Jess--

Interesting that they are now allowing end of garden moorings on non-residential land (but only for the landowner)

I've had 2 ssd drives fail on me (both were very heavily abused) the first an OCZ vertex 2 drive failed totally and without warning (the drive simply isn't recognised by anything) the second was a toshiba drive, this one gave me numerous warnings that the drive was nearing end of life for about a week before giving me one final warning that after the next power cycle write capability would be disabled, sure enough next time the system was powered on the drive was read only. (no data lost although windows will not boot from a read only drive) OCZ got themselves added to my "do not buy" list, reading online at the time a lot of people were having problems with their drives committing suicide. run as a main drive in heavy daily use (12-18 hours per day) I expect them to last a minimum of three years.

no, any form of permanent storage (SSD / HDD or flash drive) will be massively slower then RAM. also with an SSD you want to avoid using it for virtual memory if you can because constant re-writes on the drive can use the maximum number of write cycles earlier. with servers using SSD drives it's fairly common to still have a normal drives in the machine purely for massive storage (multi terabyte drives) and items that are constantly being written to (log files / virtual memory etc), generally the ssd drives are used for the operating system and installed programs but normal drives are used for data storage

that laptop used an I5 cpu @ 2.27ghz, while you can get faster I5 cpus I would be wary of fitting one in case the cooling or power lines cannot handle the faster / hotter chip, generally dell offer the faster chips as an option but did not on this model which makes me think it is close to it's limits on either power or cooling

I found that my tv (also cello) had a low level buzz (not a hum, more like the low throb of an engine running somewhere) on it's audio at all times which seemed to be caused by the backlight, I didn't get to the bottom of whether it was actually in the audio directly or was being induced onto the audio ground line. I ruled out ground loops by temporarily running the audio amp from batteries, which made the audio ground the only link anywhere between the amp and any other equipment. for me the simplest solution was to switch my audio feed from the tv to the computer since the computer was already handling everything, I have usb tv tuners setup allowing the computer to run as a full pvr system capable of recording & playing multiple channels at the same time so never actually use the tuner in the tv

have you considered adding one of the diesel water heaters from webasto / ebersplutter, in theory it could be fitted in tandem with your alde heating system to heat the same radiators / calorifier while minimising the amount of changes on the boat. unfortunately the Chinese & Russians don't seem to have copied the water heaters yet so there are no cheaper versions. Just a thought as it leaves you with 3 viable sources of heat including one that will still work when you're frozen in, have run out of diesel & gas and have flat batteries

Identifying the Owner / Keeper / User of the boat is irrelevant, from memory the CRT license is deemed to be held by the person legally responsible for the boat, they don't care who actually owns it

similar story around here, the only place I know of that runs a waste oil burner is a manufacturer of high end stainless exhaust systems (mainly for older Rolls-Royce cars), we use them because the quality of the exhausts they make is excellent and they will custom make them to fit around various non-standard bits we have under the car (full custom stainless actually works out cheaper than manufacturer original, and it's better)

depends on the person doing the barbecue

my reasoning for turbines facing each direction was so a barrier could be used (maximising height difference) and each turbine could be used at it's most efficient without adding complexity of variable blades or having to turn the turbine, the fewer moving parts the better (especially if you're dealing with a mixture of salt & freshwater that's carrying silt)

Not that I am aware of, may be worth bearing in mind that at the time it was designed (early 70s) there would have been no demand for the power it could produce due to plentiful coal & gas supplies (and power stations fuelled by them) and a large planned increase in the number & size of nuclear power stations.

wall with 2 turbines fitted (each with a gate sealing it off) turbine one set up to work on falling tide, turbine 2 set up to work on rising tide the gates are there so you only use a turbine when there is a big enough difference in water heights to generate usable power obviously you would scale up the idea and have multiple turbines to maximise output

Why only get power one way? running the turbines on the rising tide in addition to falling tide should provide almost double the power

or the ones that can't add the insulation because they don't own the property (and of course the landlord won't pay to have it done because they don't pay the heating bill)

I can't help thinking that once the majority of homes the remainder will be hit with massive price increases which will probably mean those that have properties that can't convert or that cannot afford the conversion costs will end up paying through the nose