So What Is Going On At Herbert Woods

[andyg]

7 hours ago, kpnut said:

Yes, a group from the Perse school in Cambridge, first outing since covid started, so lots of very excited youngsters.  I noticed them and sent a message to my sister who works there to confirm they’d arrived safely!!!! She wasn’t sure where they were heading, but thought maybe under the bridge. They have camping gear stowed on board and will have prearranged fields for camping with various landowners. They’ve used the campsite at salhouse before now. 

Hire a fleet of boats to go camping!!! Different I guess !! Hope they all enjoy themselves. 

[Mouldy]

3 hours ago, tjg1677 said:

LOL....... 

Did 10 years with grey funnel line, never did get my head around the rules of uckers, noms yes, uckers no, too many different versions - devonport, rosyth, wafu even wardroom. I'll get my coat griff.......

No doubt all versions ended the same way if the game was won and one player still had yet to start though.  Just doesn’t bear thinking about!  

[Vaughan]

13 hours ago, andyg said:

The Internet has never been a kind place so if folk are really that easily offended maybe the Internet isn't for them

Yes, I guess you are probably right, Andy.  As it happens, this is the only Internet forum I have ever been involved in.

How very sad indeed, that bad manners and the deliberate causing of hurtful offence should have become regarded as normal.  I wonder how today's schoolchildren are going to grow up, if their elders (and betters?) cannot maintain basic standards of communication.

[BrundallNavy]

7 hours ago, tjg1677 said:

LOL....... 

Did 10 years with grey funnel line, never did get my head around the rules of uckers, noms yes, uckers no, too many different versions - devonport, rosyth, wafu even wardroom. I'll get my coat griff.......

 

 

.

Gets even more interesting when you have a “Mixe”

[Roy]

I have to say watching the news this morning I thought to myself I’m glad I haven’t got any children to grow up in this World it’s crazy at the minute human race is getting greedy it will be the downfall of the human race 

[andyg]

32 minutes ago, Roy said:

I have to say watching the news this morning I thought to myself I’m glad I haven’t got any children to grow up in this World it’s crazy at the minute human race is getting greedy it will be the downfall of the human race 

I 100% agree. 

[Mouldy]

17 minutes ago, Roy said:

I have to say watching the news this morning I thought to myself I’m glad I haven’t got any children to grow up in this World it’s crazy at the minute human race is getting greedy it will be the downfall of the human race 

Sadly, as a race, we continue to not learn from previous mistakes.  Whilst I can empathise with your comment, I dare say that there have been times in the past that have instigated similar comments from others - wars, The Suez crisis, the Cold War, Cuba all spring immediately to mind.

The trouble now is that news and fake news is spread so quickly due to social media and modern communication methods, sometimes we can be so easily be misled.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s no doubt that the troubles in Eastern Europe are very real, but crises in other parts of the world have been going on for years and not gaining media attention because they have little bearing on us.  Because we are being affected in so many ways by Ukraine, through fuel prices and availability, availability and prices of some food stuffs, the profile of the problem is being raised.

Lets also remember the days when the British used to wander into a country, stick a flag in the ground and claim it as theirs.  Was that any different to what other countries are doing now?  There has always been greed, whether it is in the form of money, territory or anything else.  Class systems have existed for years and they will continue to exist.  How some folk get what they do for what they do compared to hard working individuals in certain sectors of society, who do essential work for minimal reward remains a mystery to me, but it’s no good me worrying about it.  We’re lucky to be living in a country where we flick a switch and lights come on and turn a tap and water comes out.

For those things, we should be very grateful.

[andyg]

2 hours ago, Vaughan said:

Yes, I guess you are probably right, Andy.  As it happens, this is the only Internet forum I have ever been involved in.

How very sad indeed, that bad manners and the deliberate causing of hurtful offence should have become regarded as normal.  I wonder how today's schoolchildren are going to grow up, if their elders (and betters?) cannot maintain basic standards of communication.

A sign of the times Vaughan I'm afraid. We've had a couple of months of illness at home with one thing and another and I've recently retired. I thought to myself yesterday that I'm spending way to much time on line. I really need to be more productive with my time. The weather is improving so il get on with finishing my garden. I've often wondered if the spats that happen on here would happen if we were all sitting around a table. It's so easy to miss understand and take out of context what members write/ post. I'm sure nobody intends to be hurtful or rude. 

[Ray]

24 minutes ago, andyg said:

It's so easy to miss understand and take out of context what members write/ post. I'm sure nobody intends to be hurtful or rude. 

This is the 100% most important message to keep in mind on the internet 👍

[addicted]

I believe to say that we used to march into a country, stick a stick in the ground  and claim it as ours is perhaps a little unfair to our ancestors. With the "stick" we often brought civilisation, religion and industrial education. Yes we gained something from the exercise too but that's the nature of investment and is  still today what makes the world go round. and I think we often left the country we had occupied better off than when we found it. A bit of a moot point I know. but I do think our forebears  get a huge amount of  denegration  and they are after all what made this country of our such a great nation. Yes a lot of what was done then is unacceptable now but it was the way of the world. and a lot of what is done today is very unacceptable too.

 

Carole

[YnysMon]

30 minutes ago, addicted said:

I believe to say that we used to march into a country, stick a stick in the ground  and claim it as ours is perhaps a little unfair to our ancestors. With the "stick" we often brought civilisation, religion and industrial education. Yes we gained something from the exercise too but that's the nature of investment and is  still today what makes the world go round. and I think we often left the country we had occupied better off than when we found it. A bit of a moot point I know. but I do think our forebears  get a huge amount of  denegration  and they are after all what made this country of our such a great nation. Yes a lot of what was done then is unacceptable now but it was the way of the world. and a lot of what is done today is very unacceptable too.

 

Carole

Unfortunately, the claims that we were bringing civilisation, religion and education were often a veneer for the greedy to just land grab and a general subjugation of the population. Although we have fake news etc. at present, the 'story' that was presented in the past was usually the point of view of those in power. 

[Oddfellow]

On 05/04/2022 at 12:30, annv said:

Hi That's why yards use lead acid as they are the most cost effective,  they do need a certain amount of maintance ie topping up the with distilled water but with engineers on site , Advanced regulators can be fitted to any boat at little cost, they only require wiring alterations and will halve the the engine running time to  recharge the battery's saving fuel, wear and pollution. John

I think you're over simplifying this. 

Replacing all the batteries on a boat with AGM variants and upgrading the charging system with decent regulators that will last a long time is not a low-cost option. Anything but. You could be looking at £1500 per vessel and whilst there are obvious advantages, it's an expensive solution to a problem that would barely exist if the batteries were properly treated and monitored. 

[Oddfellow]

On 05/04/2022 at 14:17, FlyingFortress said:

So all this talk about batteries I thought I had better check my own.

3x domestic plus one engine start battery.

Each individually disconnected, drop tested,6x covers each on the 2 that are not sealed removed, level checked,12 covers replaced,4 batteries re connected and tools put away.

Probably 10 mins max 15.

Not too hard for an engineer to do prior to sending a boat out on hire

Took me longer to type this post ..,. possibly 😁

You make it all sound so simple. 15 minutes doing this work is 15 minutes. When an engineer has another 20 boats to do, what's 15minutes x 20? 5 Hours in old money. How viable does that sound now? Not convinced?  The boat is vacated by 10am and needs to be engineered, repaired and cleaned by 2pm. That's a 4 hour window. Perhaps you are now beginning to understand the problem. 

Let me compound the problem for you. Every time you loosen the nut on the battery terminal and remove from the post to do a test, you are weakening the post and the terminal. You may easily damage the post and terminal too meaning that you can't get a good electrical connection when you next reconnect it. This leads to a failure point. Maybe the engineer notices its not nipping up properly and tightens further, bending the clamp bolt in the process and further damaging the post and connection. Maybe the terminal snaps and he has to fetch another from stores that's a 5 minute walk away. 

All these things are not only possible but highly likely. 

It's not as simple as you think. Nowhere near, 

[rightsaidfred]

10 minutes ago, Oddfellow said:

You make it all sound so simple. 15 minutes doing this work is 15 minutes. When an engineer has another 20 boats to do, what's 15minutes x 20? 5 Hours in old money. How viable does that sound now? Not convinced?  The boat is vacated by 10am and needs to be engineered, repaired and cleaned by 2pm. That's a 4 hour window. Perhaps you are now beginning to understand the problem. 

Let me compound the problem for you. Every time you loosen the nut on the battery terminal and remove from the post to do a test, you are weakening the post and the terminal. You may easily damage the post and terminal too meaning that you can't get a good electrical connection when you next reconnect it. This leads to a failure point. Maybe the engineer notices its not nipping up properly and tightens further, bending the clamp bolt in the process and further damaging the post and connection. Maybe the terminal snaps and he has to fetch another from stores that's a 5 minute walk away. 

All these things are not only possible but highly likely. 

It's not as simple as you think. Nowhere near, 

Nothing in life is simple, surely a bit of time spent in the yard on basic maintanence even if it requires an extra body is more cost effective than constant call outs plus the benefit of customer satisfaction, there again you loose the income from additionial sales of fuel.

Fred

[annv]

Hi Batteries do not require topping up checking once a week , twice a year is ample ,i check mine once a year at end of season,and leave on the boat connected, i also have a solar panel to maintain voltage so i dont need to remove or connect batteries to mains trickle/maintainer charging, yards may remove all the batteries to a battery shop which would be easier to check and trickle charge over winter,then at end of winter they would disconnect from buss bar and then let them stand for 24/48hrs then check specific gravity and voltage to ascertain battery's performance before replacing on the boat, perhaps Vaughan could give us best practice that yards might/do follow. lead acid batteries may not last as long as AGM but at half the cost they only have to last over half as long together with the scrap price being higher when life span is finished to be more cost efficient for the business. John

[Wussername]

Funny things batteries. Be at a car or a boat, as soon as you try to start it you know, you just know things are not as they should be. Last gasp, it starts. You don't need to test it, you don't need an engineer to do a drop test (whatever that is) you just know. 

I believe that any engineer, on any boatyard, worth his salt, knows exactly the state of the boat or boats that he is responsible for, and that includes battery's.

I also believe that some boat yards do not carry out preventive maintenance, planned maintenance. Well it is not an airplane is it? Not going to crash at 27000 ft, is it?

On demand seems to be the way to go.

It is a trip from Potter to Ranworth, by road, by van, to fit a new battery, or a recharged battery. In the scheme of things not that expensive. 

 

 

[Oddfellow]

51 minutes ago, rightsaidfred said:

Nothing in life is simple, surely a bit of time spent in the yard on basic maintanence even if it requires an extra body is more cost effective than constant call outs plus the benefit of customer satisfaction, there again you loose the income from additionial sales of fuel.

Fred

Very cynical, Fred. Let me assure you that there's bugger-all profit to be had from fuel sales. 

And in no way was my explanation some kind of justification for doing a bad job. BUT, it is a likely reason that a bad job can be achieved because the pressures to work to a very tight schedule are very real and let me assure you that a customer mouthing off in reception with a queue behind them because their boat might be 15 minutes beyond the time they think it should be ready impacts upon all the staff and other holidaymakers that witness it. 

The point is that things happen. Sometimes things aren't always checked as fully as we might like, sometimes not at all. To err is human. 

I really don't think most of you get the pressures of working in or running a hire fleet. Comments like this cement this. 

In an ideal world, nothing would go wrong. But this isn't an ideal world no matter how much we might demand it to be. 

Many change over days are a matter of fire-fighting problems. LOADS of customers come back and report problems that have existed since the morning after they took the boat but never reported them. These need investigating and repairing and all this stuff takes time and time is the one thing you can only get more of by paying more staff and that is an immediate impact on the financial position of the company, more so now that NI has gone up. 

It all sounds so simple from the comfort of an armchair. 

 

[grendel]

how many of the 'dead' batteries swapped out from boats are actually dead, and not just discharged? they will get taken back to the yard, given a good charge, and only then get replaced or scrapped if bad.

[Oddfellow]

22 minutes ago, annv said:

Hi Batteries do not require topping up checking once a week , twice a year is ample ,i check mine once a year at end of season,and leave on the boat connected, i also have a solar panel to maintain voltage so i dont need to remove or connect batteries to mains trickle/maintainer charging, yards may remove all the batteries to a battery shop which would be easier to check and trickle charge over winter,then at end of winter they would disconnect from buss bar and then let them stand for 24/48hrs then check specific gravity and voltage to ascertain battery's performance before replacing on the boat, perhaps Vaughan could give us best practice that yards might/do follow. lead acid batteries may not last as long as AGM but at half the cost they only have to last over half as long together with the scrap price being higher when life span is finished to be more cost efficient for the business. John

Hire boat batteries take a beating every night. Engines and Alternators can do 20+ hours running a week and if something in that power circuit goes faulty in all that work, all that vibration, things can happen. It's very different from a private boat that might get only 60 hours running a year by someone who's gotta cough up if something goes wrong. 

Monitoring the electrolyte levels in batteries is a good weekly indicator of how the system is performing and can give you an early-warning of a failure in the battery or, indeed, the charging system. 


Running a boat is very different from running a hire fleet. VERY different. 

 

[OldBerkshireBoy]

20 minutes ago, annv said:

 perhaps Vaughan could give us best practice that yards might/do follow. lead acid batteries may not last as long as AGM 

Pretty sure he has with a spreadsheet in a previous thread.

[SwanR]

I’ve stayed away from commenting on this topic but … are most of the contributors boat owners or boat hirers? If you haven’t hired for a long time then it’s a little unfair to be making generalisations about how hirers use their boats and what they expect and what they are told on handover. 

The daytime and emergency phone numbers are always pointed out during the handover. And we are always asked for any issues on return. 

With a very busy yard like Richardson’s I’m never quite sure how much running time the engine will have had on takeover day or whether it has been hooked up to shore power if the boat has a connection. So we make sure that certainly on the second day we get a good few hours cruising time. 

When we took SR1 last month we had no problems at all. Only went as far as How Hill on day one. No problems at all with the heating and hot water. 

[FlyingFortress]

1 hour ago, Oddfellow said:

You make it all sound so simple. 15 minutes doing this work is 15 minutes. When an engineer has another 20 boats to do, what's 15minutes x 20? 5 Hours in old money. How viable does that sound now? Not convinced?  The boat is vacated by 10am and needs to be engineered, repaired and cleaned by 2pm. That's a 4 hour window. Perhaps you are now beginning to understand the problem. 

Let me compound the problem for you. Every time you loosen the nut on the battery terminal and remove from the post to do a test, you are weakening the post and the terminal. You may easily damage the post and terminal too meaning that you can't get a good electrical connection when you next reconnect it. This leads to a failure point. Maybe the engineer notices its not nipping up properly and tightens further, bending the clamp bolt in the process and further damaging the post and connection. Maybe the terminal snaps and he has to fetch another from stores that's a 5 minute walk away. 

All these things are not only possible but highly likely. 

It's not as simple as you think. Nowhere near, 

Andy please

I never for one moment suggested that every boat needed a drop test every time it went out on hire.

I was merely asking does such a thing as planned maintenance exists in a large fleet.

Far be it for me to suggest a PM schedule but surely the batteries can be routinely tested and certainly before early hirers go out.

I was asking Vaughan what his PM schedule was and did someone have to be in a position of responsibility to sign off these boats fit for purpose.

Yes I do understand that it is sometimes a box ticking excercise but you are also protecting yourself against liability.

Townsend Thorenson were charged with corporate manslaughter over the Herald incident and I do fear for the outcome of the NBD death at GTY a couple of years ago.

As one who turned down a job at MAIB I only hope that there is a good quality investigation but I don't hold up much hope.

I will continue my discourse on another post as what I am about to say is controversial and is sure to be deleted.

[Vaughan]

1 hour ago, Wussername said:

I believe that any engineer, on any boatyard, worth his salt, knows exactly the state of the boat or boats that he is responsible for, and that includes battery's.

There is no scientific proof or explanation for that statement.

But I think it is absolutely true!

They also say, in the business, that the maximum number of boats that one man can know intimately, is 25. That is why yards like Richardsons and Woods are split into sections on turnaround days, where each section has its own boats and its own staff.

[floydraser]

6 hours ago, addicted said:

I believe to say that we used to march into a country, stick a stick in the ground  and claim it as ours is perhaps a little unfair to our ancestors. With the "stick" we often brought civilisation, religion and industrial education. Yes we gained something from the exercise too but that's the nature of investment and is  still today what makes the world go round. and I think we often left the country we had occupied better off than when we found it. A bit of a moot point I know. but I do think our forebears  get a huge amount of  denegration  and they are after all what made this country of our such a great nation. Yes a lot of what was done then is unacceptable now but it was the way of the world. and a lot of what is done today is very unacceptable too.

Agreed. It was a different era and I'm pretty sure we weren't the first to walk into another country, but someone else with a large navy did so and it became clear that if we didn't, there wouldn't be anywhere left to walk into. 

Also, back then there would have been nothing like the global economy there is now, where existing trade is taken into account. Like oil and gas... nuff said.

 

[Vaughan]

1 hour ago, annv said:

perhaps Vaughan could give us best practice that yards might/do follow.

The short answer is that batteries taken off a boat are charged on a bus bar for 24 hrs and then disconnected and "rested" just like your Sunday joint when you take it out of the oven.  Only then can it be tested.  The best test for a lead/acid battery is specific gravity, with a hydrometer.  This will tell you at once if you have a dead cell.  This test can even be done when the battery is in use.  Drop testing is not good for a domestic battery.

Nowadays, boats with shore power can be left on charge when moored and most yards in winter usually had a system of charging batteries on the boats in rotation, using portable chargers plugged into the bank.

Water levels should really be checked every week as hire boat batteries are being "cycled" - that is discharged and recharged every day and this rapid charging causes them to "gas off" and lose water.  Sometimes though, there is no time for this.

Batteries are also designed for a number of "cycles" and this is usually marked on them.  Most batteries will accept about 400 to 600 cycles.  After that, they will die.

This is why the batteries on a hire boat doing 25 week seasons, will only last 3 years.