scraggs

Whine, whine, bloody whine. It's one day and not even a full day at that. Money was raised for a very good cause. I pay my tolls as well but enjoyed just sitting on the boat watching them swim past us, in fact I have the utmost of admiration for them. I never saw any boats being held up at Beccles and from where we were sitting it looked a very well organised event. We look forward to watching it again next year hopefully. Some people are just unreal.

Just seeing a post on facebook about fitting a new engine in a boat and it got me thinking about this again. Is there any particular reason boat engines don't run a conventional cooling system ? I assume it's to do with overheating in a confined space and maybe a cooler exhaust side of things ?, but we run both big and small engines in enclosed spaces at work and have never yet had an issue with overheating.

Not on a boat. but have had them chomp through part of the wiring loom on a teleporter forklift, and through the cables in a timber framed house. Neosorexa gold generally sorts the little buggers out.

Fabsil

I bought one of these last year to use on the boat 1byone ariel very impressed with it considering we leave it in the cabin while watching tv, I just bought another to use at home on the spare room tv to save messing about with a proper ariel.

So you missed the part where he said there is no culture in the area :( A boring programme, but TBH I find John Sergeant a bit of a boring presenter.

As a suggested above, try using raw onions, they work wonders on paint fumes, I see no reason why it won't work on diesel, has to be worth a try. You do need quite a few though.

I had a propex in a camper I built and doubt I would fit another, it made an annoying gurgling noise when the burner was on, it was sent back to Propex to be checked and it was how it should be apparently. Although the quality of service from Propex was very good.

The genuine Plannar heaters get quite good reviews but compare the wattage used on the 4kw which is way over webby's and eber's and it's air output on both the 2kw and 4kw units is way under both webby's and eber's on full power. That said they are cheaper so a bit of a trade off, also the 4kw uses pretty large bore ducting 100mm iirc.

There is a facebbook group for the chinese heaters, they have a lot of error codes come up and heater plug failure is really common, also consider that they are not CE market, if anything went wrong the insurance company may be a bit funny about it.

I have looked at the Planar heaters from a UK dealer, my concern with them was the fans shift roughly 20% less air volume than ebers or webastos, also the 4kw version runs 100mm ducting which means enlarging all the holes the duct runs through. Quite a saving though at half the price. I think I may get a Chinese 5kw one for the workshop, at the price if it lasts a year or 2 then I would be happy with that. There is a facebook group for the Chinese heaters

Being a Viking once you get that done will she be able to get into the cabin OK, we had a look at quite a few vikings when we were buying our boat and most had very steep access to the cabin.

We did consider that as it would have made life easier especially as we could have brought her home for winter work, but then we decided to go bigger and towing 26 foot by 10 foot had too many problems, mainly width and weight. If buying smaller it's definitely worth thinking about.

Getting the mooring first is going to cost you and if you are like us finding what we wanted took ages and was still a compromise. Originally we wanted to moor on the north broads but decided to find the boat and moor her on the south broads which was far easier to find a mooring, we can move her north at a later date if we want to.

We paid nearly half what everyone else was asking for the same model of boat we bought, but she needs loads doing to her, the others needed bits doing but not as much as ours needs, if we were having the work done by someone it would have probably been cheaper to have bought one of the dearer boats requiring less work, it's only because I can do it myself that it has worked out a good deal. That said, a few months after we bought ours one of the other sellers called me to say he was dropping the price a fair bit and were we still interested.