nicknorman

Where did I say you did? One of premises of your post seemed to be that with modern synthetic or semisynthetic oils, sludge build up didn't happen. Which is of course true. However as I mentioned, 95% of boat engines owned by people on here run on mineral oil. Therefore your post might be misleading to people who didn’t fully understand the significance, including the OP. My aim therefore was to add clarity and hopefully prevent misunderstanding.

Narrowboat engines including relatively modern ones like our Beta 43, aren’t and shouldn’t be run on synthetic or semi-synthetic oil, they are run on mineral oil.

Nasty. Hopefully you reported the accident to CRT?

Fuel filter because a new boat may well have swarf and other debris in the tank and pipework. If it’s a new engine in an old boat, I wouldn’t bother. We have limited clearance under the gearbox so for that, I pump out via the dipstick as much as possible, then insert a shallow tray (not big enough to hold all the oil) and undo the drain plug. The engine has a built in pump which sucks via a modified sump plug so using that is as effective as removing the sump plug.

With a modern battery charger left on, powered by the inverter or shore power, once the BT battery is fully charged and the charger goes to float, the power drain will be minimal. So I don’t see it as an issue when out cruising, nor when on shore power. If you were going to leave the boat on the towpath for an extended period, one would switch the inverter off and then no power drain. Unless that happened a lot and you switched the power off very shortly after mooring (which is unlikely because most people wander around doing stuff for a while before leaving the boat for an extended period of time on the towpath) I can’t see it as a problem, and no worse a problem than charging at 12v DC over long fat cables via a VSR. We don’t have a BT but if we did, I would want it charged by a local mains charger.

Assuming the boat has a weed hatch, the trivially easy way to measure static draft is to hook a tape measure under the skeg via the weed hatch, and note the water line on the tape measure.

I would say the depth quoted relates to clearance over the lock cills. The actual river is going to be very variable, but I would be confident that most of it is a lot more than 3’7”

Oh yes sorry, I didn’t read it properly! As you say it’s a 24v system so multiply the numbers I gave by 2 if measuring across both batteries, or measure one battery at a time and use the figures I gave.

Using a multimeter across the battery terminals is definitely the best way to check. You should expect over 14v if the charger is working and the batteries are not unduly flat. 13v or less means the charger is not working (or the batteries are very flat).

I had noticed, but with the standard of spelling and grammar on here being far below that to which we are accustomed on TB, I didn’t bother to mention it.

And yet here you still are!

Sure. But he didn't say "signing out for now" - not that you would need to say that for the reasons you give. He said "signing out" which is a passive aggressive way of saying "I don't like the answers I've been given, so I am leaving and ensuring you all know about it". Yes but same applies in real life. Someone asks me a technical question and when I try to answer irs obvious they are not in receive mode and it transpires they just wanted to moan about something, but dressed it up as a question.

One piece of etiquette is that if you ask a vague question, it is rude to walk away while people are trying to be helpful and answer it.

Only if you are a stupid office-residing non-boater.

Stupid, stupid CRT! I suppose they employ children to write rubbish of Facebook. Anyway the moral is, never believe anything you read on soshalmedyaa. Especially here!

According to the internet, Gunthorpe marina is on the north side. Kingfisher wharf is the premises on the south side.

The large volume of air is in part to assist in cooling of the "important bits" ie the actual contacts and conductors. Everything has some resistance and when current flows, that creates heat. Heating of the conductors is the primary constraints that limits the current rating. The heat has to be disspated or the temperature rises without limit and things melt (and go on fire!). The heat dissipation to the outside world is aproximately proportional to the surface area of the containing thing. Make the enclosure just big enough to hold the contacts, and you either have to derate the switch or increase the amount expensive materials (copper etc). It is easier and cheaper to increase the amount of plastic and air. And it makes it easier for gorilla-fingered numpty boaters to grasp and turn. I suppose the only thing is that if the negative conductor is connected to hull via the boat's dc system, the postive end remains at high voltage relative to hull and touching the wiring coming into the switch or around the panels could be fatal. Whereas with double pole, the voltage is "floating" and touching any one conductor has no effect.

Yes this was the thrust of the video. But plenty of switches are dual rated ie for both dc and ac, and thus there is only one switch speed. But of course the dc rating will be less than the ac rating. But all this is only about what happens when you open the switch whilst current is flowing. If you don’t open the switch, the propensity for overheating and thus fire risk is not dependant on ac vs dc.

The arcing on the DC only arises due to inductance in the circuit. The heater in the video has a lot of coiled wire inside which I guess gives it plenty of inductance. I don’t know what the inductance of a solar panel itself is, not much I’d have thought. And the wiring is in straightish lines so again very little inductance. So I think the video rather over-eggs the issue as applicable to solar panels. Whilst of course it’s true that a switch rated for ac will have a different (much lower) current rating for dc, that is only an issue when interrupting a high current with significant inductance in the circuit. It has no bearing on the current rating whilst the switch is on. And if you only switch it off when the current is low (batteries fully charged, darkish etc) then again no problem. So yes of course the correct answer is to ensure that the dc rating of the switch is adequate, but in practice let’s not over scare-monger!

Not necessarily, only in terms of the application and hence the pressurisation. If they are adjacent to each other, one will be connected to pipework that gets hot when you run the hot tap (the expansion vessel), the other will be attached to pipework that remains cold (the accumulator).

It’s all a bit silly really. Gas work can be done by anyone on a leisure boat. Then some time later, the owners decide to live on the boat. So the previous “uncertified” work remains unexamined by a GS person (until the next BSS) in 3 years time or whatever). And how long g do you have to reside on the boat for it to become residential? A night? A week? A month? A year? Who knows.