MoominPapa

It's connected to the stud, and is for a radio suppression capacitor. Not connecting it won't disable anything except possibly radio reception. MP.

Credit where credit is due. We came down the Wigan flight this morning, and it was an easy run. The flight is in a much better state than I remember the last time we used it, about five years ago. It still has a lot of copious pissers though. MP.

I shan't relax until I get to Middlewich. MP.

As I recall when we came through last week, that lock had the worst pissers of all of them, and they are mostly bad. Water leaking through the walls and into the surrounding soil when the lock is full and then running back into the lock, carrying soil with it when the lock is empty is not exactly difficult to diagnose, so the subsequent sink holes are not really an unexpected Act of God either. We passed a crew injecting foam into embankments in Burnley to try and fix leaks. Maybe they should have a go at locks too? MP.

My 70A alternator reduces to a 60A alternator as it reaches operating temperature. I don't think there's an explicit control path, it's just that the rotor current reduces as the windings get hot and their resistance increases. MP

Below is the graphs for the last month. Green is the Soc from Ah counting (ie something like what the BMV is calculating) blue is the Soc estimated from cell voltages, and purple is the output the algorithm that combines these, and what appears on the display in the engine room after it's converted to a percentage. You can see that the blue line does correlate reasonably well, long term. I'm not sure about the change from generally being higher than the Ah count to generally being lower, a week or two back. I suspect it may be due to lowering solar output as the weather worsens. (If the current metering read significantly high in 5-15A charge range that we get on a sunny day, for instance, that would explain things.) The other change is that we've been doing more engine running as we're moving more. MP.

Don't know the exact capacity, but not much. A litre is probably enough for at least two fills. MP.

We've come up from Leeds in the past couple of days. There was a grumpy CRT bod at Forge 3 who satisfied himself that one of the two boats going up wasn't a rank beginner hire boater and then disappeared into his bunker. Meanwhile at Newlay 3 there were four jolly vollies, having a great time; none of who seemed to be aware of the possibility that a 60' boat would need to tuck in behind the opposite gate to get the gates closed. At Dobson 2 there's a sign on the top gate beams instructing you not to fill the top lock whilst a boat is descending the bottom lock as the gates leak so much that it would put the boat in "serious danger". The sign doesn't say what an ascending boat which has no choice but to be in the empty bottom lock with the top lock full it expected to do. The answer we came up with is to get very, very wet and somewhat stressed. The boat coming up before us reportedly suffered a flooded bedroom. Dobson's 2 is not in the set locked overnight. Yesterday evening it was filled for swimming by the local youfa who brought their own windlass. To Bingley tomorrow! MP.

Long lines of moored boats, especially those with people living on them, seem to generate worse local weed growth. I guess it'sthe nitrates and phosphates in the grey water discharges to blame. MP.

We're moored at Castleford, and planning a quick diversion to Wakefield in a 60' narrowboat. I don't intend to try out the long boat diagonal on a short lock technique this time, so I'm trying to work out how far we can get. According to Nicholsons, it's to Broad cut, but looking on Google Satellite view, Thornes Lock, the one before Broad Cut, looks short too, but with a second set of gates to make it longer. So the question is can I get a 60' boat through Thornes lock in short mode? If not can I use the extra gates to make it long? If not can I wind on the river below Thornes lock, and if I can get through Thornes lock can I wind on the river below Broad Cut Low lock. Locals, please advise. Cheers, MP.

The clue is the "L" in LPG - liquid petroleum gas. Inside the cylinders it's a liquid, so you can pour it from one container to another and transfer the vast majority. Just connecting the valves with a pipe won't do this though, you need to invert the source cylinder, or use a cylinder with a dip tube that picks up the liquid from the bottom. MP.

Yet another toilet-tent cratch cover. MP.

Our boat was built in the early nineties and lived on by the first owners 'till the late nineties on the Staffs and Worcester. It still gets recognised as such around Kinver. Sorry. MP.

The amount of water to be passed through the lock each day comes from on-high, but when it's run through is not specified 🙂 The bywash at Ashline lock is an actively controlled sluice rather than a weir these days, so that may fight attempts to increase the level. MP.

As others have said, it;s just the end of the lock farthest from the river which is deep, so going down from the river to the ML with a deep boat can be a problem. The soliution is to put the boat in backwards, so the deep stern is over the deep bit of the lock as it descends. You can turn a full length boat in the Nene before the lock, and up to 60' below the lock. Longer than that is a mile reversing to the next winding hole. It's worth explaining the situation to Tina the lock keeper when you book. She has in the past run water down into King's Dyke in advance for us to get enough depth to avoid having to reverse. MP.

Since the cow was in the river up to her shoulders, I'd have needed SCUBA gear to collect the milk....... MP.

When we moored there last, we were woken in the middle of the night by a huge wave moving the boat and splashing along. At least that's what it felt like: actually it was a cow, falling in between the boat and the bank. A long farago involving 112 and the fire brigade and very little further sleep ensued. MP.

Good advice except when there's a howling cross-wind (which is often) Getting a boat which is pinned to the side by a gale back into the middle of the channel and moving fast enough to avoid being blown back is non-trivial single-handed. MP.

For my sins, I've spent 20 years writing server code that is exposed to the jungle of the 21st century internet: https://thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html Making stuff secure and at least vaguely DoS resistant is therefore fairly second-nature. It's interesting though that one day I couldn't connect: it turned out that something/someone had made multiple TCP connections and used up all the (deliberately limited) connection slots. A quick rewrite to close the oldest connection when the limit is reached, rather than refuse new ones, fixed that problem. MP.

The generator has not been used since we left lockdown at the end of March (but we did buy some juice from a hookup at the Retford and Worksop boat club last week.) I've not quite got the "power from fresh air" module in the software debugged yet. MP.

I have a Kipor IG1000 and the manual says not to use fuel containing _more_than_ 10% ethanol, so it looks like that's in the clear, for now. MP.

The algorithm I use is only little more complex, and works well. Amount removed from a cell is proportional to the difference between its voltage at termination and the voltage of the _lowest_ cell voltage. (So, if the cells are 3.56, 3.55, 3.56, 3.60, then the balance amounts would be 1Ah, 0Ah, 1Ah, 5Ah, or some similar ratio.) MP.