grendel

well having picked my car up from the garage I now needed fuel, with a 360 mile round trip for lads week, i was going to need a full tank, so at 4.30 I drove round to asda, joined the queue at the self serve pumps (£99 limit as usual) waited for one car at the pump to move and then moved forward and filled up, once again 25 litres filled the tank from half full (I can see I am going to have to get used to this tiny 52 litre tank, still it should get me there and back (hopefully) (with my old V70 I could easily fill it from 1/4 tank and put 50 litres in). so though asdas garage was fairly busy,there was fuel and the queues were at the pumps not out on the approach road, so back to normal seemingly.

well I had to take the new car back to the garage to be looked at, it wasnt accelerating smoothly between 1000 rpm and 2000 rpm, I then had a lovely 4 mile walk home along the river Stour, and through canterbury, got the phone call and went to pick it up, this time deciding on the added speed of an electric scooter, this was also along the riverside path and was much quicker, though they dont seem to be able to achieve the range quoted, I mean if I half flatten it in 4 miles its not going to get much more than 8 before the battery is flat, (being realistic I do weigh in at slightly more than the 100kg weight limit, however this didnt hold it back and I did hit 13mph at some points. the garage owner was interested and wanted a go, so we had a laugh around and then discussed the car. the mechanic who looked at my car used to work for volvo and is a master technician, so all good there too. Now Dave (JA) please tell me if anything else goes wrong with Water Rails engine and the cure, because it seems this car is determined to copy her, its had the diesel overrun, its had the part blocked diesel filter and needed bleeding, so it would be nice to be warned of whats going to occur next.

The majority of that cost I quoted for installing cable is the civils work, cable itself isnt too expensive compared to the installation, now assume a team of men can trench 100m per day, with all the cables that would need to be laid, which must be in the region of tens of thousands of kilometers. well I will let you do the maths for how long a single team would take. the real issue is that all of the utility providers have work for all their teams on a full time basis as it is, so more digging gangs would be needed, trained how not to damage the existing cables and other utilities, and then someone has to fund these posts too. a shortage of brickies and carpenters would be peanuts to the shortage of diggers and civils works teams that a project like this would generate. then you need someone to make that cable. and truck drivers to deliver it. you could provide full employment nationwide and still be short of manpower. on top of that all those teams would be spending half their time trying to find somewhere to charge their electric vans near the work sites.

very roughly extrapolating from Ed Chinas figures, for water rails 45 litre tank of diesel, to get the same cruising range you would need 5 tons of lead acid batteries (and thats without thinking how long they would take to charge compared to a five minute at the pump) or nearly a ton of Lithium batteries, start adding those sorts of weights and the boat us either going to be sitting very low in the water and thus requiring more energy to push through the water, or will be sitting on the bottom unable to float. these are the stats, and the reason you would have less batteries and charge more often, bigger boats would require even more batteries to get the equivalent range, and then you have the problem of recharging between hires, no 4 hour turnarounds with electric, probably nearer 4 days to recharge that lot.

i have no idea what nextdoor is (and with my neighbours, no wish to find out)

well at least people wont be able to make the petrol shortage worse by telleing everyone where the tankers have just delivered.

i did wonder why i didnt seem to be able to get on it, ah well at least I know its not just me.

ok, well the two screws on the motor are the replaceable brushes, that little bit with the bumps the bar on the rudder sits on that for free running (non radio controlled) so you can set it to circle slowly I think the 1960's was the eraof no proportional radio control, so you had to turn left after turning right. around that time there was something called the galloping ghost radio control. of course nowadays you can buy a decent radio control set for under £30, you would also need a speed controller, which would give you your forward and reverse. you could even fit lithium batteries and a brushless motor (make sure the speed controller matches your motor). you can get away with 2 channel, steering and throttle

another thing i looked at many years ago was local generation, from non fossil sources, and at the time there was a great deal being made of small scale nuclear plants, small enough to supply a small village, these were a liquid salt reactor, and were designed to run using the nuclear fuel in a molten salt as the basis, the theory was if the reactor had to be shut down in a hurry the molten salt would encapsulate the fuel which would solidify into a solid lump and be relatively safe. I am not sure what happened to that. another option would be to refurbish the old windmills as wind turbines to generate locally to the moorings, that would work, except during a calm, or have a field of solar farm next to the mooring, also fine except when it was cloudy.

yes, i think i got them all.

45 litres - 3-5 hours cruising each day for 5 days.for a good comparison with fuel vs electric ed china did a good comparison in the first few minutes of this video here -

20 years ago electric cars were being spoken about, and I was saying that we should be installing car charging points in every car park, but I was told that wasnt economical as there were too few cars to use them, unfortunately, the general public werent keen on buying electric vehicles without the charging infrastructure in place.

Horning to Potter is hardly a 5 hour days cruise, I like my 5 hour cruises, and some occasions will get up to 8 hours in, I somehow dont see me getting from Dilham to Polkeys mill on one charge, and then arriving to find no charging posts there either.

It does, but it wont be happening within the government timescales they are currently working to, because you would be looking at a 30+ year programme of work to achieve it. the transformer manufacturers would need to at least double their output of transformers, currently there are lead times of around 20 weeks on transformer supplies, and if you go to the bigger sizes for energy transmission across the country, the lead time is measured in years. Its just not possible, no matter what the government try to push.

I manage to cruise for a week on water rail on a 45 (max) litre tank, I dont imagine the best set of batteries that could be fitted to a 26 foot boat could manage that.

once again the national grid have jumped in saying they can provide the extra capacity to have all new homes electrically heated, unfortunately in saying this they use those same reserves they claim to have to provide electric vehicle charging, very carefully not mentioning its an either or situation, and then again there is getting it to those new homes over our aged infrastucture.

well the national grid jumped in early and laid claim that they would be able to supply the electricity, a claim I personally doubt, but thats a moot point anyway as the distributors dont have the capacity in their networks to get it from the national grid to the customer, in fact the electricity regulator has made it impossible to future proof the network by installing a bigger asset than a customer requests, if a customer asks for 1MVA, then thats all you are allowed to install, you might know that another 1MVA will be needed in 4 years, but the regulator wont allow you to future proof your network by installing a bigger transformer now. we might have been ready if we had been allowed to install spare capacity, and had started 20 years ago

you have to bear in mind that with the current price of copper that cable prices are volatile and vary daily, but at current costs to provide and lay 1km of high voltage cable to a substation (2 cables will be needed for security of network, we are talking around £30,000 to dig and lay a cable trench to the DNO specifications for standard depth in footpath (600mm), and a lot more over agricultural land as the depth needed to avoid cable damage is nearly double (1000mm to top of cable), so maybe double that figure for twice the depth, and double again for 2 cables, and we are talking over £100,000 per km, Hardley cross is about 6KM from the nearest network- if a practical route with access can be found, then there is the price of switchgear, transformers, the LV infrastructure to supply the charging posts, which would have to supply the full length of the moorings, and this will be repeated over many moorings down the southern end of the network, which currently has very few charging points. all these costs will have to be paid up front before the electricity company will install the network, and how much could the Authority charge for these points, - no more than the current price per unit of electricity as the price is regulated by the electricity regulator. hard to see how they would make the difference up in tolls.

the issue is the charging infrastructure, most marinas would not have the current capacity to charge all their boats, so new substations (plural) would be needed, new supply cables, and then the normal few hour handover window would haveto go out of the window, because boats could not be sent out low on charge, a boats fuel will easily last a week, yet electricity would require plugging in every day. putting charging points at remote locations will be difficult, for the number of boats that will use them daily, its not economically viable, for example I have calculated Hardley cross would cost nearly £1 million to get a supply to as it is miles from anywhere and miles from the nearest network, there are no roads, and overhead lines across the marshes would be a planning no no (as well as electrically insecure) and then any supply capacity would have to be available at the nearest network point.

it is possible, but give me some time to achieve it

my local asda has two lanes from the main road roundabout, so they have staff out keeping the queue for the fuel in the right lane and allowing shoppers to use the left lane, they are also waving cars past as soon as the queue backs up to the main road roundabout, I assume the petrol station is still open as google maps is showing slow traffic on the roundabout still at this late hour.

the other year at the beccles wooden boat show we encountered a sailor (ie one who sails a boat), who seemed to enjoy making life difficult for every other river user that wasnt on a sailboat, even to the point of changing tack mid river as soon as a boat started to go through behind him, then aiming at the mid section of the overtaking boat shouting give way to sail. He did come unstuck when he tried to perform a similar manouver with a pair of boats side along towing as he yelled for them to slow down as he had right of way, the towing boat slowed, but the towed boat carried on forward nearly sideswiping his yacht, of course because it was towing and thus restricted in its manouverability he didnt have right of way at all. in all walks of life some people just seem to want to be obnoxious, I just let them get on with it and ignore them as best I can

OK, lets explain, a post sometimes is hidden while the moderation team discuss, we do try and inform the poster when this happens, and at that stage all we can say is its under discussion. the moderation team are getting set up to implement the online harms bill once it comes into force, therefore some posts can be hidden while we discuss the implications and whether going forward we will be able to allow them. yet other posts can be automatically hidden by being reported, with these it can be a little while before we even know it has happened, and we do try and get in touch as soon as we realise, though by this time the post may well have been missed and questions asked. yes we are human, no we dont always manage to get in touch with the poster in a timely fashion, and we do have to discuss as a team the best course of action and agree on that course. With Online harms we have to be careful, one wrong move could end up with the forum shut down just like that, so understandably we get twitchy fingers at times, usually common sense prevails and the post gets reinstated. the only place where we definitely wont send a message is in the jokes thread, if we dont think its suitable, it will be removed (or never approved in the first place) we dont automatically hide discussions of the BA, we just ensure that they remain factual and within the terms of service and polite, hence this discussion here.if you can avoid using derogatory terms for anyone or anything (even in jest), that would help us immensely, as that is a big part of the online harms bill, as we all know the internet is full of filters nowadays that will pull out derogatory terms all day long, so we want to avoid that, once you have been pulled out for inspection, then its a lot more difficult to fight the forums corner, much better not get flagged up in the first place. That doesnt mean we cannot discuss things, we can, just remember to keep it polite and factual. You do your bit, and it will make the moderators teams job a lot easier (remember we are all just volunteers) and in return we wont need to hide posts while we discuss them. now go and try guess which part we asked Griff to remove from his post, but dont say it out loud here, or we may have to hide your post too.

as long as you dont glue yourself to the river and stop boats, campaign ahead

while any predictions can be inaccurate (because the tides dont behave and do as they are predicted at best of times), relying on them for actual heights to my mind is even less sure of a thing, they will be what they are, and with wroxham or potter heigham, only the pilots with years of experience can say with any degree of certainty what the next tie may be, depending upon weather, wind direction springs / neaps etc etc and years of experience, and that jut to predict the change from one tide to the next, maybe 12 hours, based upon what they are seeing today. It might be worth contacting the app developers (they must have a contact number or email in the app surely) and asking them what the figure is based upon, if anyone they will know, the best any of the rest of us can do is guess.