Sitting out the high levels

Blimey we were sitting in bed feeling very smug after moving yesterday. It was tipping it down and doing those locks today would have been a nightmare. It just never seemed to stop. It just went from heavy to light, as we watched the water levels come up. In fact it was strange as we had five widebeams come past us in the bad weather. maybe this was because it put more water in the canal for them to move and there is less chance of meeting another narrowboat.
We then had a swan attacking a young Canadian goose next to us, but it did get away in the end.

Our next trial on the batteries was the slow cooker. It's 120 watts, but is on for 7 hours, and with no solar, so this was a good test..
We watched the volts and percentage drop on the controller, as we had to use lights and other electrical items as we were moored in a very dark and dingy place on this horrid day.
When we went to bed it got as low as 42% and the voltage was still holding at 26 volts.

In the morning it had dropped to 36% and 25.8 volts with the fridge going overnight, the lowest we have let it drop. So the lesson was don't use the slow cooker when we are not cruising or its not a nice day for solar.. This is called boat management and you have to learn what you can and can't do in certain conditions..

So it was back to running the engine, which seemed weird as we hadn't have to run it while static for quite a while. We thought it would charge quickly, but this wasn't the case. The solar panels still weren't producing much and the 60amp alternator has been restricted by the Buck Boost to feed the lithium batteries 25amps as they can't take 60 amps, so it took three hours to get them back to 80%.
The batteries perform better between 60% to 80% and even with the little solar coming in the batteries were showing infinite and even slowly charging again.

The following day the weather still wasn't good and we fancied a walk into town, but didn't fancy getting wet!. So we had no choice but to sit tight again. Al was going down to Kent on the Friday and the train was easy from Theale, so we moved Derwent6 on to some 14 day moorings so we could stay another couple of days..
Al saw friends Bernie and Sarah as on the Saturday Al & Sarah went to see the show 'The Ballroom Boys' at Bromley.... they had a fantastic time..

Del stayed with Derwent6 and did a few jobs that needed to be done. First he checked the Crankshaft nut for movement again and from the picture you could see things hadn't moved which was a relief.

Its next check will now be at 600 hours (fingers crossed)  unless any unusual noises are heard. He also fitted the new timer boost switch to the immersion heater so we could have the hot water on for fifteen minutes.

The great thing was we could do this from the lithium batteries and solar so free hot water!
Al got back on Sunday and we caught up on things over a beer and made our plans to move tomorrow as the weather looked ok.