Denis R

I've had one fitted a couple of years now and in all honesty can't imagine how I survived without it. I've managed to stretch a set of batteries by about a year by using the Smartgauge to inform my charging regime, and from my experience it will tell you one of two things: Your battery use is being adequately compensated for by your cruising pattern Or, you've underestimated the demand you're putting on your batteries by orders of magnitude... As an aside, I've been puzzled to know how the odd user 'can't get on with a Smartgauge', there's not actually a lot to have to 'get on with'...

I think we've probably been down this street before (several times), but could you give a steer on which isolator you reckon would be the 'isolator of choice'?

There is a statutory redundancy based on age and number of years service, and a state scheme for a minimum payment if the employer goes under and is unable to pay Statutory Redundancy. Noises coming from the Coalition are that they are not going to make enhanced payments as may have been done in the past.

Here's a morbid one for you... The BW standard mooring agreement states: "3. The right to use the Mooring is personal to you and you may not assign it to any person. You may allow another person to use the Mooring for short periods but only with our permission which shall not be unreasonably withheld." Under the definitions section, 'you' is defined as: "‘Owner, you, your, yours’ mean the person(s) or entity named as Owner in this Agreement and includes an employee of the Owner or a person in charge of the Boat with the Owner’s permission." So, family takes on a residential mooring then the 'Owner' whose name is on the Mooring Agreement dies. Do the family have to give up the mooring?

Thanks guys, you've talked me out of using an Easy-Out I think a LH drill it is.

These aren't the alternator adjustment bolts - these bolts only attach the alternator mounting bracket to the cylinder head and as such, should have been correctly torqued up at the factory. I take your point about Easy-Outs. Plan B was to drill out the bolt and run an M8 plug tap down the thread. It may have just become Plan A...

My Beta 35 has just clocked up 3,000 hours, sadly way too many of them from battery charging and one alternator bracket mounting bolt has just failed. This looks to me like a classic fatigue failure in shear. There is significant fretting corrosion around the area of the two mounting bolts - you can see the red dust on the picture, it's just as bad around the bolt hidden under the alternator wiring loom which hasn't failed yet. It appears to me that the twisting moment on the bracket caused by the tension of the alternator belt is not being fully counteracted by the clamping force of the two M8 bolts. It isn't a surprise to me that the rear bolt has failed, the front one acting more of a pivot. M8 is way too small for this application in my mind and it doesn't help that Beta have used cheesy 8.8 grade... The large bolt holding the lifting bracket only attaches it to the alternator bracket, not to the cylinder head, so that's providing no assistance at all. My plan is to extract the broken portion with an Easy Out and replace both bolts with 12.9 grade socket head cap screws. Before I go ahead and do that, does anyone have any other solutions/ upgrades that I should know about?

Wow, that sounds like an excitingly techie fun installation. Mild overkill for wallowing around in ditches I feel, but a Grand Day Out on deep water.

A 4 blader and a 3 blader? Any particular reason for this combination or am I being a numpty or missed something in a previous thread somewhere?

It's currently on the hard just the other side of the new marina at Heyford Fields and as of Saturday, not looking too sorry for itself.

My God, are they still available? I remember things like this from when I was a kid and my father used to add weird potions to practically every orifice of his Ford Pop! Fascinated by this I did a quick Google surf and there seems to have been a technology shift from tablet to pulse charging for desulphation - many sites even have instructions to make a DIY desulphater of your own, such as this one. Be interesting to know from how close to the brink you can bring a battery back (Gibbo?).

Which they do on the stretch between Blisworth and Whilton, the same numbers appear every week, they even mention it in conversation and know most of them off by heart. But nothing changes. Many of the boats have been on the stretch for a number of years. And I don't define shuffling the few miles between Blisworth and Whilton as 'a genuine progressive journey around a significant part of the network'. Edited to add: I don't consider that 'bona fide' navigation either.

Avoid it like the plague, take the wet route. You'll get enough s**t to last you a week on this forum as it is.

I bought a Briggs & Stratton with more enthusiasm than forethought and it's the loudest, most irritating noise on this earth, with a lousy AC waveform to complete the misery. Neighbours use both Kippor and Honda. I'd say the Honda is a little quieter but there's not much in it. They are both considerably more tolerable than my Kalashnikov sound-alike. The guy who runs the mobile coffee shop that pulls up outside the office has a little Chinese 2 stroke £70 jobbie that hums away quite merrily. He's got no illusions as to how long it's going to last mind you...

The liners on the double skinned chimneys I've found recently are invariably smaller than the flue pipe, which wasn't the case a couple of years back (?). The previous lined chimney was a nice snug fit. In the end I went for a chimney with a smaller diameter liner (which was all I could get) and ran a decent ring of glass rope between the inner and outer skins. This seems to seat on the chimney collar well enough and prevented the chronic condensation I was getting with a single skinned chimney I was using as a stop-gap.

I heard the very same words to describe the stretch between Blisworth and Buckby bottom. There's no shortage of mooring spots mind you, so it can support quite a reasonable sized community and the 'passing throughs' too, so doesn't seemed to have created too much tension...

...and irritate the locals by littering 'their' lanes with parked cars. The 14 Day north of the A45 bridge being a favourite, although even the 48 Hour between the turn and the pub isn't immune...

It might feel like a salmon swimming up the rapids if the Cropredy Festival crowd are on the post-gig move... Have fun.

Looking at a wiring diagram on the web here, the black wire is the switched feed to the heater, red is the positive and brown the 0v line. You will also find in the Webasto wiring loom to the timer a looped wire, whose colour I have forgotten, which if you cut and bridge with an on/off switch, will restrict the burner run time to one hour if switched 'off'.

If Beta panels haven't changed much over time, yours will contain plastic moulded lamps that don't have a separate bulb, they're single units. The lamp comes out forwards, there's a sprag washer holding it in at the back, which is difficult to remove without wrecking. If you buy a new lamp from Beta it should come with the sprag washer. I seem to get through the green power lamps, it's just gone again...

That Beta insulated post is a nightmare in its own right and it's worth running a single cable from the alternator to the battery if for no other reason than to eliminate it. Mine started to melt away when the connection came a bit loose and the threaded stud had almost come away completely from the plastic block when I discovered it. I got the impression from the local boatyard that I'm not the only one to have suffered. "They all do it at some point, it's just a question of when, not if."

Wise counsel from Mr Smelly. I've seen a few narrow boats change hands around here for pocket money prices that have been in pretty good nick. Nigel Carton, who posts on this forum sometimes, seems to have a knack for finding and shifting these sort of things. There may be more opportunities than you imagine, if as Mr Smelly says, you are prepared to be patient. And carry cash.

Flippin' 'enry I don't believe it. The local JH must have read this thread, and enthused by my finding a missing spanner after receiving their Good News on the towpath, turned up at the office this morning to continue their ministry. Sadly, they have not so far come up with the goods. The 3/4" deep socket I lost on my mother's driveway in 1976 remains missing-in-action.

If you were to walk past my mooring, hand in hand with a Dalek, my curiosity would indeed get the better of me, and I would be bound to ask Derick where he got you.