Retraced steps and Now! have FREE HOT WATER!

On the Sunday we treated ourselves to a Sunday lunch.

We relaxed on the Monday morning before we headed upstream to Beale Park again.. These are 24 hour moorings, but we just go between Pangbourne and Beale as we like the area.

It is great for Tooty and also has a bit of everything we like. Train, on our own, shopping, peace and quiet, but what will make us move out of the area is water..

We did some washing as we had enough water at the minute, and can you believe it we did it without running the engine.  It soon got nice and dry in this warm weather..
We got a great low level view of the Dakota as it flew low over us.

Del did some other jobs and one of those was to look at how we hot up the water.. Derwent6 is now very self sufficient and we now only have to use diesel to heat the hot water..  Del wanted to try and see if the lithium's batteries could heat the hot water using the immersion heater, and first fitted a 1Kw element. Del then had to change some wiring around the immersion as it all use to run only off shoreline, and when the travel power generator was on.

It was switched over to the invertor side and then tried. It coped very well and did take 10% out of the batteries, but only had to be on for 15 minutes to make the water piping hot.. This is amazing!
You can also see that the element only took 884watts and 26.9A

It means that now we don't have to run the engine for anything except cruising. The saving on diesel will be incredible and we are saving the environment. We said the lithium batteries would change our lives and its proving to be the case. The solar panels helped to recover the batteries very quickly, as the batteries charge much quicker than lead acid batteries.. Del now wants to work on the tumble drier as that takes a lot greater load. They are getting better and use different drying techniques which is bringing down the Kilowatts they use.. Ours uses 2800Kw which is a bit close to the limit of the 3000Kw invertor, because if anything else comes on (like the fridge) it could overload the invertor, which will be expensive.. The good thing about this BMS system is that we can look at every load added, and if it gets close just turn it off..