MtB

All this rather assumes a boater can afford a Victron. I suspect yer average cheapo inverter from Amazon or similar will be higher.

And what exactly is wrong with that? I only get to own a car, a bike, a house, a dog, a TV or anything in life if I can afford it. Why should a boat on the canal be any different?

Except that big-uns tend to draw a higher quiescent current than the little ones, so for permanently-moored boats and CMers not on shorelines, a big-un will flatten the batteries unnecessarily quickly in winter when God has turned the solar off.

Col's licence works out at about £25 a square metre by my simple arithmetic. On the same square metre-age basis my car licence costs approx £50 a square metre. And on the Thames, Cols boat licence would cost about the same but for only 215 miles of cruising waterway. CRT boat licences are cheap whichever way you look at it!

Ridiculously cheap isn't it!!

He mentions going through Teddington Lock, which sort of implies he is in a red board section now.

Yep I remember as a medium-sized child my cousin asking me what was the most dangerous nut on my bike. While I was considering this question he gleefully pointed out it was probably me, the one riding it.

"She" grates especially for me, given both my boats have male names! I refer to canal boats as "it", generally. "She" sounds to me like an inappropriate modern middle-class affection when I hear it used.

Hmmm there is a detailed and interesting thread on here about the CAV 45 but at first sight it looks different from the photo of the OP's starter, posted upthread. https://www.canalworld.net/forums/index.php?/topic/110950-request-for-help-on-cav-c45-starter-please/

40A seems on the high side for a loom fuse. Not high enough for the heater plug wiring though, perhaps. Fuses once you delve into them, get very complicated once you start specifying how quick you want them to blow, and/or if you want them to withstand occasional transient surge currents.

This is the point I was making a few days ago. It will become even more attractive to people using boats as houses if it ceases to be possible to use boats "bona fide for navigation throughout the period for which the consent is valid without remaining continuously in any one place for more than 14 days or such longer period as is reasonable in the circumstances." Mainly because it will become "reasonable in the circumstances" to remain continuously in any one place for more than 14 days when there is no practical way to cruise due to large numbers of un-repaired stoppages.

As tony implies, that does not mean 40A is the correct rating for that fuse, so do check what the manual specifies it should be. It might be (for example), meant to be 30A but it kept blowing so someone fitted a bigger fuse without fixing the underlying cause. 40A seems a big value and the photo looks like a fuse that has been stressed.

That's interesting. I've never seen anything like that in the canals down south. Maybe we already have plenty of wildlife! Which canal was it you picked up that lot on?

Hostage to fortune. I predict Alan will focus on the BMF changing its name to BM a few years ago... I made the same mistake upthread!

Or what happens, if they ignore this? Just curious...

I disagree. Relying on turnover is kidding yourself. The old cliché applies here: "Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, cashflow is king". And as my old accountant used to point out, a business not making a profit is more accurately described as a hobby. Don't ask me why he used to tell me this!

Being a number 2 is perhaps worse!

Cracking good boats though for rivers, them Brooms.

All diesel injector pipes are heavy duty, surely, given the pressure they are subjected to! Maybe the OP means heavy duty as in thickwall steel tubing rather than copper such as is used for LPG plumbing.

I suspect what we are seeing is a pragmatic, commercial decision by BM members. The members are being faced with a stark commercial choice, either accept the BM policy on this and insist on PCAs, or resign as members. I think most members want to remain members as it is the professional thing to do, they see membership as an essential feature of being a good quality broker and they will lose business if they cease to be BM members. On the other hand currently they are balancing this against losing business to the non-BM brokers and private sales market and concluding that is a price worth paying, but that might change if large numbers of brokers relinquish BM membership.

You will be replaced by richer people who CAN afford to go boating....

Curiously it was the mobile phone companies that allowed WhatsApp to gain a market foothold. Firstly by continuing to charge for text messaging when identical messaging was free with WhatsApp, then the same with sending photos.

Is that really true in the final analysis? What if CRT goes bust? Is it actually possible for CRT to go bust? Or is the government a guarantor of last resort (or something along those lines)?