doratheexplorer

Yes. There's an argument for plane tickets to be sold by weight, like loose apples. Gatwick to Paris - £5 per stone etc...

There's a balance to be struck though. The electrical experts on this forum advocate charging daily until a tail-current of 1-2% of capacity is reached. The problem with that is that the last few percentage points takes up about half of the overall charging time. So you may be paying £3-4 just to get from a 5% tail current to a 1.5% tail current, every time you do it. If you don't bother doing this last bit (or only do it occassionally), your batteries lose capacity. Somewhere there's a sweet spot in all this but I don't have the patience to do the maths to work out exactly where that sweet spot is. So I go by my own hunch, and this is what I do: 1. Buy 3 x bog-standard 110ah leisure batteries. 2. Trust my solar to pickup most of my needs for about 7 month of the year. Run a genny when my consumption is high or it's very gloomy out. 3. Come early October, start paying more attention to what my batteries are doing. Especially what charge they're at first thing in the morning. Run genny accordingly, when needed for a couple of hours or so. Make sure I charge up everything while the genny is on. 4. Come November-ish, turn the fridge off and switch to outside cool-box. Start running genny more days than not, as needed. Once a week or so, run the genny for 4-5 hours. 5. Expect to replace batteries every 3 years or so. (£250-ish) Note: I work from home and have a laptop and connected monitor running for approx 8 hours a day. When the fridge goes off, that's by far my highest power draw. Now I could fork out a huge sum on fancy deep cycling batteries, but that would only be worthwhile if I was going to charge them properly. That would mean something like 3 times the engine or genny running for half the year, which would also cost me a lot of extra money in fuel, servicing and wear and tear. A very quick sum in my head tells me that it would come to a load more than £250 every three years. I also get the benefit of less annoying engine noise and pollution for me and other boaters nearby. Lithium is a different ball-game, and I may go that way at some point.

Under CRT?

Part of the Montgomery Canal is navigable and disconnected too.

Lydney docks?

Please read. It's the best info on battery charging I've seen.

It does seem odd to me that you even asked for advice. Every single bit of help and advice you've been offered have been dismissed for what have typically been spurious reasons. I'm wondering if you're just trolling too now. The bottom line is; you live on a boat and are partially reliant on batteries for your daily life. You have no way of telling what charge is in those batteries or whether those batteries are being charged. You started this thread with a problem which points to a possible battery problem. A problem which is likely to get worse going into winter. Forum members have unanimously raised concerns for you about this, yet you just don't want to know and would rather moan about how hard living on a boat is. NEWSFLASH: It's a hell of a lot harder if you refuse to do anything to help yourself.

I don't blame you!

You wouldn't catch me in a marina, unless I was getting diesel or something.

I'll take Reese Witherspoon if you don't mind.

All the way from Cassiobury Park to Uxbridge on the GU is lovely. And all within the M25.

It's pointless. He doesn't want to help himself.

The problem with reporting noise nuisance from boats to the Council is that a noise abatement notice has to specific the source of the nuisance and that source must be a fixed place. So even if the Council did serve a notice on a noisy boat, the notice would become instantly invalid once the boat moved 100m up the cut. Council Environmental Health bods know this, which is why they don't waste time and money serving notices to boats. It's possible you might have more luck going down the ASBO route since this covers things like boy-racers revving their engines.

I suggested you get a voltmeter nearly a week ago. (Last thursday lunchtime). If you'd gone to the chandlery you could probably have got one straight away or they'd have it by Friday morning. It would have cost less than £10. If your wife made a fuss about it, you could have blamed me and she wouldn't have used the 'bigger boys' argument. With your voltmeter you could have checked the batteries quite easily. I too am dying to know which marina you're in. My suspicion as to your reluctance to say is that you've been exagerating how remote it is because you don't really want to put much personal effort into sorting things out. The trouble is: boats need a lot of effort, and it's never ending. I too have enjoyed your humour, but the phrase "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink" springs to mind when reading through this thread.

Well that's not true. I enjoy peace and quiet. I'd prefer no engines running after 6pm. I'll accept that 8pm helps for people if they need to run their engine after getting home from work. But I'm very glad to not have to listen to engines late into the evening.

What does SMS mean?

I was lucky enough to be cruising under there once, when the steam train went overhead 😃

Try this: https://www.anglowelsh.co.uk/locations/bases/tardebigge/ It's close to Alvechurch and zero locks away.

This is quite a good option. But worth researching safe mooring places: https://bcnsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/BCN-Safe-Moorings-2017-12-06.pdf The Dudley Tunnel trip is a must. And they have lots of events for children: https://www.dudleycanaltrust.org.uk/

Honestly, I wouldn't recommend a canal holiday with a 2 and 5 year old. Dealing with locks is potentially dangeous for them. So you're looking for somewhere with virtually no locks or manned locks. The common forum response for few locks would be to start somewhere around Braunston/Napton and head to the top of the Ashby and back. Trouble is there's very little along that route to entertain small children. Another thought would be to head along the River Severn and the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal. You're likely to have locks to get from the the canal to the river, but after that they're all manned. Interesting stops at Gloucester, Worcester, Stourport. The big problem, is that the Severn floods quite regularly and you'll be forced to go another way.

I have to wonder: why did you buy a boat? (Honest question)

The reason we have all given you the advice we have, is because it's very much worth investigating whether it's the fridge or the batteries/charging. A 12v fridge costs £500. You really don't want to be forking that out to find out the original fridge is fine. There's a simple thing you can do - put a meter on the battery terminals and on the wires going into the fridge. I get that it's awkward but that's sometimes how things are. Getting to the wires behind the fridge cannot be that hard. If you're feeling really lazy, then buy one of these: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dual-USB-Car-Charger-Built/dp/B01N5I0J92/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?adgrpid=115344935707&dchild=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw4qCKBhAVEiwAkTYsPCA4qxcpmo0VfKy99v3Wu8BPKHEQIoWIb-TRNnX4N2ohTBQNP-6UHhoCWWgQAvD_BwE&hvadid=476465497360&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9045469&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=b&hvrand=17564207078868035315&hvtargid=kwd-305192881801&hydadcr=6846_1812858&keywords=voltmeter+car+lighter&qid=1632129235&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUExQ0pBUkxTVEZJSTZGJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwNzU4NTk5OE9VNklLMkhTUU9QJmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTAwMTM0MzEzNFhCSUdFNzFVQjhIJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfYXRmJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ== It will give you a better idea than you have now. You can even watch to see what the volts do when the compressor kicks in.

Don't be to hard on him. Everything will be a mystery to him at the moment. He won't be aware how much of a boat electrics expert you are.

Fair dos. In another few weeks it may be cold enough to turn the fridge off and keep your food outside in a cool-box.