Jess--

No gas expert here but had an odd one a few years ago with a gas stove on calor bottles when a burner was first opened it would flare up (to about 4 times its proper size) and then die down and work normally, a second burner would work perfectly, it would only do it if there had been no burners on / gas used for about 4 hours and it would do it on whichever burner was switched on first. turned out to be a faulty regulator that never fully shut off when it reached pressure on the low pressure side and kept slowly increasing the pressure on the gas system until it was close to the pressure in the bottle. the same fault could give the result you are seeing where the more pipework you have connected / switched on the more space it has to pressurise so you see more bubbles

the one that springs to mind was a lot colder, small welsh cottage sunk into a 45 degree hill on the west side of the valley. in mid summer the sun vanishes at 6pm, in winter you only saw it for about an hour a day. one of my regrets was not buying the place when it was offered to me for a ridiculously low price (I just hadn't got the money and the terms of the deal would have ruled out a mortgage)

I think the need for air would kill most methods as options since the air movement will carry heat with it. I too remember houses with no fridges (or electric or running water). Water was from a well (hand pumped) keeping things cool was done with a cupboard built into a north facing wall (2 foot thick stone wall) Heating / cooking was from a rayburn that burnt non-stop for 360 days a year

just an extra note, they work better if they are crammed full (thermal mass), and would fail dismally to keep a single bag of peas frozen. we have a smaller one previously used by donald russell (made by styropack) that we use for keeping takeaways hot while driving home and decided to try a bigger one for frozen foods. our first one we tried was made by custompak (all over ebay) and was very light / flimsy and not as dense as the styropack one, it did not perform well at all. we then phoned styropack and managed to get one of their larger boxes (somehow as a free sample) sent to us

have a look at some of the heavy duty polystyrene boxes that meat companies like donald russell use for delivery (fresh or frozen meat sent through normal courier companies). we use one (made by styropak) with 40mm walls and find that if filled with frozen food and stored in the cratch (during the height of summer) it will keep food frozen solid for just over a week as long as you are only opening it once a day.

muscle memory can really work against you in that situation

My best one was being told to slow down while sitting out of gear approaching the narrows / turn at sutton stop / hawkesbury I had watched a full length boat ahead of me go through the narrows and mess up the turn so decided to hang back and let them get sorted before going through the narrows myself so I had dropped out of gear and slowly drifted to a stop between the boats moored each side and was now just sitting not moving when a head popped out shouting slow down, I looked at them, their boat and my own boat and asked them if they want me to tie up alongside them as that was the only way I could go any slower, the head dissapeared.

I always assumed that the shape evolved to allow an even balance of the tiller above the bearing or bush while allowing a long handle pointing forwards for leverage, most other designs would put extra weight on one side of the bearing and increase wear

I suspect the solitary pair claims the area as their territory and will defend it whereas in a group the area is either nobodies territory or the territory of the family group

I'd never admit to going up and down that section a few times to get a feel for how the boat handled when doing stupid things rudder if anything has a touch too much on the front end, it will put itself on the towpath quite quickly if you leave it alone, although I find that it gives a good feel for what the boat is doing so I have ignored two chances to change it.

Not that I have ever found a nice wide and deep bit of water to test my boat on. but if I had....... I might have found that with enough power on that it is just starting to produce black smoke from the exhaust the boat will just manage 9 Mph and shows no sign of overheating after 20 minutes at that speed, Steering feels like it's on rails (I have never felt such a positive tiller on a narrowboat), You might want Geoff Capes steering though as the forces on the tiller increase massively with speed.

For the thames we always check here https://www.gov.uk/guidance/river-thames-conditions-closures-restrictions-and-lock-closures also if you have a look on there you will find instructions on how to subscribe to the notices via email (look under the keep up to date section)

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