grendel

it will be good to see you Helen, I will be on Water Rail from the wednesday (not sure if i will make it all the way to Stracey arms for the BBQ), i think Dave is running out of people to man his boats (he doesnt have too many boats, just not enough people).

unfortunately, Covid 19 hasnt gone away, the effects are less, and its no longer as deadly as it has been, (thanks to the vaccination programme,) but its still possible to catch it, and still wise to take precautions.

what a day yesterday, mid morning i got a call from my parents, they had a water leak, could I come over, it just needed sealing with some silicone. after i finished working at 3pm, I headed over, sealant gun at the ready, only to be told they didnt have any idea where the water was coming from, close inspection eliminated the joints, and finally I spotted, a spurt of water from the pipe, about an inch below a joint, from the back of the pipe to the wall. fortunately it was the hot water pipe, so I turned that off at the valve beneath the heater (its a direct flow heater, so no tank.) leak isolated it was now time to try and temporarily fix it (as i had bought no actual plumbing tools with me) off to B&Q, nope, then found some self vulcanising tape in halfords, good to 250 deg C, yes that should do the trick. but no, things didnt go as planned, first problems getting the tape all the way around the pipe in anything like a neat fashion, it kept sticking to itself when i didnt want it to, and not sticking to the pipe when i did. so after wrapping the pipe and turning the water back on it still leaked. then my dad wanted to call a company he had found on check a trade, rather than his trusted gas man who also does associated plumbing. fortunately he got no answer from the 24 hour plumber (where I am sure he stood a good chance of being ripped off) so he eventually calls his gas man- earliest they can visit would be friday. As we had found theat we could stop the leak by turning off the hot valve below the heater, i suggested that they do this and only turn it on when they actually needed hot water. i eventually leave them with this as the plan, go round the corner to my sisters to report my attempts, and fate stepped in, my nephew was round there, he is currently re-plumbing his bathroom, so offers to pop round and see what he can do. after i arrive home i have a message, he has fixed it, a spare section of pipe from my sisters, and a couple of push fit connectors he had in the car, and the leak is fixed, thank goodness for nephews that are still young enough to fit into under sink cupboards, and are willing to help out.

and so it begins, you get a boat, start doing it up, and slowly boats accumulate and the work list gets longer.

its usually only that easy if you have meticulously planned it, (and nobody is watching), experience counts for a lot, but when sailing solo, all of the lines need to be in place for mooring when you leave the previous mooring. dont worry, we have all messed up a mooring or two, i once had a jump to get back on the boat when the wind took her and I was ashore with the bow rope, and at that point she decided she wanted to point the other way, it happens to all of us at some point.

not so much a sausage dog as a chipolata dog, or maybe a cocktail sausage for short.

the wiring is slowly getting tidier, lack of space and in one case waiting for the correct switch slowed the process, the switch arrived friday, what i needed was an 3 position switch, on/off/on to connect the battery to either the light circuit, or the solar panel, or turn it off altogether, this has now been wired up and positioned just inside the forward companionway. its getting neater but this lot still needs tidying.

easily done Andrew

All well and good Andrew but this isn't the nbf, this is the NBN

my parents used to bury a 3 foot pipe at least a foot into the ground, angled under the row of plants and at 3 foot intervals, this then had the advantage that the roots were watered, and that the hole to pour into was at a reasonable distance above ground, saving the need to bend.

I will remind you of this post , basically you come home, plug the car in and expect that it will be charged next day, but no, if demand is too high, the energy company may have switched your charger off some of the night, and you suddenly don't have enough charge to get to work. All facilitated through your smart charger and smart meter.

they just manage to surpass the EDP

if the new development shows ev chargers, the base load will be increased to account for them, thus where at present we may have 200 houses fed from a single substation (300kW) (we like to allow some spare capacity) we will be able to supply 117 houses from the same 1000kW substation and have no spare capacity due to the ev chargers, (assuming the are the low power 7kW variety) so I do hope your development has allowed space for enough substations to supply those chargers and properties, or we will be nicking pairs of parking spaces to site them, thats always assuming we can get the capacity for them from the local HV network from the DNO. now heres the difference, 200 houses could just about be fed from the local LV network, but add the EV chargers and we will need to put in a HV supply and a substation every time.

just news media doing what they do best, sensationalising the mundane to make people afraid to leave their front door.

no, it does take an awful lot of work to produce an ev battery, this was a comparison between ups batteries, which will be a lot smaller, but sustainability wise, lithium wins out over lead acid equivalent, just. its just that the posts on facebook dont present a balanced argument, and are just posted to generate the reaction they want. I am not anti EV, i just look at the impracticality of the current situation.

that said, saying its slightly better than a lead acid battery isnt saying much considering the toxicity of lead and its recycling, eventually lithium batteries will be recycled as are lead acid, which will gain a small improvement. the fact is that we have limited resources, and we should be conserving them rather than squandering them.

facebook as usual is wrong, a sustainability study has been made between lead acid and li-ion batterys by a leading electrical equipment supplier and while battery for battery, lead acid wins (mostly because 98% of lead acid batterys are made from recycled lead, over the lifespan of the equipment, a single li-ion battery can replace 3 lead acid ones, thus comes out slightly ahead https://www.se.com/eg/en/download/document/SPD_WP71_EN/

this is what i have been trying to say on all the threads regarding electricity supply for EV's, there are some areas that just dont have the spare capacity, so much for the target of 2025, if they cant upgrade their network before 2035 to supply all thse new cars. you cna just bolt a 7kw EV charger onto the wall of your house, but if everyone does so, then the supply network will fail, as its not been designed around that additional load, the average house is rated at aboout 1.5kW, and the network is designed to the capacity of every house using 1.5kw, when you put on a larger load (eg cooker) the network can manage this, because not everyone does it at the same time. so when everyone wants to charge their cars at 7kW, the cables supplying their houses will fail, or the fuses will blow at the substation, you may have a 100A supply into your house, but the cables supplying the street are not capable of carrying this load if every house tries using it. older houses fare worse, for example my house only has a 64A breaker, there are 16 houses fed off a single 35mm 3 phase cable, the cable is rated to take 154A, thats effectively 10A per household - 2.2kW, so if someone puts a 7kw charger on, they are effectively using 3 houses allocation of supply on the mains cable, this idf all 16 houses had a 7kW charger and turned it on at the same time, the poor cable would have in excess of 500A trying to go through it- result - poof, no cable

so thats where the phrase splash the cash came from, i always wondered

I have split it to a thread of its own for you, in my experience if footpaths are not used they can disappear, when walking the local woods i have been known to carry gloves and a pair of secateurs to clear the paths (particularly where there are brambles and other prickly vegetation), there are still some marked paths that are impossible to traverse.

critical data is duplicated on all 3 synology nas units, so is triple saved and on raid so effectively exists on 6 hard drives, if i get that bad a failure i have probably lost all of my data anyway.

At least we don't get the problem of not being able to park because it only allows the use of a certain app, and there's not even an alternative phone number to contact. Locally councils are going to parking apps, forgetting that not everyone has a smartphone. If I did have a smart phone it would never be linked to my bank account anyway

thanks for that, yes, i do know raid is not a backup as such, the system does alert me to a failed drive, i had one fail early on when a power outage caused one drive to crash its heads onto the disc, this is why all of this now runs on a ups, so i know that the raid system will do its job, as i inserted a new drive and it copied all the data back to that one, it is however i step higher than most home systems.

thats a good question, and one i dont know the answer to - even after reading up on it via google, the explanations were complex and it was all greek to me. so, i dont know if it is a setting on the forum, or on your phone network thats causing the issue. put bluntly, i dont know if the cloudfront thing is part of the forum software, or your phone software. I generally know enough of the forum back end to be dangerous, and perform simple tasks.

no, thats just my stuff, cad files, video and photos take up a lot of it, work manage on a far more modest 4Tb (that is almost always nearly full)