Oddfellow

Only redundancy. You already have a battery charger in the Sterling unit. Another would conflict with the Sterling unit if you were to use them together.

BSS..... Normally dependant on boat and what's installed. An electric dinghy will cost a lot less than a 40ft liveaboard.

Little chance really. It takes a great deal of money to start something like this from scratch as I can attest. Real profits come from volume and that's not easy to achieve with any speed unless you have very deep pockets. But as it's very-much a service business, you need the quality of service to go with quality boats and all of this comes at immense cost and that is before you factor in the cost of a riverside base to operate from. There are no remaining viable yards at Oulton Broads apart from the old TopCraft site which is now private and under new ownership. Everything else that way has long since been flattened. The old site at Thorpe that I rented is barely viable and needs huge investment, the Sandersons site will be lost to new development it seems and there's just little real financial incentive to convert an old yard that's turn private back into hire. Clive is, of course, an exception and quite mad but as he says too, it's not been straight forward even for someone with his resources and experience. There's a reason there are fewer and fewer yards and that's cost. Hire fleets are VERY hard work and very expensive to build and maintain. Been there, done it and lost my children growing up in the process.

Sterling may be an English company, but nothing is made here. I have been through countless Sterling products in fleet and vowed never to install another one. Of course, stuff in hire gets hammered and mistreated, but the failure rate just after the warranty period was enough for me to declare Sterling inverters as a future "do not fit" to my boats.

I recommend these: I fitted them to all the fleet boats. https://www.sunshinesolar.co.uk/Item/LCHA20A

And it needs clearing out pronto.

Anything you want to know about it, just PM me. Which window leaks and who's fixing the leak? Trevor Preece is the only man I would recommend unless it's a leak between the frame and the boat when there are a few more options. I can't recall if we had them all out or not when it was painted.

Whilst I hold a British Marine Electrical Technician certificate, I no longer work in this environment so can advice only. DO NOT PUT THE ZIG UNIT IN YOUR BOAT. PUT IT ON EBAY AND GET RID OF IT. It's not designed in any way, shape or form for a marine environment and any marine electrician that installs it for you should be avoided. It's old, outdated and is designed for a caravan or motorhome which is very different from a boat. Also, the charger in it is awful and will not prolong the life of Deep Cycle batteries which is what should be used as your "house" batteries. In boat terms, we'd call these Domestic. A bad 240v installation might use the circuit breaker as the on-off switch for the charger. Just a thought. You can tell a bad 240v installation from a number of things and the instant giveaway is the use of solid twin and earth cable that you would find in a land-based installation. Multicore Flex must be used in boats as the vibration can snap the single cores with devastating consequences. You need to investigate more or get someone else to do it. John Spruce is very well respected in these parts but also very busy because of it.

I would recommend using a pure sine wave inverter rather than a cheap coke-can inverter. Modified sine wave inverters aren't good longer-term for sensitive electronics. If you get a 12v TV, make sure it's one that is designed to work on boats and motorhomes. It it's designed to work with a power brick, it's a bad idea to just connect it to your boat as your boat isn't 12v. You might think it is, but it's 14.4v when charging and any other voltage at other times and a 12v TV with a power brick is expecting 12v constant, not the fluctuating power of your boat. Long story short, it will damage your TV.

I'm pretty sure it's being used within its limits. Traffic would be halted otherwise. It's worth remembering too that it was the ONLY road traffic structure crossing over the Thurne anywhere for hundreds of years before the A149 was built which is, for the most part, a following of the railway line, long since lost.

Toolstation does cheap throw-away brushes much cheaper than this. If you're just using them for resin, these are perfect. Not so goon on gel as they tend to shed a bit, but if you condition them before use, they are better. https://www.toolstation.com/paintbrush-set/p48839 These have gone up my 50% in the last 14 months. They used to be £0.99p

Planning permission has already been granted for this site I believe.

Haven't been near it this year though. I have a plot of land just down from the old yard but I don't want to run into someone down there who a legendarily unpleasant individual and one of the key reasons I closed the business. He helped send me into depression and the thought of bumping into him is not nice

I have the same boat but with a nauighties refit. I didn't pay that for it and neither did the guy I got it from. I am often amazed at the asking price of the 32ft version which is often £40k plus.

I remember that advert well as well as the lyrics.

I haven't been past the BA dockyard in months so I don't know how many wrecks may have been recovered. However, there is a fenced compound within the BA dockyard that has a number of boats on stands/chocks. This compound is sub-let as a BSS tester training centre and those boats within the fenced area are part of the training. Prior to this, the only training centre in the country was at Evesham and the only boats they had to look at were narrowboats which are very different from a Broads boat.

Curiouser and curiouser.....

There are no regulations that are enforceable other than the BSS which is pretty pants for electrical safety. This is about best practices using the knowledge that we have today and not just doing things as they did 20/50 years ago because it worked then. If we can justifiably say that, for instance, screw terminal blocks should not be used to terminate cables because we know that it damages them, would it not be better to use terminals that we know are substantially better and ultimately safer? Of course, anyone can do anything they like on their boat and see whether it passes a BSS next time or causes damage in the first place. As someone who holds a marine electrical installation certificate, I felt it was better to counter some of the advice given here by people who aren't professional in these matters.

Vasseline will not stop damage to the cables. This is the principal reason these types of terminal blocks should not be used. Just because "most" boats only have screw connectors does not make it right. I would argue "most" is inaccurate too. Boats from the 70s and 80s would commonly have screw terminal blocks. By the 90s, practices were changing. I removed many of these blocks from fleet when time allowed as I knew how difficult fault finding could be with them. You can buy terminal blocks that have a crush plate in them so that pressure is applied more evenly to the cable than just a screw base, but these aren't decent substitute for a good crimp. The best crimp terminals are the uninsulated ones with a separate boot. Insulated ones are all too oven badly crimped and come loose. There's also some absolutely awful, cheap nasty insulated crimp terms out there that I wouldn't dream of using. Like most such things, a little knowledge can get you some of the way but doing it properly is where properly trained and experienced pros are needed.

Screw connectors should not be used to create electrical connections on boats. It's part of the wiring regs in the BMET scheme. They damage the stranded wire, cause pinch points that vibrations then break. Additionally, very few are remotely suitable for damp marine environments and corrode horribly over time resulting in poor connections and a total inability to disassemble without just cutting the wires.

I would never advocate merging or combining fuse/switch panels. If you already have such a panel, great, but never add one if you already have a fuse panel elsewhere for the same reason it's bad practice to add a fuse hidden away behind, say, a fridge. whilst you have another fuse panel somewhere else - when there's a fault, you have to trace everything and a long-forgotten fuse behind something will make that process hard. Keep all things alike in the same place. All fuse panels together; all main circuit switches together. Also, as I said earlier, a fridge needs a decent current and some fuse panels won't have switches capable of the load. One of the best ways to switch such a device is with a relay where you let the relay deal with the heavy load and use a low-amperage switch to energise the relay. There are many dos and don't to marine electrics but mostly in terms of safety. Most boat owners have just about enough knowledge to rig something to make it work but with little regard to safety, long-term operation and troubleshooting. It's not dangerous 'cos it's only 12v, right? Have you ever seen cable insulation melt because some tool has put in a big fuse because the right sized one kept blowing?

See, even I made the same mistake here. Negative not neutral.

Can we please use the correct terminology. There is no earth or neutral line on your boat's low-voltage DC system. These terms relate primarily to AC mains in this context and must not be confused and should not be interchanged. The DC system has Positive and Negative; possibly, hopefully, a ground though this isn't as common as it perhaps should be and can be very complicated. In a car, we might consider that we have a positive or negative 'earth' because the car is made of metal, we can use the whole of the vehicle to conduct the negative of the power circuit. On the vast majority of boats, this will not be done. Positive and Negative are carried in their own cable conductors. Sadly, the use of the word "earth" is technically incorrect again. This brings me to the point of accidentally turning the fridge back on by connecting a negative piece of metal to the chassis if you're switching the neutral line rather than the positive. Given that there should not be any stray cables laying around anyway, the chances of this are low. Yes, electrics are all about "potential", but it's perfectly legitimate to fuse and switch either the negative or positive lines. Generally, we consider the that we should only do this on the positive because we consider this to be the power "feed" or "supply". Again, this is technically incorrect. Ions actually travel from the negative terminal of the battery to the positive terminal in a circuit and not the other way which is how we generally think of it. In practice, it make little or no difference. What you need to ensure is that there is a "standard" across the whole of the DC circuits so that confusion isn't introduced when you have to troubleshoot an issue. As a point of note, I hold a British Marine Electrical Technician (BMET) certificate.

I'd say you need to be careful then and really understand what you're doing before you cut any cable. If you don't have the proper crimp tool, don't do it and also make sure you have the proper sized crimp terminals as well. If you have to remove strands from the wire or double the wire up to fit a terminal, it's the wrong size and may cause further problems down the line. I've seen some truly awful wiring done in my time, some down-right dangerous. People often think that 12v isn't dangerous and that's true only to the point of not getting a big shock off of it in certain circumstances. The danger lurks in bad cable, switch and connection choice and festers over time, growing with every new engine vibration. Incidentally, who installed a fridge without an external switch anyway? Very bad practice.

Whichever way you look at it, that's wrong, sorry. You only need to switch the positive or negative line. Only one cable runs through the switch. Your diagram will generate an immediate short which, if there's no fuse, will burn the cables out quickly and cause a fire in the worst possible case. If you have no fuse in the circuit, you absolutely need one. And fridges have a big load requirement in general, so ensure that your switch and all cables are more than adequate to carry that load else you may have many other problems. The biggest issue with electric fridges is poor cabling which can't handle the current draw which causes the fridge to not work properly. Cables should be crimped and not soldered and poor joints will cause failures. If you're not sure, get a professional to do it.