Jess--

Some things just don't need encrypting and with newer browsers throwing a fit it just makes things difficult. one example I ran into recently was a remote temperature sensor, you go to the site and it shows the current temperature and a graph for the previous 24 hours, no login forms / no scripts / nothing but raw html (not even an image file) now with browsers refusing to connect I either have to work out how the hell to set up https on an arduino within the 5k of memory that is unused or scrap a few dozen sensors and replace them with something a lot more expensive & power hungry

Our experience of towing a powered narrowboat (with dead engine & small rudder) was that breasted worked best (to be honest we just hooked centre lines and pulled it tight). our attempts at towing with a single (long or short) line were hilarious failures until we lashed a long gangplank to the swan neck giving a nice flat rudder (more of an oar) with a lot of travel to either side, then it needed a bit of muscle to steer but was actually very controllable.

Your inverter has the capability of totally emptying those batteries (100% to 0%) in 90 minutes or less (and with lithiums you never want to be doing that) those solar panels (under perfect conditions) will need 9-10 hours of full sun to recharge the batteries assuming the losses through the mppt controller aren't too high. this may work during the summer, during spring and autumn you will struggle, during winter you will have more chance of seeing elvis perform live than getting your batteries to full charge. When I previously said that members on here were charging from their engines I meant fairly hefty diesel engines with alternators giving 70-150A of 12v output which on paper would be capable of charging your batteries in 3-6 hours assuming the batteries can take that current at all stages of charging (in reality it would probably be nearer 5-9 hours) The power outputs from outboards are tiny as all they are really designed to do is recharge the battery used to start them, I would guess at most being under 10A output (based on the wiring thickness they seem to use) and that would probably only be produced with the engine running at over half of it's top speed (not at a little over tickover which is what you'll be doing on the canals), Assuming you could get the full 10A you would need to run the outboard for 40 hours to recharge your batteries (that you can empty in 90 minutes). Another things to bear in mind with outboards is Fuel, Petrol is a much more dangerous fuel than diesel and has much tighter controls on how it can be stored and used on boats, as a result you will find that there are very few places on the canal network that you can refuel directly so every bit of fuel you use you will have to carry from a petrol station to the boat. Another thing springs to mind... You show a shower in your layout.... where are you getting your hot water? Most boats have a hot water tank that is heated with waste heat from the diesel engine (and in some cases can also dump that heat into radiators to heat the boat). if you're looking at an outboard then this option is out. forget electric water heating unless you are on a mains hookup this leaves you with 3 other options 1. hot water heated by stove back boiler (do you really want to have to light a stove to get hot water in a heatwave like last summer?) 2. Diesel water heater (webasto / eberspacher etc) 3. LPG water heater (will hammer gas bottles) Any of the options will mean a fair amount of modification to the boat you have shown (adding water tanks / gas bottle lockers / diesel tanks) As for the boat... I'll be blunt... There's a reason it didn't sell at auction. it looks to have been designed to sit at the end of someones garden as a spare bedroom permanently plugged into the mains.

For the electrical needs you have listed I doubt you would have enough roof space for enough solar, running anything Mains powered will require an inverter, these have their own losses (a good one might only lose 10% of the power through it) and also hammer batteries due to the high current use, powering a 1kw item through an inverter will be pulling around 100A from the batteries. You will find that most people on here / on boats rely on running the engine to do the bulk of their charging with solar allowing them a few days of not running at a time, yes there are some 100% electric and solar boat owners on here but they tend to be long widebeam boats with 6-8 times the roof area that you would have with a 30 foot narrow beam boat, they also tend to be running more expensive lithium battery setups which are more tolerant of the usage than the more usual lead acid (car battery) type.

I looked at the Burslem one but couldn't find any way of getting the view in the photo from the canal (bakery to the left houses to the right), also the date of est 1828 (or 1826) didn't seem to fit as the Burslem one pre-dated either date.

Silly question maybe... was the engine running when you tried the horn? The horn on our boat would either not work (just clicking) or give a quiet strangled squawk if the engine wasn't running, with the engine running the horn worked perfectly. for us it was a combination of an older starter battery* (the horn was the only thing apart from the starter running from it) and marginal wiring thickness. We just accepted that the engine had to be running to use the horn as we couldn't think of many situations where we would be on the back of the boat, need to use the horn and not have the engine running. *The starter battery finally gave up at 29 years old... the day we sold the boat (of course we fitted a new one when they came to pick up the boat)

A few years ago while we were still running fairground rides we looked into taking card payments, the best deal we could find would have swiped 30% of our most common transaction as it's minimum fee for a debit card or 80% as the minimum fee for credit (amex would have cost us money to take). Oddly we decided to carry on taking cash only even though that meant changing up frequently, we used to change a few hundred in pound coins at various times of day with the arcade next to us (it helped keep their cashboxes floated), and then in the evening we used to change up all of our £5 & £10 notes with them for £20s, again this was useful for them as those notes were commonly needed for change. Then every week - 10 days (never predictable) we would take a carrier bag full of £20s to the bank and get charged £15 for paying in cash (but since the amount was well into the thousands the £15 charge barely registered).

I have meddled with a pair of 10kw solis inverters (+ 24kw of batteries) and agree that the 5 minute reporting is terrible, however the data format used between the solis inverters and their dataloggers (which they use to upload data to soliscloud) is known, with the format being known it can be intercepted and read in near realtime as long as I am happy to build my own monitoring solution. snapshot below from one of the 2 solis inverters I have access to (not my electric bill thankfully) Edited to add.. these solis inverters were installed in Dec of last year but are being replaced later this year with a new single solis 20kw hybrid inverter as a pair of 10kw hybrid inverters really don't play nicely with each other.

We were looking at Growatt or Solis inverters

All they are really interested in for exporting is that your inverter complies with standards (will shut down if the grid goes down so it doesn't fry people working on lines etc) and that the final connection from your inverter to the grid is made properly. our plan is to fit all of the panels and the inverter ourselves and get a qualified sparkie in for a final check and to make the final mains connections for sign-off. The 5kw system is what we looked at as that will cover all of our daylight usage for 6 months of the year (exporting a little), cover most ( >70%) of our usage for another 3 months, and some ( <50%) of our usage for the final 3 months (averaging out for solar covering around 75% of our daylight power usage) We did look at battery storage but adding that into the mix didn't really work since most of our usage is during the day while the sun is shining, battery storage is aimed more at households that are out at work during most of the day allowing the battery to charge and be discharged later in the evening when everyone is back from work, for us working from home with the majority of our usage between 10 am & 4 pm we just couldn't make the sums work for battery storage unless we made the whole setup at least double the size (quadrupling the costs because of the cost of batteries & different inverter types needed)

recently I've been monitoring our energy usage as we're planning to move and self install a decent amount of solar when we do (so to know how much solar to go for we need to know our usage). currently the only non-electric thing in the house is oil for heating I used our winter usage as the worst case and came up with us using an average of 16.08 KWh daily (13.88 at day rate / 2.2 at night rate), with servers running here we can never get below 250w usage Then I looked up the average annual output from various 5 kw solar installations (real world figures not manufacturers) then knocked 10% off just so that I knew I was underestimating and ended up with a figure of 12.42 KWh per day our final figures showed that with a 5kw system we would drop our usage down to around 4KWh per day average with the solar system with breakeven on the solar system being reached in just over 2 years at the current electric prices (expected price rises only make the breakeven time shorter) Below is a snapshot of our current usage (daily figures are from midnight / weekly figures are from midnight sun/mon) the top (large) figure is our cost for usage right now if we keep the same usage for 1 hour (25p) and the next figure below it is the current power usage (660w) you can clearly see on the graph the time we got up this morning and how many cups of tea we've had. the overnight peaks are heating boiler (pumps etc), fridge, & freezer.

If it helps our lpws4 idled in neutral at 1000 rpm and dropped to 900 in gear, at 1000rpm it was smooth (or as smooth as a diesel ticking over gets), at 900 it was rough, everything shook or rattled throughout the boat and we eventually found that running for long periods at 900 was undoing the upper nuts on one of our engine mounts (2 hours at 900rpm to release the nut & locknut + 1 hour to take the locknut off the thread completely and leave the bottom nut dancing on the top of the thread). After finding that and replacing engine mounts etc we always knocked it back up above 900 rpm for ticking over in gear (not as far as 1000 but just enough to get rid of the shake)

My dad is still running an old nokia 6310i (and probably will be until they can't connect to any network), about 15 years ago I grabbed a whole load of 6310i spares (literally every part of the phones) so I had enough parts to build 4 complete phones if needed. whenever he breaks his phone I can have it rebuilt for him for about 20 minutes work. So far he's needed a new battery (he was down to 3 days battery life, with one of my replacements he's back up to 2-3 weeks) and a new case & screen (after someone dropped a car on his phone).

Joining in on the useless apple device theme. we used iphones from the 1st version through to the 4S and apart from a few niggles were generally happy with them then 18 months later we suddenly found that facetime wouldn't work because apple had lost a patent infringement case and updated facetime to avoid the patent, they updated facetime for any model above the 4s but didn't release the software update for the 4 & 4s even though at the launch facetime was a big selling point of that model. Then we found that support for our ipad mini's were no longer getting updates for the operating system which initially was not a problem but over time got into the position that services need a newer app version, the newer app version needs the newer operating system which cant be installed. these days the only thing the ipad can do reliably is connect to our camera dvr. In contrast I have a laptop that is in daily use that is now 16 years old it was bought brand new as a cheapie dell from tescos (I had been going through the dell site choosing what options I wanted when the equivalent machine was at tesco with the only difference being glossy vs matt screen) it can (and has) run any windows operating system up to windows 10 or any number of linux systems. over the 16 years the only thing I have done was to install a high capacity battery taking it from 4 hours life at full load to 8 hours. Windows 11 is the first windows version that is actively excluding older hardware from being used (based on CPU requirements and the need for a trusted platform module) and I think that when they drop support for windows 10 there will be a lot of machines that either get scrapped or switched over to running linux

I was going to suggest just sticking a changeover switch to allow switching the solar panels directly to the immersion instead of the solar controller (assuming under 1kw solar) for a manual solution

to an immersion heater voltage does not need to be at a fixed level (just within sensible limits) as it is a purely resistive load for example all of the list below should power a 1 kw immersion heater perfectly 25v@40A 50v@20A 100v@10A 200v@5A 240v@4.17A with solar controllers using tracking to get the highest wattage out of the panels they may just dump the panel voltage straight through

I always assumed that the higher Batt reading on the tracer panel was due to one of 2 things 1. it is reading the voltage as it's trying to charge the batts so may be a higher reading 2. it is reading the voltage from it's side of the shunt (assuming there is some form of a shunt in the tracers for them to measure current)

our best one was while travelling on our own boat with friends on another boat, both boats grounded. we were the 2nd boat so we jumped off to get the first boat free leaving our own boat grounded. After 10 mins we came back to our own boat to find that we had jumped off leaving the boat with then engine running at tickover in reverse gear and with no ropes to the towpath, luckily when we ground a boat it really is grounded.

My guess would have been frozen pipe (split or pushed off fitting) defrosts and fills the bilges slowly (bonus points if it's the bilge pump pipe) nobody notices that the whole thing is sitting lower in the water than usual until one end is on the bottom at which point the other end sinks quicker and it makes the news

lol no there was no increase in weight as the leds replaced existing leds or plastic trim pieces (if anything it was slightly lighter due to removal of led lenses at the rear) That Mini I ended up selling as spares after a leaf falling from a conker tree crashed it into a lake (sucked into prop and stopped the motor), it did fly again after it was dried out but had some intermittent issues where it would sometimes shut down all motors in mid air or randomly start all motors at full throttle even though the drone was turned off (in short not safe to be used anywhere) I replaced it with the Mini SE (Mini brains with Mini 2 motors, body & battery) with the Mini and Mini SE you have to be careful as they are so close to the weight limit, if you fly either with prop guards on then you are over the limit if you fly a Mini SE with the batteries from the original Mini you are either on the limit or 0.1g over

The mavic mini was built specifically to fall into the sub 250g drones category (and has labels all over it stating that it is 249g) the stock mini I agree you would struggle to judge orientation at the distance I was when chasing the train however mine was slightly modified with a high brightness red led replacing the stock rear lamp and a high brightness white led mounted in the front (in place of a bit of trim) which made it a doddle to know it's heading (red light = flying away / white light = flying towards / red & white = flying sideways / flashing red & white = falling out of the sky)

My illegal flight was at 50 feet above open crop fields and was really my test of if everything goes wrong how far can I keep control and get this thing back from or ditch it safely. you will note that for the video I said that I was at my limits for each end of the video for vision as for the overflying in the video it was legal at the time and still is until Jan 2023 as the mavic mini drops into the A1 restrictions The changes from Jan 2023 will mean that the UK no longer recognises EU drone class marks and any drone bearing EU marks (or no marks) can only be flown in the A3 category which rules out flying pretty much anywhere other than empty open fields. I predict a lot of small drones going up for sale early next year to be replaced with identical drones with the new UK markings (or a lot of people ordering replacement shells for their drones that have the new correct marking)

Just to add NEVER launch a drone from the roof of a metal boat (or from reinforced concrete) the metal will give the inbuilt compass a false reading, but once the drone is in the air the false reading is replaced with a true reading which causes problems because the change in reading disagrees with what the gyros and gps are telling the drone is happening (compass says I'm turning from north to east, gyro says I'm not turning etc gps says I'm flying west) This is the biggest cause of flyaways that I know of.

Don't go for one of the cheaper mavic mini clones, I have yet to see a review of one that comes close to the stability & quality of the dji product For most people just the plain mini will do the job, it's control system will work well beyond the legal flying limits (400 feet above ground & direct line of sight between flyer & drone), I tested mine for range over open fields and found that I still had full control and video at 2 miles out and more importantly still had the battery life for the drone to fly back and land. if I'm flying in an unfamiliar area I set the return height to 350 feet before taking off, then once in the air use the drone & camera to judge the height of the tallest obstacle and reset my return height to clear it by at least 50 feet. The auto return feature works well, if signal is lost it will hold position for a short while (I cant remember if it's 30 secs or 1 minute) before climbing to a preset altitude (set by you) and flying back in a straight line (if it's already above the set altitude it will stay at the altitude it's flying at). for the attached video I had already flown 2 batteries just hovering in position waiting (the train was 45 minutes late) then once I start moving I was flying in sport mode which gives a top speed of around 30mph (flying backwards / diagonally trying to keep the shot and keep the drone above fields / trees), at the start of the video the drone was as far as I could see it away and 95 feet above ground, by the end it was as far as I could see in the opposite direction and 397 feet above ground (400 feet legal limit) video (assuming embed works) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSL2ty9Jvjo

With propane you can freeze the tanks if you take a lot of gas quickly. I used to work in hot air ballooning (which uses massive amounts of propane) and it was fairly common to need to empty flight tanks in the middle of winter prior to them being tested, In cold weather even with the tanks using a liquid take off (dip tube) we would freeze the tanks before we had taken 60% out. we'd start with a 30 foot flame and after about 10 minutes it would be down to less than a foot because the temperature of the gas had dropped to the point where you just had no pressure left. For cold weather flying it was normal to spike the propane tanks with nitrogen shortly before to ensure that the tanks had the needed pressure to run the burners properly.