Jess--

I suspect the biggest delay is just not being able to get the steel (which has probably delayed a build or two before yours). we've just ordered some steel sheet (only corrugated roofing) from our usual suppliers, normally we would expect delivery in 8-10 days with everything rolled, cut, shaped & coated to our specification, this time it will be a minimum of 6-8 weeks. They usually get their steel from Tata but they closed their order books in april and have not re-opened them so they are having to get their stock from Italy & South Korea. the shipment our job will be made from is already over a month overdue.

there is no sensible way of using a speed limiter (or even worse a rev limiter) on a narrow boat as there is no way of reliably measuring the speed of a narrowboat through the water (the narrow / shallow nature of canals messes up the prop in the water type counters) using gps etc would only give you a speed over ground reading with no account for any possible flow on a river (imagine trying to navigate downstream on a river flowing at 5mph and finding that you can't raise the engine off tickover because you are already moving faster than the 4mph limit)

I have an older generator with what looks like the same engine (chinese no-name copy of the yanmar L100). red lever should be pushed to the right (it will click into position) then it should fire straight up on battery if like mine you don't or cant use electric start then you will need to find the decompressor lever (usually above your picture) pull the pull start gently until compression stops you put the decompressor lever down pull on the pull start and it should go to stop the generator push the little red tab down to the right of the red lever (the red lever will drop back and the engine will die) if you still can't get it to go follow the fuel line though, if there is nothing after the injector pump (the black bit just above your red lever) you may have the same problem as I had (detailed here)

from previous photo's aswell as completely lacking any form of swim at the rear it didn't sit very deep in the water at all, so on top of having to cut the front off and half of the back (to construct swims) you would end up having to use an egg whisk instead of a propeller or ballast it enough to drop it to a sensible depth to use a better prop at the cost of freeboard (if possible with skin fittings etc)

The canal width & depth will make a huge difference to how fast your boat can go. for ours (45 foot cruiser stern with fairly long swims) the max on the ashby canal was 3mph (13-1400 rpm), pushing the revs higher actually slowed us down. for contrast the same boat on deep water (thames going upstream) the same 13-1400 rpm gave 4.5mph and pushing the revs up to 2900 gave 9.5mph (we couldn't push higher on the revs as that was as fast as the engine could turn the prop, trying to push faster didnt increase revs but gave black smoke). as the flow was low on the thames at the time you could probably add an extra 1 - 1.5 mph onto the speed for speed through the water

I haven't read the whole thread yet but if they cannot offer different types of licence (CC & boat with mooring) then they will (on paper) just offer the one type but offer a discount to boats with a recognised home mooring

you would think that most marinas would accept 2 similar boats with the same owner being swapped (never both boats on the mooring) provided they had proof that both boats were licensed / insured / valid bssc etc. But thinking about it I wonder if it may present them problems when CRT do license checks and find what appears to be an extra boat. I also wonder what the implications are of the wrong boat being on the EOG mooring

I think that the avg eirp part is aimed more at data comms where even though a transmitter is in use it is only actually transmitting for tiny periods of time (i.e. transmitter active only transmits for 250ms per second) rather than voice comms (ignoring ssb) where if the transmitter is active it transmits for the entire time. I haven't done the calcs yet (as I'm not currently on the air) but I suspect that my home antenna setup needs nothing doing thanks to it being 40 foot in the air and about 30 feet away from the nearest part of the house even with my max power of 100w (legal limit 400w equipment capability 100w)

Just a quick note about the OP's surging (not holding steady revs) could it be as simple as it being time for an oil change? with our engine (lpws4) which was only meant to have 100 hours between changes we found that from 85 hours onwards it wouldn't hold our usual cruising rpm, started as being barely noticeable and slowly worsened as the hours went towards 100. By the 100 hours our cruising speed of 1250 rpm would vary by about 25 rpm each way (1225 - 1275)

On ours (on the last boat) the only light appeared to be to indicate flame failure. ours was a 29XX (I dont remember the last 2 digits) but I do remember that the 4 switches had to be in specific positions for it to operate. Luckily I made a note of their settings before selling the boat (the new owner has asked for the settings once so far after children flicked the switches) If yours has the same bank of switches as ours did (pictured below / ignore the extra little black button by the gas knob) the settings we used were... switch positions on the boiler for normal running (from left to right) Down (N) Up (1 arrow) Down (12) Down (N)

I have run a couple of the chinese diesel air heaters without any major issues for the last couple of winters, I am using them in a location where carbon monoxide isn't a concern rather than on a boat, for boat use you would need to replace (at a minimum) fuel line, burner air intake pipe and exhaust / exhaust pipe. the combined water / air heaters are using the same burner & fan assembly but have added a water loop into the heat exchanger so they give out less hot air and a little bit of heat into the water, from comments of other people that have the combined versions the heat output on water seems to be around the 0.75-1.25kw range depending on hi / low settings. The chinese heaters are a copy of the russian (planar) heaters which are a copy of the Eberspacher heaters (the 3kw chinese heater is a clone of the Eberspacher Airtronic D2, and the 5kw heaters are a clone of the Airtronic D4 (note the chinese ratings are 1kw higher than eberspachers ratings), avoid the chinese 7 or 8kw heaters as so far all they are is the 5kw heater with everything over driven, so while they do get near the 7kw output they also eat glowplugs and motor bearings at an alarming rate. Power usage is highest during startup & shutdown as that is when the glow plug is active, peak will be around 12-13 Amps, once it's burning and the plug shuts off power usage (for the 5kw models) will drop to around 2-3A (low) to 4-5A (high) (power usage is roughly 50:50 between the fan and the fuel pump so changes to the mixture like I have made will affect power usage) The only problems I have had with them is the fuel pump failing (clicking away but not shifting fuel), but I knew I was probably going to get this as a result of running from kerosene (heating oil) rather than diesel (1 failure between the 2 heaters halfway through their 2nd winter) 1 of the pair is running on stock settings and just sits running constantly on low from November thru to April. The 2nd one has a home built add-on module fitted which makes it act as you would expect a domestic heater to (switch on (Hi) if the temp is below target, go to low if temp is at target and shut down if it's over target), this makes the 2nd one a prime candidate for sooting up since it goes through many more startup / shutdown cycles than expected, as a result I modified the fuel / air settings (pump pulse rate & fan speed) so it's running the absolute leanest mixture (to the point you can hear it flame-out on low between each fuel pump pulse), a lot of people warn against leaning them out but I have never run into any problems and after 2 winters that heater is still silver inside the exhaust pipe.

On our first trip with our last boat (from brokers to mooring) we found that every time we went into gear we were getting less & less engine revs, after getting through braunston we pulled into the side and lifted the engine hatch because the full movement of the lever was barely getting us anything higher than tickover. the cable was moving, the arm on the engine was moving but was floppy. tightening the nut holding the arm onto the shaft stopped it being floppy and restored engine control. apologies for vague description but it was 6 years ago and it never needed touching again in 4 years of ownership (and as far as I know the new owner has had no problems). so it may be that it takes 25 years of normal use for the nut to work loose.

I had issues with chrome struggling with youtube videos, firefox & internet explorer (now edge) played them perfectly. after some hunting around I found that chrome & youtube try and use a new network protocol which some routers / network interfaces don't like. if you go into chrome://flags (type it into the address bar) look for "Experimental QUIC Protocol" and disable it you may find that everything works perfectly with hardware acceleration turned back on.

A good source of hessian sacks if anyone is heading up the GU is one of the units that back onto the canal in Hemel (bridge 153). Smith's Coffee company obviously deal with large amounts of coffee beans and don't seem to object to passing boaters waving at them through the back door (which is usually open in nice weather) and asking for some empty sacks

Not sure how I was exploiting the musicians. I had no objections to buying the original CD's I had no objections to paying PRS fees to be allowed to play the music in public (until the fees went from around £1500 to almost half a million) I did object to being charged thousands each year for the convenience of using copies of the original cd's we had already purchased in mp3 format (MCPS) Had it been permitted (even at a higher price than spotify premium) the only cost that would have been eliminated would have been the MCPS costs. instead of purchasing new cd's we would have been paying for spotify, and in a way it may have helped some artists since there would be an accurate record of what we were playing rather than the usual "current top 3 manufactured boy/girl bands" being assumed to get the majority of our plays

By the same token, how do you know that? Spotify's terms used to specifically exclude public or commercial use (and probably still does), I know this because we wanted to use spotify when they first launched and found that we couldn't. it would have made for a simple upgrade for the music source we were using at the time. we were using a laptop loaded with mp3's backed up by a cardboard box full of the original cd's the mp3's were copied from, we had to run licenses from PRS (Performing Rights) for the honour of having music that could be heard by the public and another license from MCPS (Mechanical Copyright Protection Society) to cover our copying from CD to MP3. If we had been able to use spotify it would have eliminated the MCPS bill for us and saved a few thousand each year. We ended up dropping music altogether when PRS insisted on trying to charge us based on annual footfall of our location, since we were on skegness beach at the time they worked this out to be be around 3 million people (based on tourism figures) and presented us with a bill for the year ahead that cost more than a 4 bedroomed house with a couple of acres of land.

Our house chimney went up last night (I will admit we knew it was likely as it has not been swept in years and in our defence we also know the chimney is sound and well able to withstand a fire) embers were flying well into the woods that border our land and we had a very nice cone of orange flames out the top so even though there was no risk to the house we had to put the fire out rather than letting it burn out. we ended covering the fire with ashes and spraying them with a mist of water to send steam up the chimney, this put the chimney fire out in around 10 minutes, no mess, and after about an hour we shook the ash through the fire and let it relight (the fire not the chimney). looking in daylight the only thing found is that the top inch of our chimney pot looks a little scorched.

Grants lock has (or had) a sizeable garden to the rear, certainly large enough for a very well attended wedding party in the early 80's getting vehicles there was a different matter though as it involved crossing several fields as there was no official vehicle access (the tracks were nice and straight from vehicles coming in and anything but straight from vehicles that left), I note that it now has an official access route

The other thing to look at with MP3's (just as important as the bitrate) is the sampling frequency. with digital sounds (including CD) a large amount are sampled at 44.1 khz meaning anything above 22.05khz cannot be accurately recorded (losing above 22khz isn't too much of a problem as it's beyond hearing for a large amount of the population) but it can produce interesting alias sounds down to around 16khz. using higher sampling rates such as 96khz doesn't remove the problem but does take any possible effect well beyond our hearing ranges (min reproducable frequency 48khz / aliases from around 30khz) for 128k mp3's they tend to run into trouble with anything above 16khz and a lot of encoders deal with this by applying a low-pass filter to remove (or seriously lower) anything above around 15 khz for higher bitrates some encoders remove the low-pass filter (although quite a few have been found to leave the filter on regardless of bitrate or sampling freq). For low bitrate sounds (where cramming as much as possible into the smallest storage is needed) I have found that AAC+ outperforms mp3 (i.e. 96k AAC+ sounds as good or better than 128k mp3)

With a vehicle we had the regulator on the back of the alternator fail and would randomly decide that 10-11v was fully charged, hard to diagnose since there were never any warning lights as the alternator was working and of course when checked with a meter it was at times when it was putting out it's full voltage (night time driving with headlights flicking between bright white & dim yellow was interesting, used to get flashed a lot when people assumed dip beam turning white was high beam going on). Ended up doing a (temporary) frankenstein fix with a regulator from a completely different type of alternator, It was still frankensteined and working perfectly when we sold the vehicle 10 years later.

In our area it tends to be car tyres, 1 every 20 ish feet on the side of a back road for a mile or so, our guess has always been a van driven slowly along the road with someone in the back chucking tyres out of the side door. The other one we have seen a few times is neat piles of shredded green leaves, plant stems and roots, all nicely compostable but with the smell it's a bit of a giveaway so I can understand why it was dumped well away from the source.

we used to run one of the old range rovers (classic model before they started fitting airbag suspension etc) and that thing was damn near perfect in the snow (moved and stopped perfectly) as long as you knew how to drive it, we let someone else drive it in the snow and they decided that snow meant kicking in all of the diff locks which worked perfectly until they tried to turn the first corner and they very gracefully pirouetted down the road, the difflocks had forced 3 wheels to slip when they turned, once 3 wheels were sliding on ice & snow the 4th had no chance. To bring things back on topic, the range rover was lpg converted, any temperatures below -5 could freeze the regulator (or evaporator) if you were heavy footed before the engine was fully up to temperature, this showed up as stalling the engine. and temps of -10 or below would freeze the gas tank with use (gradual loss of power until you were reduced to a very rough misfiring tickover).