Dr Bob

I agree with Colmac. I've used RCR for the last 4 years. We have had 2 throtle cables replaced and there is no way I could have sussed out how to connect it at the morse control end. I've watched them do it twice and that would be a no go area for me. We sold that boat. I am a muppet though.

Yep that will be really smelly!

Ah, so the evidence is mounting up. Use a normal bin for dog poo - 'CAUSE ITS THE SAME BLEEDING WASTE CODE AS NAPPIES and can therefore be treated in the same manner using 20-01-99. Alan, are you listening? I notice Alan has not been back to acknowlege he has not been giving us the full picture by insisting it is illegal. Having knocked the "illegal" issue off the table. What else have the boo boys, who dont have boats on the canal, whipping up the witch hunt been pushing. Oh yes, "it is disgusting to put this waste in a bin". So how many of those who said it is disgusting on here have put their dog turds in a bin? Take a look in the mirror. How about the 5,000 tonnes per week of human shit and wee that go in the bins. The max we are likely to see from these dry toilets is around 5 tonnes per week assuming 1,000 boaters. That is 0.1% ie virtually nothing. If nappies are ok then so is this. Of course there are better ways of disposing of the waste...ie composting which I do but this witch hunt is not called for and is just going to turn boater against boater. Are you going to ban babies?

Many apologies Martin. Yes, it was aimed as a response to frangar but thought it better to tail it on to your comment as yours was relevant to the flow.

Dont think so, the more vocal ones who dont have boats on the canal network started this here and are giving the CRT a hard time. The CRT need to sort themsleves out and not hide behind 'it may be a regulatory issue'. It isnt.

Well Alan, once again you are talking a load of cr&p. When will you listen -that the transport of this waste is not illegal. I am surprised at you as you say are managing a site which disposes of rubbish. You know as well as I do that when a dumpster of rubbish is picked up by your waste handler that a transfer note is raised and on that note, the content of the bin is entered by transfer codes including the amount in the bin of each code. That then is signed by you and the waste handler and off it goes. All legal and above board. The only illegal thing that can happen is either you or the waste handler writes down the wrong code. The codes that you are disposing of will be in your agreement with the handler. This solid waste we are discussing is classed as Municipal Offensive Waste – Non hazardous and uses the code 20-01-99. It is the same code as babies nappies and dog poo. It is also the same code used for 'other fractions not specified'. Now, I dont have a clue what proportion of 20-01-99 you have agreed in advance with Biffa but you will have a % number – maybe 0%? As long as you do not exceed that number then transport will not be illegal. Now lets ignore your waste and look at CRT. CRT will sign off on each dumpster with the correct codes and amounts. As they allow nappies – and dont specify how much, they will have to put 20-01-99 in as a code and as anyone could put any municipal waste in, they must allow a reasonable amount for 20-01-99. That waste gets picked up and shipped, and it is then legal. The solid waste from a composting toilet is classed under code 20-01-99. On page 18, about a 1/3rd of the way down, I showed how much waste a weeks worth of nappies would weigh. About the same as a couple with one of these toilets. THEREFORE, as the crt allows the disposal of nappies in their bins, the amount of code 20-01-99 will be set quite high and is likely to be much higher than ever seen as 20-01-99 is a catch all and has to be set high in case peeps put a lot of 'other fractions not specified'. If the crt dont set the amount of 20-01-99 high, then they are in serious risk of breaking the law every time a dumpster is shipped. Shipping this solid waste is therefore not illegal. If anyone is interested to look at waste codes than look at: https://www.veolia.co.uk/sites/g/files/dvc1681/files/document/2014/11/How_to_classify_your_waste.pdf Let's then look at what the CRT are saying....see quote from Mr Putin. "We believe that there is a regulatory problem"!!!!! WTF!!!!!! Dont they know? Why not? The waste transfer regulations are very straightforward. Agree and declare how much 20-01-99 you are putting in the bin and dont forget that is anything that doesnt fall under the 20 odd categories stated on the codes list. They have to make the 20-01-99 high enough to cover say 10 bags of nappies (10 boats worth) in case there is a run of them. What about dog poo? How many of you throw dog poo in the bin? Seriously? You do Alan....I am told. It is total B*ll*cks to say 'we belive'. It is not a regulatory problem if you sign the waste transfer form correctly. THE PROBLEM IS THAT BIFFA DONT WANT THAT PART OF 20-01-99 THAT BUGGERS UP THEIR INCINERATORS. It is nothing to do with waste transfer regulations. ...and please do not come back and say its not about nappies, or there arent many nappies thrown in crt bins. CRT clearly state they can be disposed of in this way and they are designated by the UK Goverment under the same waste transfer code. Bottom line is that CRT and Biffa are in an argument about what they want to handle. It is a commercial discussion and not a regulatory issue. 5,000tes of human shit and piss (sorry for the language but with the Mob braying at my heels I dont care) are thrown into bins every week - and virtually no solid waste from these toilets are put in crt bins - as more boats than not are in marinas. Add to that the amount of dog crap you all throw in bins. Whilst composting is the way to go (and that is what I am doing) the disposal in crt bins is not the disgusting practice that the mob here would lead everyone to believe. If it is such a sin, how do we resolve the 5,000te per year problem?

I think a fridge would kill that set up! I'd worry about not having a separate starter battery. It does sound like a very low power boat.

Of course you can argue this is about transport regulations and invoke all sorts of 'rules' but the clear steer I am getting from collegues working with the waste companies is that they dont want to put this waste into their incinerators which is now the overwhelming method of black bag disposal in the UK. It reduces their margins so they dont want to do it. Siiimple. How much it affects their economics, I have not been able to find out. The outcome of this is they tell their waste supplier (the CRT) they will no longer take this waste in the mixed waste they pick up. They will likely use an excuse of 'health' and 'transport' but the bottom line is litterally their bottom line - they are driven by money like every company these days. All of the waste management companies run their own incinerators (Biffa, VIridor, Shanks etc) so they will all be doing the same thing and companies like CRT will be forced to stop putting that waste in or pay more.

erm no. Lets deal in facts. From the biscuits on page one. The wording clearly spells out what to do. As the waste from a composting toilet may not have enough time to decompose sufficiently on board the boat before it needs emptying, this waste will still need to be disposed at an Elsan/sanitary station. With the increasing popularity of composting toilets, we are hoping to pilot a facility for solid waste from composting loos as part of the London Mooring Strategy but in the meantime liquids go into the Elsan unit and solids should be bagged in a nappy bag and placed in the domestic waste bins. Please don’t dump liquid and solid waste on the towpath or into the water, knowing that it hasn’t composted properly. This was on the CRT site. "may not decompose sufficiently......so it should be bagged....and placed in domestic waste bins". Nothing about 'hinting' on 'desperate'. That to most peeps who understand English is clear what to do if a person cannot fully compost it. Yes it is a temporary measure while they do their London trial but very clear to me.

...and thank you Dora. Yes, the 'tsumami of idle speculation' is detracting from the real story. The practice of dumping it in bins is highly likely to be curtailed for whatever reason (but not what most on here have latched onto) and the CRT has an obligation (or lets be more accurate and say moral obligation ) to sort out something they have been telling peeps to do for 3 years as you have been saying for the last 10 pages.

Ok, let me inject some real thinking into this thread which seems to be dominated by a number of peeps who are doing a lot of guessing. The company I am director of licenses technology to companies to recycle plastic (mixed rigids) from council and industry collected waste. We have plant operating in Newcastle and buy our feedstock from Biffa, Viridor, Shanks etc. I have spent the last 2 weeks trying to get info on where this new CRT thinking comes from – discussing with our guys in Newcastle who source the feedstocks and talk to the waste management companies on a day to day basis. It is now clear to me what is going on. This is nothing to do with transfer of waste being illegal as Alan is saying. The laws on transfer of waste are quite vague and done principally under waste codes. My colleagues say that will not be the issue. It is not about 'waste' laws. The CRT decision is nothing to do with that. The problem is that today 90% of 'black bin' waste goes to incineration not landfill. This number has grown significantly in the last 5 years from a position before, where land fill was the predominant method. The crux of the matter and the real driver is that Biffa (and the like) do not want to put this waste into their incinerators. It does not contribute to the energy recovered therefore they dont want it in as it costs them money. This is purely an economic argument. There are no laws that are being broken by it being put in – black bin waste and the stuff coming from the CRT which is as Alan says is industrial waste can go in – it's just it is not good for the incineration process. What I hadnt realised was the huge swing to incineration means very little is landfilled today. Landfill is more expensive than incineration so the Biffa's of this world will avoid this type of waste going in. The main driver for the pressure coming on the CRT is therefore economic, not health related. I talked with the guys about how waste is handled. All of them said that very very little black bag waste is handled by anyone anymore. Only very few actually put black bags on picking lines and almost all this waste goes direct to an incinerator with no human intervention other than driving trucks, mechanical handling etc. They said that the type of waste from a 'solids' toilet would be similar to nappies or dog poo bag in that it is not a hazard for collection or transport but that becomes a significant issue for disposal ie where it ends up. Note this is the 'solids' waste only and not the 'wee & poo' in a bag which is a health hazard if its leaking all over the place. I've talked about nappies a lot in the past which are classed as offensive waste and could be present in large quantities in dumpsters – but the key here is that Biffa (and the like) are happy to throw them in the incinerators as they have a significant plastic content which is beneficial to the energy recovery. Nappies are therefore seen as beneficial. Not so sure about dog poo. “Dun no” was most of the responses I got. So there it is! You can choose to believe me or not, but the word out of the professionals who work with waste management companies every day is that Biffa (and the like) will be pushing this through from an economic point of view and nothing to do with health as they don't want to bugger up their incinerator economics. Me.....I'll just carry on composting which is not affected by the above. I am however fully in agreement with Dora above in looking for answers from the CRT – who I think should rigorously try and defend the current position of waste disposal in light of the commercial push by the waste management companies – who will say its a health decision not economic......ie they will lie! Trust me, that is what my colleagues are telling me. The waste management companies will win though as money talks......and chaos will rain here. Given that background, I wouldn't want to be in CRTs position. I'm just going to carry on composting.

Whilst a lot of EV manufacturers will set 80% as the usual target to extend the lifetime, lifetime is not a key issue for me on the boat as mine will outlast me. I avoid 100% because it is safer to do that. My choice of 80% is more about safety. The memory effect is interesting and there has never been discussion here (as I dont think any peeps actually operating have seen the effect). There has been a large discussion on the cruiser forum on the topic although no real evidence has been agreed. I've had some evidence on my system that it could be happening but the data could be something entirely different. I take my system up to typically 13.6V and then stop charging (so 80-85%) usually daily charging. When we parked up for the winter as the October lockdown hit, I tried to take the system up to 100%. Once the cells -which are pretty well top balanced- got to 3.45V (all at the same time), 2 of them decided to stay put and didnt increase in voltage (charging from a victron combi at 30A) with the other 2 going up to 3.55V. I had not seen that before as previously (3 times a year) they all went up to 3.5V+. I discharged and tried again the following day. Same result. Discharged and repeated but this time with a bit of oomph from the combi (100A) and all cells went up together (breaking through the 3.45V barrier) and the current tailed off nicely down to 25A where I was happy I was up to 100%. This type of behaviour was what had been reported on the cruiser forum. Next time I go up to 100A I will pay more attention! It seems from what peeps have reported on the crusier forum the you can recover from the memory effect and indeed if what I was seeing is a memory effect, it was easy to break through it so perhaps not as bad as sulphation in LA's which for me has always been the beginning of the end.....or the actual end!

"and then black over it whilst it is still tacky." Let me pick up this bit. Please define tacky. Tacky to me means the first coat hasn't finished curing i.e. It is not fully cross linked and more importantly all the solvent has not come out. If you then coat with a different coating you are likely to get attack on the bottom coat from solvent from the top coat and you are sealing in the solvent in the bottom coat meaning it never gets fully hard. Painting over a tacky first coat is a bad idea. Let it cure first. I have been involved in paint formulation for a reasonable chunk of my working life and always paid attention to the performance of paint panels we tested. Real world performance was however king. Hammerite is fairly easy to apply especially over poor surfaces so if this worked well, everyone would be doing it. Hammerite has been around for 40 years +. They haven't - so very unlikely it will do any good. My guess is the hammerite is too rigid and brittle and lacks the adhesion of epoxy so won't last very long. Once on it is likely to be very difficult to get it all off to black properly. I'd move marina.

I do apologise. I thought my answer pretty clear and obvious but in my defence it was late at night and I had been watching some entertaining VAR decisions from the evenings footy.

Simply quoting from internet sites in a way to encourage others to do things that could be dangerous is very irresponsible. You cherry picked the info you quoted so didnt included all the important stuff....and part was just sales speil from a battery manufacturer. Too many people on the internet cut and paste what they read without a thought to what their actions may result in. You have no experience of the subject yet you put yourself over as the expert. Very poor show.

Lithium batteries are basically a thin film of anode separated from a thin film of cathode separated by the electolyte....often a solid. This is quite thin ...say a few mm thick. For the 18650 round type batteries, the active part is a long strip of the 3 layers rolled into the cylinder with one tab to the positive and one to the negative. In the U.K. It's called Swiss roll, in the US ...jelly roll. For the big prismatic rectangular cells, it is still these 'thin' 3 layers but either it is a jelly roll but flattened into a rectangular shape or layers are cut and stacked together but in this case there have to be connections between the multiple positive and negative plates. It does vary for different manufacturers. Most of the work our company has done has been on the 18650 type cylindrical cells.

Thanks for the update. As per the other thread, I was more worried about control of ventilation and dampness. Our stove does a huge job of sucking air down teh boat at floor level to burn and thus keeps the humidity very low. As it is your first boat, you wont know the 'normal' level of humidity (no one measures it apart from Smelly) but the stove keeps the condensation down, the key measure of ventilation. You wont be getting that.

Ah, I had missed that one. Of course. I wondered where the weight was on the windward side. I guess the foils can be very heavy. How have the NZ team been practising? Are they out everyday on a practice course? I wouldnt like one of those winging past me on an afternoon cruise with the family.

Mmmm. That nordkyn site was one of the 2 'bible' sites I have used and promoted since I have been involved in Li's so you dont need to tell me. However, I see your response encourages peeps to use 'smaller' Li's on their lumpy water boats. Have you ANY first hand experience of Li's and lumpy water boats or are you just one of the many people that sees something on the internet and regurgitates it? It is dangerous to promote something that may not be safe. The text you quote says "plenty of...boaters have successfully used ....without problems". Does it say all? No. Why not? Likely because a number have had problems of physical stress. How many? I dont have a clue....and neither do you! I have mentioned on a number of threads about Li's that I am professionally connected to a company doing work on destruction of Li cells for air transportation. Over the past 2 years we have destroyed a large number of cells so I have first hand experience of what can go wrong. In my own case I have done a rigorous risk review and mitigation on my lithium set up which is mainly around risk of fire but also looks at mechanical damage. For a narrow boat, physical damage is very unlikely and will only happen in very limited circumstances and can be mitigated by good practise. I also have extensive experience of sailing yachts in very poor sea conditions having completed many North Sea races in all sorts of weather. Even beating into a force 6 with wind over tide conditions in coastal waters causes slamming that would not be kind to any sort of battery. It is not the risk of one 'bang'. Far from it. It is the risk from continous hammering from vibration or wave to wave crashes. I use 160Ahr cells on my installation and it is my personal view that I would put them nowhere near a lumpy water boat as there is a risk they will go wrong. "The key is to use small size cells (200Ahr or less)"!!!!!! So 201Ahr is bad but 200Ahr is ok? Why the change over at that size? That quote comes from a battery company. They want to sell batteries. Have you your own data on that - or are you just copying others? Read some of the links I provided on other threads on fire safety of cells and you will see that one of the causes of fire is physical damage. Vibration or constant hammering can damage these cells - yes 160Ahr ones. Yes plenty of lumpy water boats have succeeded but not all....and I wouldnt chance it. If you have first hand experience to advise peeps to do it then let us know.....but you dont do you?

Its not about smoke as we all told you in the other thread. Its about ventilation and keeping condensation down but as you are new to the canals, you will not have a good base lien to compare to. lets not discuss that here. This is a battery thread. Reply on the other thread.

We had a similar problem on our 2002 boat which had a Victron Combi. I kept getting fed up of loosing the 240V when in a marina. My solution was to get the boat rewired to use the victron combi as inverter only - it worked fine as that - and installed a £200 victron IP22 battery charger - so ending up with separates. The 240V from the shore power is wired to the boat and cannot be tripped by the combi. A 1 2 0 switch chooses if the shore power or the inverter supplies the boat with 240V. If you have a problem with a Sterling bit of kit, I had great success driving over to them last summer and getting it sorted there and then. I took over 2 BtoB's that I bought from them that did not do what they should and they tested them and upgraded them (very good deal). It was only an hours drive from here to there. I stood and watched as they investigated. Great service.

As Tim spends 24/7 on his 240V enabled mooring, he doesnt need Li's. He doesnt really need LA's!!!! Anyone who switches to Li's knows how useful they are and to me, reduction of engine running hours is the most use. They also work much better with Solar accepting full power all the time. I have not used my Li's for 5 months as we have been on lockdown and on a 240V supply. Come April we will be out and about and totally dependent again on the Li's. We are a heavy power user as we are not camping and it is so so much easier with Li's. Alan hasnt got a canal boat so he wont see the benefits that we get. I wouldnt put them anywhere near a lumpy water boat as I wouldnt trust they could withstand the sort of physical stress you get when inshore/offshore. If you are running your engines all day, you dont need Li's. It's not difficult to find a way to charge Li's via an alternator - there are a number of solutions. Smelly hasn't got an ecofan either. ...yes, but that was a crap idea.

Agreed, there are lots of places to go out to and moor if in a marina near Napton and not just in the summer. When we were in Wigrams, we used to go out each week during the winter down to Braunston to go to the butchers and spend a night down there and one on the way back. You asked about how busy? That is a downside. The wigrams to Braunston stretch has to be the busiest on the whole network and on hot summer weekends, a boat a minute in each direction is not unusual - given 5 marinas on the stretch plus another 2 the other side of calcutt locks and 4 hire fleet locations. Put one fat boat in the mix and it can be a traffic jam all the way to Braunston. Lots of nice mooring spots even when lots of boats.

Oh no, that was disappointing! We got whooped. Ineos was so dominant during the round robin but I didnt believe the hype around 'Ineos have the advantage with 2 weeks off as they have a few weeks to improve the boat'. The Italians just seem to get better and better in that final series against the US. When we got to this final then, the Italian boat just pointed a lot better - a combination of a better boat and better racing skills? How much of this is down to real race experience? I've not a clue how the crews practice racing - they dont have a 2nd boat do they to race against? Overall this final series of 8 races was rather boring. The Italians were so dominant - and the only interest was the close start in the last two races. The Italian boat just seemed to point a lot higher and dominate all the upwind legs. Lets hope the NZ/Italians final is a closer match. We were short changed with only 8 races in this one. How on earth can a sail boat go at 40knts in 10 knts of wind? Surely that equates to perpetual motion? I cant understand how they fly. Why dont they tip over? The sail area must create such a force pushing the mast over, yet the boat is flat above the water. Is it about controlling the weight on the windward side of the boat to keep it level as the foil in the water cant exert much in the way of stopping the boat tipping - can it? I can see how foils lift small boats like moths....but these AC75s? Its a tiny foil compared to the boat size. There must be some huge forces on the foil and its support. So when NZ win it, what sort of 'boat' will they choose for the next one?