Mike the Boilerman

Royal Mail is not a courier.... For anything over about £20 in value or bigger than quite small, I find seller send by courier and yes, which one makes quite a lot of difference. If I could select by courier I would always choose DPD. That's why I was interested you seemed to know how to select which courier.

What is the best price you've found so far, that you are looking to beat? And which "small PRM box" do you need, exactly?

I too make hundreds of ebay purchases every year. Never figured out a way of checking which courier they are gonna use though!

But with no enforcement or any negative consequences whatsoever of ignoring that RCD requirement, I hold that DIY bodgery will continue to thrive in the future just as it does now. The OP's boat for example might well have been built to RCD but whoever installed that wiring obviously cared nothing for the requirements, and why should he? Probably isn't even aware they exist.

BUT... There is no obligation on anyone installing gas or electrics later, to do it in accordance with RCD. 15mm rigid copper for gas piping and solid core household copper cabling is fine for BSS.

I had one too but it never seemed to work properly.

Yes the only way to distinguish these fake UK sellers is by the predicted delivery date being 8 or 9 days ahead and no option available for courier or any other faster delivery. And when the item arrives, it was clearly posted in China. Damned clever, these Chinese...

The scam that winds me up is when you select UK sellers only, but ebay still give you chinese sellers anyway in your search results. More than once I've failed to notice this and bought from china with the associated delay without realising until too late.

I would say yes. The BSS is a very sketchy standard with some gaping holes in it, e.g. this, despite the stupidity of boats failing due to, for example, a missing label on the diesel filler or gas locker. Another example is the use of annealed copper for gas pipes rather than hard copper. Mandatory in RCD and also BSS you'd have thought, yes? I challenge you to find it in the latter....

I think the scam is you start by sell loads at a zero profit price, undercutting all the competition with your low low price and hoovering up all the business. The you don't actually post out ANY of them until nagged by the customer who didn't receive their goods. There will always be a proportion of people who don't notice their item never arrived, or CBA to raise a dispute over it (life's too short), thus furnishing the seller with the occasional 100% profit.

I'm a bit worried that you were using the Easy Start in the right way, given the cigarette lighter there next to it!!

Wow, I missed that! (But then I'm not as familiar with what a can of EasyStart looks like as you are, Jim )

Me. I'm not getting emails for threads your are following either. Never had have. Not sure why....

Well in the interim several of the large ash trees here have now burst into leaf, but not the HUGE one my boat is moored underneath. It looks dead as a dead thing. The one on the left. Obvs.

In Post 2 you said the OP might need an isolator, not his boat.....

SO easy done!!!

Will yours run in either direction?

Agreed. The way the inverter is connected with croc clips is particularly crappy I thought. The OP however seems to have been left with the impression that all of the wiring is causing the 'fail', rather than just the battery interconnects. With no starter motor or any high current demands (except perhaps the water heater), I see no need for 25mm2 interconnects. No evidence of a battery isolator either. Nice that yours starts easily. I had one once that was a right pig to start....

I too have had a fright believing my boat stolen, twice now. In my case though, I have just returned to where I left it time before last to find NO BOAT, then with a good hard think realised it is five miles further up the cut. Duh....

What a beaut! How do you start it? With a blow lamp to heat up the hot bulb?

Ok, I thought this was an interesting fault! I'm still inclined to suspect the warning light is not connected to the alternator at all, getting its power from somewhere else, and the alt is self-exciting. But will find on on Saturday... And yes I'll send you the alt for a post mortem if swapping the warning light cable to the W terminal fixes it.

True! In which case a manometer connected to the test nipple will show a steadily rising pressure. This is one of the reasons the first step in using a manometer for tightness testing is the let-by test. No-one ever mentions this on here, except me

Reading 3.2.2, only the battery, master switch, bow thruster, inverter, starter motor and winch supply cables are required to be of any particular size. The general wiring shown in the OP photos should still pass a BSS despite being thin and solid core.

Wow, how delightful! What make and model is it? Care to bung up some photos? That would be wonderful!

Are 'wires too thin' actually a BSS fail? I can see the installation is appalling so the examiner would be looking to fail, but this seems a bit of a sloppy reason for failing. Besides I bet 3 out f 4 boats have at least one cable 'too thin'.