grendel

currently the infrastructure in london is maxed out, we are having to build primary substations (33,000V) places to be able to get energy to supply new developments, the furthest we have had to lay cables to supply these has been about 10km to the nearest available supply point. there isnt any spare capacity for electric vehicle charging.

those will be the standard 18650 cells

its a 500 error, which is a generic host server issue, it sounds like there is / was an issue on the host server, this is beyond our control and will have been flagged up to our service provider.

yes i too had that message last night

https://ourworldindata.org/energy

currently renewables account for 52% of electricity production

https://gridwatch.co.uk/

the other thing to remember is that the diesel engine was originally designed to run on peanut oil, diesels will run on infinitely renewable vegetable oil, they actually run cleaner on veg oil than they do on fossil fuel, why isnt all of our diesel vegetable, well the oil industry is trying to retain an ever more tenuous grip on their monopoly, ok modern diesels have been tuned to high grade fossil fuel, but they could as easily be optimised for plain veg oil by the manufacturers.

the real issue with electric vehicles is that currently the entire electrical infrastructure is insufficient to charge them, the nearest charging point is about half a mile from my house, we have a max 64A cutout, not enough for vehicle charging, in my estate there are 16 houses fed off a cable that nowadays we would use to feed 1 electric vehicle charge point, each charge point consumes as much electricity as 11 houses (averaging out the consumption through the day and applying diversity a 3 bed house averages 1.2KVA whereas a single charge point is 16kVA). so at home i cant charge a vehicle, at work we are on an industrial estate that pretty much maxes out the power for the estate, no spare capacity for electric vehicle charging, the nearest charge point is 5 miles away. so at present i spend 3 hours a day travelling to and from work, 124 miles, at the limit of range of most electric vehicles, cant charge up at home or at work, thus after 1 trip i limp home with a flat battery, or end up spending an extra 2 hours on the road to get some charge into the car. other than heading for work, i do a few miles round town, but most trips otherwise are over twice as far as work is, thus for me an electric vehicle is not viable- yet. the electrical infrastructure of the entire country will need to be replaced before we have enough capacity to supply every household with a vehicle charging point, we will need to quadruple the number of power stations (at least) to supply all these charging points. converting over to electric vehicles is a government stop gap to reducing our carbon footprint. eventually the vehicles will have to be propelled by some other solution, because electric vehicles isnt the solution, we need hydrogen fuel cells that work, hydrogen will be replacing natural gas as a household fuel over the coming decades, they just have to be able to make the systems idiot proof to stop people blowing themselves up, the existing gas pipes can in most part accommodate hydrogen through them. then if we have fuel cells the cars can be gassed up at your fuel station with hydrogen, straight out of the gas mains. one thing we complain about with diesels is particulates released into the atmosphere, this doesnt really happen as much with the wet exhaust systems on boats, particles are not released into the atmosphere as much, ok they are released into the water, where they disperse and dissolve, in this form they are relatively innocuous compared to someone breathing them. I would love an electric vehicle, after all I work in the electricity supply industry, twenty years ago I was telling my bosses, that if we wanted electric vehicles we had to start installing charging points everywhere we could, 15 years of building the infrastructure to accommodate electric vehicles were wasted by a lack of foresight on the parts of the energy supply companies, there was a chicken and egg moment that was missed, because it would have required an up front investment in the charging points, then they would have owned those charging points, and gained the income from them. now its too little too late and we dont have the infrastructure to achieve the desired end.

looks like it shares a fair amount of heritage with a landrover except for the grill

but we wont be, we will be in two separate groups of 6, and to follow the guidelines we will go to the pub in our group of 6, i imagine this will curtail the meal out together on our last evening, but we will work within the new laws to ensure we comply, it will be no different to going to the same pub as the family in the next boat at the moorings, most pubs wont seat groups larger than 6 now anyway. so we will keep things simple and travel as two groups.

each boat is a separate bubble, when cruising we wont be mixing between boats, and when going to the pub we will be in two groups of 6 (as the pubs will be working to the same rulings), the fact the two boats are cruising to the same locations is beside the point, for all intents we are two groups of 6 - we only ever have a maximum of 6 to a boat.

Thanks Vanessan, I have posted that to our facebook group also as an announcement.

not sure that can be answered without touching upon politics.

someone would complain its out of character for the area

lots of places to get water, every two days is normal, depends how long you shower for really, some boats also store waste water from sinks and showers, so same answer really for waste tank, though if used sparingly you could probably last out a week with just 2, it depends if you have a fill gauge and can take the chance, or if you arent worried if it gets full. best practice is to use shore based facilities at every opportunity, which can save a mid week pump out.

if it had gone ahead it would have been just 6 people, cant get much smaller

I was busy at work, where we didnt have a radio or any other form of news devices, it was quite late in the afternoon before we were made aware of what was going down, and that was only when someone in the office ot a call from his wife to say have you seen the news.

aside from the fact that this would be illegal under electricity supply regulations, i forget the exact reulation, but it falls under the same section as electric posts on caravan sites.

2 bubbles, the pubs are going to separate into tables of 6 max anyway. we are already down to just 2 boats anyway this year, the other two boats booking is being carried over to next year.

under the regulations they are not allowed to do this, there was a big hoo-ha a few years ago, and research at that time showed that they are limited in what can be charged over to the user of an electricity post, they are not allowed to charge more than the statutory charge per unit of electricity provided, they can add a charge for the cards, but that has to be stated and separate from the electricity charge.

If you want electricity in a remote area, then you pay for the network from the point of connection, in this case the costs would have to be paid by the Broads Authority, and would be passed on in a corresponding rise to the river tolls. If there is a possible second consumer along the route that also might want electricity, when they connect to the network you have paid for, a pro rata amount is calculated for the construction of part they will be sharing, and this would then be paid back to the original consumer who paid for that network.

having just had a look at the records, rthe closest available electric is at Norton Staithe Pumping station, but that is the wrong side of the river Chet, so they wont lay a cable under the river because of dredging, and they wont be allowed to put a cable overhead across the river. Other than that the next next nearest is Church farm, near the end of Hardley Dyke. Access from here would have to be via the footpath, along hardley dyke, and round the curves of the river, several miles of cable. Overhead lines would probably be objected to by the planning authority as they would run right along the river bank, also there is great reluctance to installing overhead cables in marshland areas - for example the Berney Arms supply is several miles long of underground cable winding down farm tracks etc, a distance that one must start to suspect whether the volt drop on the cable keeps the supply within the prescribed voltage limits. The voltage drop would be another issue, any cables run would have to be high voltage with a transformer on the end as otherwise the route would have too high a voltage drop by the time it reached the staithe. Add the various costs of overcoming these factors, and the numbers soon start piling up, I would be surprised if the answer came in under 5 figures, at a guess I would say at least £250,000. I can imagine the outcry at such expenditure if the Authority announced that they were putting in electric to a handful of electric posts and spending that amount of the toll payers money to do so. As such I think that the chances of putting electricity to the staithe is unreasonably expensive and will never happen (short of some new technology being developed that would allow the electricity to be generated locally to the staithe - tidal flow and energy storage systems maybe?)

for me a weeks itinerary goes something like get on boat point the nose somewhere and cruise for a few hours, moor up, repeat, repeat, repeat, head for somewhere near the boatyard, then drop the boat off and go home. I may decide there are a few places i want to head for sometime during the week, but i never have a fixed plan.

Fair enough, I admit I read it out of context, so my fault there, but that indicates why we wont have one, as it can easily be taken the wrong way.