grendel

charge controller connected up and fed to battery, one battery isnt behaving well- but thats the one that got replaced out of the car, so its known to be dodgy, however the other battery I have is charging at around 2A, so we will see where that takes us. I do need to go get another of the jump leads from lidls to allow the wires to be long enough for the inverter, which has yet to be mounted. at present i will be limited to around 65 Ah of capacity, until I get hold of a bigger battery.

quite pleased to see the sun hits the panel location around 10.30am, and by about 12 they are pretty much in full siunlight, wellthey are after pruning the apple tree a bit, to be honest my back garden faces north east, so its never going to be a good spot, my conservatory roof, is closer to the house and still just about in shade from that, so Its looking as good as it can get, the tree will shade the panels at some degree most of the day, I have the little 100W panel out in the same location, and thats throwing 43W into my solar power generator from where I charged my drill batteries the other day, that was down to 81% and is already back to 89% after just a short while. next job is the wiring and fitting charge controllers etc to the system, then I have to dig out the two car batteries that will be the start of my solar bank, I was extremely lucjy this morning, lidls had car jump cables on offer, so that gets round my cabling requirements.

spreads the load of the front of the rubbing strake trying to pull through across 4 whole planks and half of 2 more

this weekend will see me doing a solar install for my workshop, I picked up a couple of second hand 235W panels and have purchased and received the associated hardware, charge controller wiring and 1 KW inverter. may aim is to take the majority of my workshop tools off grid and put them on solar, the spot I have for the panels isnt great, they will only get direct sun half of the day, but then I dont use the workshop every day, so we will see how it goes, I do have some tools that are just under the inverter capacity, that may need the household mains for startup currents, but they can be left on the house circuit for now, and we will see how things go, I can easily upgrade the number of panels and battery capacity as needed for the rest. its just making little changes toward a greener lifestyle and removing reliance on the electricity grid and rising prices. I have to make up a frame to hold the panels, which will be angled to best catch the afternoon and evening sunlight. they will need sunlight to work decently, a quick test done yesterday (on a dull day) only managed to push 2 % back into my portable power station yesterday afternoon, I am waiting for a sunny day to see how effective the panels really are. if the system can only keep all my cordless tool batteries charged up, it will still be a winner in my books. every little bit helps.

as one who has experienced that heart stopping moment when the engine falters and dies while crossing Breydon, I can say it can happen to anyone, I was lucky, i restarted the engine and though I could not get full revs I had enough to get me across and up to Stracy Arms, albeit slowly. once there the fuel pump was removed and found to contain some waxy slime, which was cleared out, the filter was then replaced after some more cruising, and after that I experienced a few more fuel related issues (the main cause of these problems was a failure of the sealing washer on the bleed screw as it later turned out).

I am certain that every time I have hired in the skippers handbook there is always a separate page just for Breydon, saying stay between the red and green markers, always go around the yellow post, and that when doing the trial run, they specifically ask if you are going south, and if the answer is yes, they go into crossing Breydon in more detail.

I currently work in an industry that works alongside construction, historically the construction site has been considered one of the most dangerous to work in, and yet though it is still dangerous, the procedures put in place have taken it away from the number one spot as most dangerous, which i believe currently is window cleaning of all things. I too am grateful for the turn of events that has made health and safety the number one priority, and quite rightly so. when I started in this industry we would get notifications of deaths and lessons learned, nowadays I see notifications that are merely near misses or warnngs of bad installations, while deaths in my industry still happen, they are now a lot fewer and further between, thank goodness

in most industry in 1978 health and safety was just nodded to, I can remember the air pistol shooting we did in the office at my first job, (we stopped when a pellet went through the wall into the next office). when I think back to the things we got up to at work in those days I cringe now.

ooh that might mess up Griffs return to the wet shed if they dont get it fixed soon, though he might squeeze under the bridge if the lock is still operational.

still 1978 was about the time these new fangled ideas were being introduced, i was talking about 100 years.

I think you will find in those days it was called common sense, its just the habit of giving things fancy names thats new.

on the thames during the olympics they had a line of bouys strung together totally closing off access to one ban, these went for several miles as I recall, so you could string a line of small green and a line of small red bouys between posts i guess.

is that your car parked by that bush over there?- oh sorry, is your car that bush over there?

and this is why we have tos here and enforce them unlike many other social media platforms, its a fine balance allowing a discussion to progress while also being aware of the responsibility we have to protect the victims of incidents. it is gratifying to see that others recognise and highlight this responsibility we all have.

for most people pets are an integral part of the family

maybe that is part of the problem, all the advice says stay between the marker posts, I guess when some are replaced with buoys, it could cause confusion.

it is still speculation, as they may have left at any time after you went round the corner out of sight, they may just have waited until just after the end of slack to get the flood up Breydon, or any time after that. we dont know the exact circumstances of the incident, other than their engine was broken and they ended up grounded, so anything other than that is speculation.

thats a pretty shaky foundation you start your speculation with, then build speculation on the foundation of speculation, all to blame the pricing policy of yarmouth yacht station?

I think its worth remembering this from the original BBC article Coxswain Daniel Hurd said the cruiser's engine had broken and the boat was listing (leaning), meaning "those on board were in some danger". and that it was the local marine engineers who placed the call to the emergency services (presumably they were in attendance to attempt a repair on the engine) who better to determine that the situation might be dangerous?

surely the D&G's they were the ones that beached the sinking Margoletta on the mud and threw out the anchor, so salvage couldnt be claimed

No, its not, and the potential would be there to fall foul of the TOS and get the moderators on your case.

they are trying every trick to get people to change. I have even had phone calls where I had to quite forcefully tell them I do not want a smart meter. and remember, if you change suppliers then you will need to change to the new suppliers meter as not all meters can be read by all companies, they each have a different brand read by different software, they cant even seem to standardize that yet.

yes you can get special chain rollers that have 2 depths of groove, one for the links at right angles and the other for the links flat on to the roller (i believe they had some made up on the sailing channel sailing fair isle a month or so back. about a minute in on here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AdgCqZ2PFg

Fred, smart meters have never been compulsory (no matter what the electricity company try and tell you) it is compulsory for them to offer them to you, but its not compulsory for you to accept one. As an example I am on an economy 7 meter, meaning I get cheaper electricity overnight for 7 hours, if I were to change to a smart meter, then this tariff would no longer be available to me (though there are other tariffs that are available, I have not found one that offers rates as low as the economy 7 night rate). Thus the energy company want me to change to a smart meter, so they can get me off of the economy 7 tariff. If I was able to fit a car charger, I could make full use of that tariff to charge the car at cheap rate overnight. and this would be at a cheaper rate than i can get for a car charging tariff, that the smart meter can control when it charges the car to account for demand, thus overnight if a lot of people plugged their cars in to charge the system would stagger the loads to balance the network, in an extreme case this might leave someone, lacking a full charge, if there has been a large demand overnight (this is one of the factors i personally dislike about the new smart meters, they hand control of your energy consumption over to the energy company.) even if your car had been plugged in for 8 hours, the energy company may have decided not to allow charging for 4 of those hours, and the situation would only get worse the more car chargers were attached to the existing networks. thus at present I will happily stick with my economy 7 meter, and forgo a smart meter.

yes, it could be made on a lathe from a suitable material, you would need to know the radius of the internal groove, overall diameter and thickness, and hole diameter ( i think we have all of those bar the groove radius). though there should be a product available out there that would do the trick