep costs. Applying paint to damp steel will always be a compromise.

I sorted mine very easily. All you need to do is send 12v + down the black wires with the negative connected to the batttery ground to fire up the Webasto. My google nest is working perfectly and I can fire up the heating remotely if needed.

No, you certainly aren't. You dont make PCBs by burning plastic and if you did they wouldnt be in the atmosphere. They are heavy molecules so would settle on the ground hence remain in the environment. You are mixing up PCBs with Dioxins. Dioxins are even worse than PCB and are made by burning plastic incorrectly. They will not form if the right combustion conditions are met. Therefore well run incinerators are no problems. Badly run ones are. Dioxins too will not persist in the atmosphere but agglomerate and contaminate the soil etc. Dioxins are dependent on Chlorine being present in the plastic mix so burning PVC is particuarly bad. Off course burning anything that could contain plastic on a solid fuel stove could generate dioxins as the conditions are usually well away from the combustion temperatures needed for the optimum burning of the plastic.

Yea, and my comments haven't changed. Epoxies are hard rigid coatings that work by stopping oxygen and water getting to the substrate. They are excellent at the job due to their excellent adhesion to well prepared steel. They will not work well over soft single pack coatings. You may get some years out of them but its a poor solution.

Not a clue. My bus pass has now expired. The guy's next door system works fine - with the same webasto heater and a google nest. I just needed to know how to wire it and Tonka's picture shows that.

Ok, thats the heatmiser which looks totally different to the google nest. The nest has a red +ve and brown -ve feed which I will take from the boat circuits then has a wire out that is the 'call for heat' wire to the webasto. I cant see properly from the pic but there seems to be 3 wires from the square female connector - a red (so +12v and two others. I suspect one is black and goes to the A2 - so that is the 'call for heat' and the other one is brown and goes to the unmarked screw (or is it a -ve?) On my webasto switching box, I have a red, a brown and 2 blacks. Is it any of the two blacks I need to use? Edit Ah rather than just looking at the picture, I have now read the words (I am a muppet.....whadyou expect). Now clear. I'll try and wire it up on the weekend. Many thanks.

Yes, its a little square plug with the 4 wires. I want to ditch the controller and connect the wire that fires up the webasto to the google nest. Is it the black one?

I'm getting cheesed off with my Webasto control thingy giving me little control. Great, you can program it to come on 3 times a day but it never switches off. I'm going to fit a google nest but what wire do I need to connect for the 'request for heating'? Looking at the 4 wires going into the controller, there is one red, one brown and two black. I assume from looking at wiring diagrams the red is the +ve, the brown the -ve and the blacks then must be the request for heat wires. I am guessing if I put 12v down the black wire from the google nest, the webasto will fire up. The guy on the boat next to use wired his up that way but he's not around to work out which wire he used!

Worms are a good way to compost but only at low temperature. I think the max is around 45°C or maybe even less (<40°C). Once the temperature gets to the high 30's, the worms will start trying to get out of the box so not pleasant. If you tried to take the box over 40 ish then you'd be killing off the worms - so using the roof to get to 50 to kill off the pathogens aint goin' to work. I think Tiger worms are more temperature resistant but you still couldnt do it on the roof.

That all assumes land fill is the main route to dispose of our black bag waste. Unfortunately (or Fortunately?) it isnt. The majority of black bag waste goes to incineration these days and incineration costs are adjusted to match the landfill tax. This is the nub of the problem. The waste companies ie Biffa, Viridor etc dont want poo in their incinerators. It has less calorific value than the average so reduces margins. They happily take nappies because of the plastic content which is higher in calorific value than most of what they put in. They can stop getting the dog poo and some of the human poo (the 7Kg limit) via their private contracts...but its all about money. We deal with all of these waste handlers with our involvement in Plastic recycling and it is all down to margins.

Your water is coming from the water in the stuff you put in, or rain ingress afterwards. My experience of composting in the garden was that the heap always got too dry but I didnt have a clue what was needed. Water is needed as the bugs 'swim' in the water to get to the food. The compost has to be in the ball park of the right 'wetness'. Too dry and the bugs cant get to the food, too wet and the air doesnt get in and you start to get anearobic decomposition. In the lab we measure water content as per the test schedule using scientific meters. The way to do it in the field is to pick up a handfull of compost and squeeze it. If it drips it is too wet, if it doesnt drip it is too dry - ok extreme - but you are looking for something just in between. In practise, I never add water but if a box on the roof was looking a bit wet, I just leave the lid off for a few hours on a hot day. Its not really that important but you dont want the compost bone dry or swimming in water. Agreed. It becomes a very easy routine but with no need for any hardware maintenance.