aread2

Generally good. Make sure you follow the instructions. Remember to drop a teaspoonful of oil on the ball valve at intervals to avoid it seizing and finishing off the seal. It's a macerator - and by this they mean the vacuum is used to suck everything through a one inch hole at the bottom. Pretty effective but like all macerators it doesn't like wet wipes. I carry a pair of heavy duty rubber gloves on board. The cassettes are clever but with a family of five fill up in a day (15 litres; 7 year olds don't know the meaning of press and release the pedal immediately so it flushes for longer than expected). We carry a spare. Don't forget to plumb the vacuum pump outlet outside via a skin fitting otherwise you'll quickly learn when the activated charcoal filter has expired. The vacuum pump is quite noisy, especially when fitted under the bed (so I switch it off overnight) but can be fitted up to 5 metres away from the bathroom, so some thought is required here.

I'd say you are probably safe now. For the first time in four years I've had frost damage to the plumbing over the winter. I've never winterised before and this year was no exception. However we seem to have had a few more days of cold weather than in previous years. There was a series of three or four days a couple of weeks ago when the temperature dipped to around -7 and that was what did for my shower mixer valve. None of the other taps (more exposed I'd have thought) was damaged. It's considerably warmer now, so I'm confident my new shower mixer valve is safe but I'll be draining down the plumbing next winter to avoid a repeat performance.

I've got a 2.5kW Eberspacher heat exchanger and blower for warming the steerer's feet in my trad. Heat is available only while the engine is running as there is no circulation in the circuit otherwise. It's plumbed into the engine calorifier circuit and has a thermostat controlled electric fan and provides plenty of heat to keep the steerer warm on cold days, just like the range on old working boats. It's designed as an aftermarket automotive accessory but more or less any car heater matrix and fan would likely be suitable for adaptation, you'd just have to make your own ducts and grilles etc. When the engine is running the engine room, back cabin and to a lesser extent the bathroom are heated in this way from the engine. The front 2/3 of the boat are heated with the stove in the saloon at the front, and occasionally with the Eberspacher diesel heater and radiators.

Actually the London Midland Desiro has half of every fourth carriage devoted to first class.

Our has the same connections plumbed in. Are you sure there are no airlocks in the engine heater and diesel heater circuits?

Prise the two halves of the shell apart by inserting a (blunt will do) knife between them where the stalk attached the nut to the tree and then twist. The two halves of the shell come apart cleanly and the kernel comes out intact. Edited for spelling

Edited: Way too late! I think you ran out of diesel. I did the same the first time we ever went out in our boat. We now know a full tank of diesel will last about 9 days cruising with our Beta 43. The engine ran started running roughly about two miles from Calcutt locks, causing a couple of bumps when it wouldn't rev enough to stop the boat at critical times. We were able to proceed but it kept faltering and running roughly. We got through the top lock and finally the engine died. That night I checked the filters and tried to bleed the fuel system with the little priming pump on top of the engine fuel filter. I was watching for fuel coming out of the bleed screw at the top of the filter housing. All that came out was a kind of diesel foam. After 20 minutes it struck me I should check the level of fuel in the tank. There were about two inches on the dipstick but the take-off for the engine was obviously above this level. IN the morning we hauled the boat back down the top lock to Calcutt marina and filled up the tank. I was able to bleed the system in less than 5 minutes and the engine ran fine after that.

I've got a Beta 43 with a twin coil calorifier and a car interior heater. The calorifier is heated by the engine when it's running and via the second coil by the Eberspacher which then goes on to heat the rads. When the engine is running the heat is transferred to the central heating via the calorifier. The Eberspacher doesn't seems to mind a second heat source in the circuit. In addition to this we have a 2.5Kw car interior heater about where the range would be in a back cabin that blows onto the steerer's feet (advantage of a trad), using engine heat. The central heating pump is the internal Eberspacher one. There are two towel rails and four two metre finrads in the CH circuit. Edit : to add more detail.

I'm going to film some canal related stuff on Saturday and upload it for this!

Did you say cables designed for 24v from the batteries to the inverter? These would be half the cross section of those designed for 12v operation and more likely to cause volt drop between the battery and inverter. Or is this a red herring?

No not accepted, only just applied; deadline is the end of October, but there was apparently a rehearsal early in September.

Just applied for this. Anybody else applied and been accepted yet?

Plan the position of the attachments of the fixings at the bottom of the cratch cover very carefully. Ours has been damaged by impact on lock sides because some of the fixings are on the "corner" of the hull below where the cabin finishes. This has squashed the metal hooks that the bungee straps hook onto and a couple of the bungees have been wrenched out, tearing the corner of the cover in the process. The cover is still functional but looks a little the worse for wear.

I would only ever fill in a survey if there was cold hard cash involved.

On seeing a crushed can in the road an Indian friend said "In India somebody would pick up all this refuse to sell." I didn't point out that the crushing poverty needed for such a level of enterprise is something we don't have. Neither do we have cattle wandering the streets to eat all the waste food, providing free manure to burn on our kitchen fires...

How about when the crankshaft oil seal fails? At two years of age the seal on our Beta 43 was ripped in two by a fragment of drive belt that had worked its way into the space behind the pulley. All the oil fell out of the engine into the engine bilge in a matter of a few minutes with no sound at all. Fortunately the buzzer sounded when the oil pressure dropped away to zero in short order and I stopped the engine long before any damage could occur. Like most trad stern boats, It's not possible to watch the instruments all the time as they are inside the cabin.

It also came with a set of stickers to put next to the control switch that say the Travelpower should not be "on load" when the engine is started or stopped or serious damage may occur to the control box.

Ours is the silver box version. The instruction manual says the Travelpower should be off before the engine is stopped or started i.e. the Travelopwer should only be energised when engine is turning.

No, not me but it looks like fun!

Need a bit of a current, or a good push to bump start a boat! Effect of current on a propeller .

I'm using the Huawei D100. So far so good. No on-board battery, but available at sensible money if you already have a dongle.

Without the heat exchanger you are drastically increasing the volume of the engine cooling system so your header tank would probably not be big enough any more. You'd have to change the entire volume every time you drained the engine coolant. A leak in the central heating would also drain the engine coolant. Would your CH be happy running at the same pressure as the engine?

Sarah on her Chertsey blog briefly mentions grease and Plummer blocks, with pictures.

My hatch has a lip that projects down from its rear edge by about 1/4 inch. This requires the hatch to be lifted to open or close it to move the lip over the top of the doors but provides a watertight closure.

That's right: BT-Fon is only available to those with an active BT Homehub or FON WiFi router. The BT-FON and FON wireless connections are available as a separate channel limited to 500Mbps open to all subscribers. The bandwidth limitation is to prevent the owner from being adversely affected by roaming users connecting to their hub. I believe the BT-FON service has been a default setting for BT users since about 2009 - they have to opt out in order not to offer it. I have a stand-alone FON wireless router attached to my non-BT broadband so I can access any BT-FON enabled homehub using my FON login ID. There over 2 million BT-FON wireless access points in the UK.