Onewheeler

I often find that the HD freeview is worse than the standard version on our domestic TVs. You can see the quantisation of the colour levels much more clearly in HD in large areas of fairly uniform colour - such as areas of flesh (no, not that sort of programme - faces!!!) I suspect there's been a compromise between colour detail and spatial resolution.

When I recently bought a telly for the girl-child's flat, there seemed to be a lot of 1080p devices out there with 720p tuners - "HD ready" as the adverts put it. Would be fine with a HD external tuner. I've not looked at 12 V TVs. My attitude is (a) a TV is a waste of space ( buy the cheapest available and © if for a boat, I'd buy a 230 V one and use the invertor. Martin/

I have a top and bottom door in the garage after scrapping my old Squirrel a few months ago. They were the only bits not knackered. You're welcome to them if any use, can be collected from Gloucestershire or Oxford. Martin/

Looks like the one we threw away recently. Fine for a while, but the geared bits which rotated the wheels had the metallurgical properties of hard cheese. For less than a tenner though, worth a try.

I keep half a sheet of this: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/spill-absorbents/7716395/ lining the engine bilge. It makes cleaning it easy and one can see where drips are coming from . We get through less than one sheet a year so works out cheap. Martin/

If the battery charger is plugged into the invertor it might get hot. For a while anyway.

In France everything goes over the side. There are almost no sani-stations as we would know them. Considering that they are getting quite environmentally conscious (lots of recycling etc) I find it amazing that it continues. I believe much the same in the rest of the mainland waterways, although some places discourage a discharge in marinas (posssibly for the avoidance of dredging). Martin/

Keeping it aerobic is the answer. We took out our tank [1] in favour of a portapotti a while ago but while we had it, there were two breather pipes, both 25 mm diameter, spaced as far apart as feasible to encourage air flow. Never use loo blue (or anything else). Never had any smells from it. Allegedly the pipe can get porous to smells over time, but ours seemed good after ten years. Martin/ [1] 200 l holding tank available to collector. 600 x 900 x 400 h mm. PM if interested.

My DAB "preamp" (not sure if it does more than that, I have a feeling it is a receiver in its own right to act as a DAB adaptor) is powered by a dedicated connection to a socket on the back of the radio. I use a small DAB magmount (about fifteen quid from Halfords, outrageous but couldn't be bothered doing anything more homemade) with the cable run through a mushroom vent. Radio is something gaudy by Pie and Ear also from Halfords. The FM aerial is connected via an isolating capacitor as it's not a magmount. A bit of chocolate block is your friend for botching the isolating capacitor. 100 pF should do the job. Martin/

On the Thames diesel is expensive other than from an outlet in Reading. I fill jerry cans with red diesel a farm suppliers, no messing with "heating or propulsion". A jiggle syphon is easier and cleaner than pouring it out, one just needs to practice a sort of action to get the flow going. Less than six quid from Screwfix. Martin/

Another thing to consider is the hull design. Our Beta 38 achieves within a gnat's whisker of its rated full power RPM (3000) with a matched prop, but the boat is trying to plane at that speed (IIRC it's about 11 or 12 km/h), the wash is horrific and it drinks diesel like it's going out of fashion. Not much point in going too large. We cruise comfortably at 9 km / h at 2000 rpm with a bit in hand for when it's needed. (15.7 m boat with a fairly deep draft). Propcalc.xls is a very illuminating spreadsheet to play with, daresay it's still around on t'interwibbly.

Max hypothetical power ~ 500 A V^3 where A is intercept area of blades and V fluid velocity. All SI units. Unlikely to approach half of that in practice. Not many boats will see more that 0.5 m/s flow most of the time. Do the sums and then buy a solar panel.

38 will be fine if your prop is well matched. A properly sized prop transforms a boat. You may not be able to use full revs for an extended period on either engine unless your cooling system (i.e. skin tank) is adequate, although it is sometimes nice to be able to wind it up to "number 11" for a few seconds...

Yarp, would have wandered down to say hello but was busy holding the bow line of the bloke single-handing in front of you! We're now tied up at Wallingford.

When I were a lad t'Thames was full of floating johnnies. Much bigger than your gudgeon.

We replaced the old BMC 1.8 a few years ago with a Beta 38. Very, very happy with it. The Beta was almost an exact drop-in fit, only needed a very small modification to the engine bearers so the engine fitting only cost a few hundred. Another nice thing was that Beta took our PRM gearbox from the old engine, repainted it and gave it an overhaul and fitted it to the new engine, saving £1k or so. Beta are a very nice company to deal with. The new engine starts much more easily and is substantially quieter than the BMC. It's also easy to service. Torque / power characteristics were similar too so (if the old prop had been the right size) we wouldn't have needed to reprop. (As it was, the old prop was badly matched anyway so we did fit a new one).

To be fair, the Spirabase one was bent holding a 35 te boat when a large peniche went past...

I've had some experience in using Spyrabase ground anchors for mooring <<http://www.spyrabase.co.uk/product_info.php?ID=10502>l, rather than the helical shaped bar ones <http://www.spyrabase.co.uk/product_info.php?ID=10018>). (We've also managed to bend one of them!) I found these Spirafix ones while googling around - wonder if anyone has experience of them? <http://www.spirafix.com/>They look as if they might go into difficult ground more easily. Martin/

I looked at buying an A++ vs an A+ 230 V fridge. Not much less power consumption, a lot more expensive. The difference would easily pay for bigger solar panels. Martin/

Tell her not to believe them, they're all feckin' liars. Farmer Dai /

No. 1 son's favourite programme when small was a hot wash. Strange boy...

Just sharing my experience of fitting a 230 V fridge to a boat in which I have a share, in case it's helpful to anyone. After much debate I bought a Indesit TFAA10 Fridge with Freezer Compartment, A+ Energy Rating from John Lewis (available earlier this year from several suppliers including Tescos and the Co-op). It is fitted to a 24 V battery system with a Sunshine Power 1 kW continuous / 2 kW peak PSW invertor (http://www.sunshinesolar.co.uk/prodshow/1000W___24V_Pure_Sine_Wave_Sunshine_Power_Inverter/VP100024.html) which draws a quiescent current (not checked) of 0.375 A. The fridge operates very well, is very quiet and very frugal on power. Mean consumption at 230 V in warm - hot French weather is 330 - 400 Wh / day, i.e. a mean consumption of up to ~ 16 W (plus of course the standing invertor current), and an "on" consumption of about 65 - 70 W. That's with the thermostat set to its mid setting, which is fine for ice for G&T / pastis, and keeping the contents cool. Ambient temperatures in the galley were in the range 20 - 35 C most of the time. The boat runs on two 100 W solar panels in series when not connected to shore power or sailing. In practice the panels easily keep pace with the current consumption, basically invertor, fridge, lighting and charging of small devices. Over five days tied up the batteries were easily charged by mid morning, even when the weather was cloudy. Panels are semi-flexible type bought from Photonic Universe (http://www.photonicuniverse.com), not the cheapest but they had good reviews and seem well-constructed. They also arrived very quickly (in UK) after ordering. MPPT controller is a Victron 75/15 which gives us capacity to double up with two more panels in series / parallel if we need the extra power (we won't). The panels are mounted flat on the wheelhouse roof. Martin/ nb Boden + 1/6 oil tanker L'Héritage.

(ps is that James's brother?)

The spreadsheet calculator on the Victron web site is helpful once you've worked out what's watt (sorry!) I recently fitted two x 100 W panels with a Victron 75/15 controller (in a 24 V system) and they run beautifully (especially in French summer sunshine!) Stangely, the smaller Victron MPPT controllers are nowhere near as silly a price as most other Victron stuff even if they don't come with metering as standard. Martin/

A well-silly price. I've recently fitted a slightly smaller invertor (1 kW cont / 2 kW peak) from Sunshine Solar http://www.sunshinesolar.co.uk/with a much lower quiescent current, very good it is and their range is much cheaper. It also seems to cope well with very warm engine rooms. Martin/