oldgregg

So true! But then which would you rather be driving?

Yeah £133 is really good. Even Honda charge more than that.

Firstly.... What a cute Labrador, and in my favourite colour too! So many people say that they've never been to the Lakes and I can only say you are in for a real treat. As it happens, when I was coming onto the Kirkstone Pass earlier this year we found ourselves in the middle of some sort of Z3 / Z4 owners club cruise. You can see some of the line of Z3's ahead, and there was an E85 Z4 behind us. It was a slightly grey day but we dropped the roof and it was quite fun knowing that someone else in front would be looking out for sheep in the middle of the road so I could keep it flat. They weren't going flat out, Mrs OG's car (now sold, I'm sure you can work out what it was though) was keeping up without much trouble but it was a fun experience. There are so many roads in the Lakes which are just stunning to drive. Wrynose / Hard Knott pass is fun but Kirkstone isn't single track and if you hit it at the right time of day there's no traffic. The road from the summit back down to Ambleside is known as 'The Struggle' and is fantastic in a car with a bit of power. Similarly, Honister Pass and the parts around Buttermere are pretty epic.

I have to be careful not to breach the TOS here don't I

I had (well I made) a parallel port one, it was much faster than serial but was still really slow.

I remember Laplink well, and I recall making up a cable for it and using it to sync between my old Compaq Contura laptop and my desktop PC. The transfer speed was absolutely terrible.

This was the only image I could find of the docking station... Toshiba PA2710E Docking Station - Peripheral - Computing History The laptop sits on top and is locked into place by a motorised mechanism. There's space in the base for a floppy drive and full-size CD drive. The rear cover flips up (if unlocked with the key) to reveal the expansion slots below, with their backplates being visible in the cavity you can see to the right-hand rear of the dock. Utterly bonkers and the most over-engineered dock I've ever seen. [Edit:] A quick google suggests the laptop was a Tecra 8000

A PPC640 (or 512) I would assume? They were basically a repackaged PC1512 / PC1640 and while not epic, they were an 'affordable' machine. Amstrad PPC 512 - Wikipedia Toshibas were excellent machines, I had one about 20 years ago and it had a wonderfully-engineered docking station with motorised load/unload and some full-sized PCI (or were they ISA?) slots. It felt like such a well-built machine and the touchpoints are great once you get used to them.

The other thing you have to watch with chinese imports is that they cooked up a very similar 'chinese export' mark which you will find on all sorts of products. Naturally, it does not assure any form of genuine CE marking. https://www.auersignal.com/en/technical-information/standards-markings/ce-marking/#:~:text=Fake CE markings

I think the Planar heaters are certainly much less of a worry, but I haven't heard particularly good things about their longevity. They do seem popular with camper van installers, though, and various suppliers offer a heat exchanger which goes between the heater and the ducting and provides hot water.

While I do think that Eberspacher and Webasto have been taking advantage of a lack of competition for many years, I'm really not a fan of the stuff from China. If the heater can be bought for around £100 delivered, has poor instructions and generally slightly iffy tolerances and build quality why are people not seeing the risks? The thing that would concern me most is that the innards of these heaters rely on a casting. I would guess that the casting from a £100 heater might not be made from quite the same quality of alloy as a £1000 one, and that the tolerances, QA and general engineering might also differ somewhat. My concern would therefore be that over time if that casting were to develop structural cracks due to the repetitive heat cycling, then there would not be too much preventing combustion gases from mixing with the hot air output. You pays your money and you take your choice I suppose. I'll go with the proven brands for now, personally. I don't doubt that in the long run this increased competition will lead to more innovation from the big two, and I suspect it also won't be long before the chinese think of ways of doing things better and that will push existing brands to offer more. There are already combined hot air / hot water units on offer from China, imagine if they added a small generator in there so that external power was only needed for startup. That would be a game changer for the hire industry.

Can you imagine having to explain to every customer what they need to fill out on the declaration, how to calculate their usage and the split etc?

Nice marina that, quite a pleasant pub on site too which is handy for the visitor moorings. Last time I was there, there was a wedding on in the function building and the couple came out with the photographer who wanted to use our hireboat as a backdrop for the wedding pics. Most yards do the 60:40 split, it's built into the price and is so common it's never really discussed. Paperwork would be very complex to do a more sophisticated split on the Broads though? Canal boats are very similar in terms of size and engineering setup, heating source etc. Broads boats are very varied.

I think they're more hassle than they're worth for yards in reality.

Creature comforts were for electric.... But it does seem literally everyone remembers them as the "gas adverts".

This is why electric cars tend to have heated seats and steering wheels... Much more efficient than a warm air cabin heater of 1KW or more.

Funny you should mention that. I have recently been looking to change my September booking with the boys as there are now 7 of us signed up so Contessa isn't an option. Trawling through the various sites, a couple of Herbert Woods boats looked like an option as did a couple with Brinks though those seemed pretty pricey for what they were. I was looking at booking Folkestone Light as she seemed fairly spacious and good value. I don't really like bathtubs but the layout seemed to work well. I'm not the biggest Herbert Woods either fan as I have seen the state of their boats out and about and also looked on board them in the yard, plus they always have a terrible reputation for breakdowns. But it was for a boys' weekend based entirely on the North so considerations are a bit different. I went through the booking pages to look for hidden charges and noticed that the 'all male crew' deposit was £550. Wow, that's pretty steep I thought.... And then I noticed it needed to pay be paid 56 days before departure. So naturally I laughed a bit and booked with a different yard. Nice way of getting some investment income, poor way of attracting customers. Each to their own I guess. So I've booked Diamond Gem, will get another holiday towards my loyalty discount and know that if there were a problem then Ricko's would sort it.

Yeah I assumed that - Was just thinking in terms of the max wattage on shore power that it must have been a low wattage kettle. Sounds ideal actually. 5 minutes is probably better than a kettle on the hob and a lot less hassle. When I was in syndicate, we would have owners using the battery charger, immersion and some oil rads. You can imagine that would exceed the 3680W pretty easily. Breakers often don't trip until there is some pretty serious overcurrent going on. I remember inspecting the shore power lead one winter - The ends of the cable inside the plugs were black and the insulation had melted. Needless to say we chucked it away.

Oh that's quite handy! I assumed it was a low wattage one given you were saying you used it along with the heater and immersion.

What is the wattage of your kettle?

If you booked with Hoseasons, be careful. They often advertise a 'low deposit', which isn't actually the deposit. It's simply a holding payment, and the 'full deposit' is more. I got stung with this before, as I had booked Silver Haze and then needed to cancel. We had paid the £50 'low deposit' but discovered that to cancel, I would need to pay a further £100 as the deposit was in fact £150. It's a highly misleading practice, so I reported it to the Advertising Standards Authority as I don't think it really does them or the reputation of Broads holidays any favours in reality. In my case I said to Hoseasons that I will pay the extra £100 but that it is on the condition that I will never book another holiday with them. They chose to take the cash.

I've only met the Silverline team once around 7 years back, but we had popped in to their yard with Commodore 1 when she was two weeks old and most people hadn't seen her. We spent a bit of time chatting to Colin and Robert as well as looking at some of the fleet and their new build which was almost finished. We also invited them to take a look round Commodore and they were a bit sheepish but clearly very interested to see what the competition were up to. I remember Robert commented that the fitout was very much like a Porter & Haylett boat. Probably not surprising given who was working in the new build team at Ricko's at the time. We'd heard they were a bit difficult, but they didn't come across that way and while they said they certainly tried to avoid bookings from the sort of groups who would wreck the boats I don't think you can really blame them. Colin was clearly (and quite rightly) proud of the fleet and didn't want them getting trashed. We were an all-male party and they said booking wouldn't be a problem, just give them a call and mention the visit and they'll sort it.

30 already Simon? Well happy birthday

Indeed they are not under threat any time soon. There is currently no viable alternative to having some form of combustion engine aboard a Broads hireboat. I think the benefits of hybrids (whether that be series, parallel or even series parallel) are considerable now that the technology has matured and decent control systems are available off the shelf, but full electric is a long way off and hydrogen would be even more expensive.

I don't believe that to be the case.