MoominPapa
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Posts posted by MoominPapa
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Its powerful. It makes me want to sleep ALOT.
I may be being a worry-wort, but carbon-monoxide makes people want to sleep a lot too, and a new stove installation might just have a problem which makes it leak CO. You do have an alarm, don't you, so that I can stop worrying?
MP.
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Please note...None of the quotes in my signature are my own work. Please feel free to enquire, if you are interested in their source.
"This page intentionally left blank"
... and virtual points to carlt
MP.
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... perhaps pretend or give the impression that it was mine!!!
To be fair to carlt, I don't think he did either, I think there were, at least, quotation marks. Certainly I always understood it to be a quotation.
For the avoidance of doubt, my signature is a quotation, and not a comment on the state of the South Oxford towpath this year. Points to the first person to identify the source, *without Googling*.
MP.
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If I understand Colin Stone correctly, if, due to a fault , the hull becomes live with ac current and someone steps off the boat it is possible that they could provide a better earth than the water and so will not be protected.
If this is the case it is worrying because you won't know about it till it's too late!
Is this an argument for not earthing ac through the hull?
I apologise if i've got the wrong end of the stick but I know I'm un-knowledgeable about these matters
This does seem to be a similar forum to the 'illegal earth connections' forum
The other end of the stick is much better. If the hull and the ground are connected by a nice, low resistance earth lead then an accidental connection of the hull to AC live will probably cause enough current to trip the RCD or the fuse. Even if it doesn't then the current will flow down the earth lead and not though a human with one foot on the boat and one on the ground. The danger is when there's no designed earth path, and some hapless human becomes one by accident.
This is the principle of "equipotential bonding". If everything conductive in a location is electrically connected together then it's impossible to get a shock by touching two conductive objects because any current that wants to flow between them with do so via the bonding wires and not the person, as the bonding wires have much lower resistance.
MP.
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I didn't include the second paragraph because, though the nicest bit of the quote, I got bored with typing.
You're not related to a mathematician chappy, name of "Fermat", by any chance?
MP.
(If we drag their thread far enough off topic, maybe the children will lose interest, and stop arguing.)
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"Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.
It is for that reason, perhaps, that when it comes, the desire to build a boat is one that cannot be resisted. It begins as a little cloud on a serene horizon. It ends by covering the whole sky, so that you can think of nothing else. You must build to regain your freedom. And always you comfort yourself with the thought that yours will be the perfect boat, the boat that you may search the harbours of the world for and cannot find."
Lose points for using the same signature quote as another member of this forum (carlt, maybe? I'm not sure but I have seen it around.) but get them back in spades for quoting more: the second paragraph is quite charming, and very true.
MP.
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I assume you mean a 1: 2 ratio ???????????
Chris
Why? With a engine that's flat out at 1800 RPM, a 1:2 ratio is not going to be much use at cruising rpms.
MP.
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Did he conduct the test where he stands with one foot on the boat and one on the pontoon (with wet bare feet of course) and dangled one hand in the water while holding your neighbour's boat with the other, while you randomly tried making temporary short-circuits (between any pair of wires you could find and/or to the hull)? If he didn't, his test was inadequate. If he did, and he's still alive, then there's just a small chance that everything is safe.
Snort - that's the point I was trying to make too, but you did it with so much more *style*, Allan.
MP.
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.... it seems to work o.k.
Which means nothing. What we are talking about here are safety systems, the success criteria is not "does it charge my battery" , it's "does it kill someone in the event of a fault".
Is your charger double insulated or does it have its metal case carefully isolated from the Hull? If not, then the metal case is probably connected to the supply earth and therefore earthing your hull anyway. You are not protected from galvanic corrosion, but nor do you have a solid, reliable, earth bond that will ensure that the fuse blows or the RCD trips when the cable to the charger wears through and the live conductor touches the hull.
Sounds like the worst of all possible worlds, to me.
MP.
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Going back to the old hull-earth bonding debate...
I think it's generally accepted that AC on boats should be hull-earth bonded, but there are still some out there who refuse to do it.
There is a guy near me who claims to be an electrician and says that the theory about RCDs not working if the hull is not earth bonded isn't true because all the RCD does is detect an imbalance between live & neutral and the earth doesn't come into it. He asked me if I'd ever wired up an RCD (which I haven't), and said that since there are only live & neutral connections going in and out, how could the earth make any difference?
I even gave the guy an article Gibbo had written but he said he disagreed with it.
I suggest that you ask him which buildings and boats he has ever worked on, and give them all a wide berth!
MP.
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Who is going to be first to report that when they key in their own fully licenced boat number that it comes up and says they are an evader
Not quite, but when I checked Melaleuca's number, it correctly tells me that its a known number and not currently licensed. Since Melaleuca is moored on the Middle Level at the moment, that's fine, but I am slightly amazed that we were not contacted when the license expired. Maybe BW should have a canal equivalent of the SORN system?
MP.
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One thing to check, given that your engine and alternators are located in the accommodation space, is that they not bunged up with fluff, hair , etc. Dismantling the alternator fitted to the FR2 and removing large amounts of "stuff" from the internals went a long way to fixing overheating smells when working hard.
MP.
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OK people, here are a couple of photos of one of my alternators. Both are the same (in appearance). The spec when I bought the boat was 'twin 75Ah Alternators'.
There are no makers marks anywhere.
Additionally. They currently rotate in different directions (ie. the driven pullys face each other). If I swapped them over to test them on each others circuit they would each run in a 'reverse direction' to which they had been running. Are alternators able to run in either direction or only one way?
Look like Lucas A127s. They're very similar to the one fitted to Melaleuca except that on the one I have the output terminal is a post rather then spades.
I think that it's fine to run alternators backwards, the only thing that's not symetrical is the fan, which won't be so efficient turning the wrong way. Fine for a quick test, I'd have thought. Check with Snibble for confirmation of this.
MP.
Edited to add: Can you leave them in place, and just swap over the connections?
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How the hell can having unsafe electrics be a fun risk anymore than unsafe sex ....
To paraphrase someone (Woody Allen?), if having unsafe sex isn't fun, you're doing it wrong!
MP.
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Second vote for PlusGas.
Far more likely to work than WD40, which is not really designed for the explicit use you require.
I've not seen it on sale for a while, though.
Third vote for Plusgas. It solved the same problem for me.
MP.
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Just get Moomin to pass his hands over it and all will be well, especially as he seems to have added BMC engines to his already long list of competencies.
Hmmm, you've not seen an example of my welding, have you?
MP.
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Any reccommendations for a pump for a simple backboiler & two rads setup? I've got a Johnson CM30P7-1 that I acquired a while ago - anyone familiar with them?
I have a Bolin, bought for half price on Ebay. It uses not much power and is very quiet but not inaudible. No idea how reliable since its not been in place long. It does make the system, which is previously convection, much more efficient. It's no longer necessary to have the stove blasting away and the saloon like a sauna before decent heat makes it to the bedroom at the stern.
MP.
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I think I may have traced a slight problem.
The engine alternator is giving out 14.6v. The domestic one is only 13.2v
My charging instrumentation currently consists of a red light for each of the alternators and I noticed that, in a darkened engine room, the domestic light was a dim red.
Short term, I'll swap them around and see if that does anything.
Could the Sterling unit connected to the domestic circuit be effecting the output voltage?
I think a winter job may be volt meters and ammeters for both circuits
What exactly are you measuring? If you think about it, the alternator and the battery banks are connected to each other with big fat cables, so in fact you're measuring on-charge battery voltage. In fact you're probably just finding out that you domestic battery bank is more discharged than your starter battery, which isn't much of a surprise. Swapping the alternators will give you some more information, I'd bet a pint that the lower voltage stays with the domestic battery.
Voltmeters and Ammeters for both banks are a really good idea: that information is invaluable for telling you what's actually going on.
The explanation for the dim red light is probably that both lights are fed from the engine battery circuit positive and the other ends from the alternator field, so the domestic one has about 14.6-13.2 = 1.4v across it.
MP.
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Now THATS why I love this forum. Damn. good one MP
Ree-sult! .... and the Moomin-mobile passed its MOT, too.
MP.
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Hi Alan
Boat has been lying for a few years so did not use the fuel tank. I had a 5 gal. drum on the deck beside me with a short pipe to the filter. I marked the drum the first day every hour had 5 pieces of tape quite evenly spaced. The second day I could tell the time by looking at the tape.
When you connected the 5 gal drum, did you feed the leak-off/recirculation pipe into it too? Maybe the engine is just pumping fuel from your drum into the "real" fuel tank via the leak-off lines?
MP.
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Hi Derek,
Ubuntu isn't an application or peice of software which you can install under Windows, it's a complete operating system which means you either need to replace XP with Ubuntu, or setup a dual boot system, which is more complicated, and have them both installed on the same computer.
Check out www.ubuntu.com for more info.
What Liam says is correct, but it is possible to get Ubuntu in the form of Windows program, which installs without disturbing the existing system. I've used this, and it works well. Go to clicky to download,
MP.
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Same on W. Anti clockwise to open up, clockwise to shut down, like a tap. Or is that just feminine instinct?
Like a tap, and unlike a volume control. I suppose the youngsters won't have a problem, since rotary volume controls seem to be dying out.
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.... It's more instinctive, somehow, for one.
Hmm, not sure about that. The speed-wheel on Meleleuca is clockwise to slow down, anticlockwise to speed up. These days I only get it wrong in cases of dire emergency.
MP.
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Out of curiousity, with a view to actually making the change...
How would one go about converting a Perkins D3 with a PRM 260 gearbox in its own engine room, with the usual single lever morse control, to having the traditional speed wheel and gear shift (push/pull).
Ta
Go to shed and collect large quanties of useful junk, obtain an angle-grinder and an arc-welder. Cut up useful junk and weld it together to make linkages. Paint moving bits of linkages red and the rest green.
Seriously, every speedwheel setup I have seen looks like it was made this way. Melaleuca's incorporates a hand-drill gear to take the drive through 90 degrees. The one on Warrior makes good use of a car scissor-jack. I don't think there's a more standard approach, you just need something to pull the throttle lever and something to move the gear lever. With a Hydraulic box, I'd probably keep the morse cable and attach that to the push-pull gear shift, with a manual box that needs some force, a big lever is needed.
MP.
Report Unlicensed Boats!
in General Boating
Posted
Yes. Putting the index number for Melaleuca into that page returns "unlicensed", which is correct as it's current on the Middle Level and not licensed for BW waters.
MP.