Ronaldo47

A decade or so ago, one of the hire companies did offer a couple of electric boats. The downside I saw as a potential hirer was that you virtually had to follow a fixed itinery from boatyard to boatyard where overnight charging facilities had been provided, and the idea of spending several nights in boatyards rather than out in the country, was not appealing.

A few months ago (I don't recall if it was a letter in a newspaper or a radio programme) someone was recounting how they had tried to be green by installing the recommended energy-conserving double glazing, draught proofing etc., and replacing their gas boiler with a heat pump. They had been rewarded by getting a lower house efficiency rating certificate. The rating reflects the cost of heating a house, and the heat pump cost significantly more to run to get the house up to temperature than the gas boiler, even with the double glazing etc. There was an item in the papers at the time about the government investigating the noise pollution that multiple air-source heat pumps could generate, given that they needed to run 24/7. Coincidentally, on the radio a week or so later, a reporter had visited a new housing development where all houses had such heat pumps, and commented on the continuous whine. The representative of the development said that people soon got used to it. The trouble with heat pumps is that they can only produce relatively low-temperature heat. Given time, they can raise the temperature of the air in a room to the same temperature as by using the hotter radiators of a gas or oil boiler, hence the need for continuous operation. However, your sensation of comfort is not determined by air temperature per se, but by the balance between the heat your body radiates to, and the radiated heat it receives from, your surroundings. That is why you can sunbathe in comfort surrounded by snow in a montain-top ski resort in bright sunshine when the air temperature is well below freezing. Old people especially need a source of radiant heat to maintain comfort as their bodies are less able to regulate their temperature. This was demonstrated to me when the council replaced my late mother's gas boiler by a new condensing model. When I visited her afterwards, I found she was using her gas fire as well as the central heating as she couldn't get warm with just the central heating. The installer had left the boiler thermostat on the highest setting for it to operate in condensing mode. After I had turned it up to a higher temperature, the radiators got to the temperature the old boiler had got them to, and mum didn't need to use the gas fire any more. But then the boiler was no longer operating in its alleged 90%+ efficiency mode. Apparently this is the way most condensing boilers get used. The council had previously insulated her cavity walls and loft, and fitted new double-glazed windows and exterior doors, but without her source of high temperature radiant heat, she felt cold.

London is in a fairly secluded location, being protected from the prevailing winds by relatively high ground to the North, West and South. I understand that a study showed there was little point in installing wind turbines in Central London. Low wind speeds mean they would never generate enough energy to cover their cost, and likewise don't flush away pollution in settled weather, a significant factor in the smogs of the 1950's. I recall that a group recently raised a successful complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority against some of the London ULEZ adverts becuse they did not make it clear that figures they were stating about its benefits were based on estmates and computer simulations rather than actual data.

Could we be reverting to the pre-1970's situation, when a boat's essential equipment used to include a spade for burying the Elsan's contents when it got full? We had to use the one supplied with our hire boat in 1976, when the water shortages of that year's drought severely limited lock opening times, there were no facilities in the pound we found ourselves in when the loos got full, and the next locks weren't going to be opened until noon the following day.

1500W would be 1667 VA at 0.9 PF. Calculating PF is more complex these days with modern switch-mode power supplies that do not draw sinusoidal current.

It's the other way round. VA can only equal W for unity power factor (purely resistive loads) . For power factors less than than unity, VA will always be greater than W. Domestic customers normally only pay for actual power, so PF doesn't concern them. Industrial customers usually pay for VA, so it is in their financial interest to get their PF as close to unity as possible.

By applying Archimedes' principle, if you multiply the area of the submerged part of your boat (assuming it has straight sides and is level) by the depth of immersion, that will approximately give the volume of water displaced. The weight of that volume of water will equal the weight of your vessel.

I understand that the present US recommendation is for one pin to be larger than the other to provide their 2 pin plugs with polarisation, but all of the ones I have come across fitted to imported equipment manufactured in the Far East, have had two identical pins.

My first canal holiday in 1976 was with a group that hired both of Black Prince's original fleet of two boats (Nelson and Rodney) . One had two sea toilets, the other had two Elsan loos and a spade to be used to bury their contents if there was no convenient sanitary station (which there wasn't mid-week). We had brought our own supply of soft bog rolls, but one of our party who had his own yacht said that the sea toilets ought only to be used with hard bog paper as the soft stuff was liable to block the mechanism. So we bought some of the right stuff, and that boat had a harder time of it! By the time we hired again the following year, the sea toilets had been replaced.

If it was brand new and cheap, it's probably the plasiciser leaching out. The hoses provided with the boats we used to hire only seemed to be good quality garden hoses, but they must have had lots of water passed through them by previous hirers. We never had any experience of tainted water when using them.

On my first canal holiday in 1976, the towpath between Braunston and Fenny Compton was best described as discontinuous. When the weather was fine, most of the crew liked to walk along the towpath, which was often faster than the boat, but we periodically had to stop and pick them up whenever the towpath disappeared. In one case, the edge of the towpath on which someone was standing waiting for the boat, literally disappeared from beneath him, resulting in him sitting up to his waist in the green stagnant canal water of that year's drought. A start had been made on piling, but in some places it either hadn't yet been backfilled, or had been filled with mud that wasn't yet solid enough to walk on. The gangplank was often needed when mooring up due to the presence of underwater collapsed towpath debris. Things are much better today.

I did read of an instance where the GWR laid an additional rail for standard gauge throughout on one of their lines, but installed the extra rail for the standard gauge so that it was on the platform side at stations. This meant that goods trains could use the line, but standard gauge passenger trains could not use the stations due to the large gap between the standard gauge carriages and the platform edges.

I use the red wax from Babybel cheeses, smeared on pieces of corrugated cardboad rolled into tubes, as the foundation layer for firewood. The local industrial estate always has some non-returnable pallets that they are happy to let you take away for firewood

The day after a government minister had made an announcement encouraging the public to switch to induction hobs to save energy, letters from eminent cardio-thoracic specialists appeared in the papers, pointing out that official NHS advice was that pace-maker wearers should not get closer than about two feet from an operating induction hob, as the strong fields could interfere with a pacemaker's operation. Of course, this is not going to be a problem unless you expect pace-maker wearers who might need to use a hob, to visit your boat.

My understanding is that the potential problem with using washing-up liquids (such as Fairy) for leak detection, is that their detergent has had salt added to it to make the solution thicker. A neutral pure soap (Johnsons baby shampoo?) that does not contain salt should be better. My late father was a pipe fitter at the local gasworks, and always used to use a detergent solution (Daz, Surf, or Omo washing powder, whatever mum had), but that was in the days when iron pipe was universally used. When washing-up liquids started to be sold (mid- to late- 1950's I think), he did once bring home a gallon tin of concentrated industrial detergent from work (BP By-Prox I think). It was as runny as water, which made it difficult not to dispense too much from a refilled Squeezy/ Fairy bottle. That probably partly accounts for the use of added salt.