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MoominPapa

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Everything posted by MoominPapa

  1. For an A127, certainly. The diodes and heatsinks are at the back, just behind the cooling slots, so an air duster would work quite well. Just don't shove anything conductive in there. MP.
  2. They are mounted on reasonably substantial heatsinks made of ~5mm thick metal, probably steel which form one of the diode connections. There are two heatsinks, one bolted the case forming the common for all the negative diodes, and one isolated from the case which is the common for all the positive ones. MP.
  3. Alternators on boats work hard, and alternators on boats with lithium batteries work harder. I have a couple of failed alternators on board. One failed before we got lithium batteries and one after. They are both 70A A127s. Since the second failure caused me to have install the brand-new Ebay sourced spare that I carried, I thought I'd look at the two failures with the aim of building one functional unit to take over the role as a spare. In both cases the only fault was a failed diode. One was open circuit and one short circuit. I wondered if cooked stator windings might be a problem, but both stators looked fine and metered out OK. I'd already bought a new diode module on Ebay for £12 and fitting that is pretty trivial, as long as you have a BIG soldering iron. The sort your Grandad had, not a 15W tidler suitable for doing electronics. What was noticeable about both units was that the cooling air path around the diodes was clogged with dust and fluff. I suspect if I'd stuck with my good intentions and dismantled and cleaned them once a year, they would not have failed. So, lessons learned. A127s survive maximum output for long periods pretty well, and when they do fail, it's normally the diodes. When they fail, they are easy and cheap to repair. Keeping them free from fluff and dust will probably stave off diode failure. I have a good spare now, but I think I'll probably carry a spare diode pack too. There's good access with the alternator installed on the engine, and it's actually easy to remove the back half of the case and stator whilst leaving the front half, rotor and belt in place. That allows a quick change of the diodes with very little dismantling of the installation. It also saves having to undo the pulley nut to move the pulley to a new alternator, which is the most difficult part of a swap. MP.
  4. I used the same term the OP did, so any credit is due to them. MP.
  5. I've installed a Hybrid Lithium system. It involved adding a high current Schotky diode and a bistable contactor into the charge wiring, changing the alternator regulator to one which could be computer controlled, a PCB full of electronics and an Arduino running 2500 lines of code I wrote. The resulting system is stable and foolproof and I'd be happy for it to be used on my boat by other people. I would not sell copies of it: that would require extensive testing with different charge sources and different batteries. Without casting aspersions, if you can find a marine electrical fitter capable of replicating what I did, I'd be very surprised. The skill-sets are rather different. MP
  6. Side pond capacity isn't too critical as long as long the locks don't leak. They just need to be able to supply one lock-full without the level dropping too much, when turning the flight round from descending to ascending. MP.
  7. Last week the main noise nuisance in the basin was boaters running generators 11-11 directly under the students' windows. I expect that mooring will be closed eventually as a consequence: the majority suffer because of the thoughtless arseholes. It was sufficiently busy in the basin that you couldn't be confident of rocking up and getting a space. Consider the moorings by the gardens under the city walls between Cow Lane Bridge and the corner of the walls. If there's no one moored there, as is often the case, it's easy to miss them. There's no sign and the rings are difficult to see. Very pleasant. MP.
  8. Last time we went through we moored overnight there and were not alone. A quiet night was enjoyed. MP.
  9. We've only ever ended up on the bottom at a precarious angle due to vandalism once and that was above Wardle Lock in Middlewich. I wouldn't avoid Middlewich even so. MP.
  10. Sounds like you're running very old software. Is there an option to update it? I wouldn't hold out too much hope for something made in 2009, but you never know. MP.
  11. I resemble that remark. Can we start dissing boats that bang around at the end of loose ropes and then pull inadequate pins out, or is that still automatically always the fault of passing "speeders"? MP
  12. You'll be making quite a bit of extra smoke yourself, to replace all the heat you're dumping out of the vents. MP.
  13. Ah, EU roaming charges. Another Brexit benefit. How blessed we are. MP.
  14. What happens to older boats with air-cooled engines and air inlets low down? Those seem to be responsible for most downflooding sinkings. MP.
  15. For sink outlets, it's normal to consider the flooding height as the height of the sink rim, not the hole in the side. A surveyor being very cautious my insist that hoses are double clamped before allowing this. I'd suggest finding another broker and another surveyor. Bilge pump outlets can suffer from syphoning, so the easiest solution may be to do as the surveyor suggests, MP.
  16. 13Kg propane last week cost £37.50. The news on the street is that after a couple of months of relatively normal conditions, availability has gone TU again, and there's a major shortage. Not a good time for us to lose a substantial fraction of a cylinder-full over board when the union of the regulator end of a pigtail cracked and the hose more-or-less fell off.
  17. They aren't on the SIM card: those have very little memory. They MIGHT be on an SD-card if you have one installed and configured the phone to use it. They might be backed up in The Cloud if you use Google Photos or similar. MP.
  18. It's the line to Ellesmere Port. Probably still running on steam. MP.
  19. Just speculation. 132A is the railway crossing and the railway crosses the canal at high level and a significant skew, so that the railway embankment is almost parallel to the canal and approaches to zero distance from it at the start of the bridge. A tree on the railway embankment which went over towards the canal could end up with the crown of the tree blocking the canal, but a large and heavy trunk above that going up the embankment and supported only by the crown. You really wouldn't want to remove the crown and have the now-unsupported trunk descend onto your head. MP.
  20. From the latest stoppage update: Dunno if that helps..... MP.
  21. But if the outlet from the calorifier and the outlet from the heater are connected together, then the outlet of the heater will be pressurised. There's nothing in the heater to stop reverse flow, so the inlet to the heater will be pressurised too, as will the outlet side of the isolator, where the arrow is pointing. The arrow is there to tell you not to pressurise the outlet side when the isolator is off. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/271605613643?hash=item3f3cf4c44b:g:LwsAAOxyA7tSYOui is what you need. MP.
  22. I'll take a guess that they're directional, and not intended to have high pressure on the side the arrow is pointing _towards_ when closed. I'll take a further guess that you have a calorifier which you use when the gas heater is isolated, so that there is pressure on that side of the valve, when closed, from the pressure in the calorifier and hot pipes coming back through the heat-exchanger. If I guessed right, I use half-turn butterfly-handle valves for the same function and have had no such problems. MP.
  23. I don't know. I just tried to find a cross-section diagram of one to see if they do have a stack of junctions and failed miserably. MP.
  24. Possibly, if I could have determined which contact was the problem. Given that the chassis is riveted aluminium there's dissimilar metal problems and corrosion to take into account too, adding a wire was the first thing I tried and it worked so I didn't explore other options. MP. I've not. If they're 20v open circuit there must be quite a stack on junctions in there, individual thermocouple junctions are in the mV/Celsius range. MP.
  25. We had similar problems with a Spinflo grill/oven combo, which is basically the same stuff and made by the same people. The problem turned out to be that the design relied of the cooker chassis to provide the return current path from the thermocouple to the gas valve. As the thing aged, the connections between the thermocouple and the chassis, the valve and the chassis, and the various bits of the chassis, increased in resistance. The voltage generated by the thermocouple is tiny, and it doesn't take much resistance to decrease the current below that needed to hold in the solenoid valve. The fix was to run a wire from the mounting nut of the thermocouple to a mounting screw of the valve, which worked instantly. Be careful to use either uninsulated wire or wire with high temperature insulation or be very sure that the wire in securely held away from any components which will get hot. You don't want a PVC insulation fire. After making this fix I happened to look at a new unit in the chandlers, and the same fix had been implemented in manufacture, so if your cooker is relatively recent, it may already have the earth return in place. In that case all you can do to be make sure the connections are clean and tight. MP.
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