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too_tall

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Posts posted by too_tall

  1. That will take a moderately large pump Wheels - I would imagine an absolute minimum of 1liter per second at a reasonable pressure. Would make a much cleaner anchor locker however!. Maybe a 240v pump running off your inverter could be the trick to get the flow etc?

  2. There are plenty of drop over the side pumps which have attached hoses and power leads which work well if you don't fancy having one connected to a through hull. KM, the deck wash ones are normally salt water.... The bigger the better to be honest. The drop over the side ones can also double as a pump to drain any areas of the hull which are poorly enough designed that they don't drain to wherever the bilge pump can get the water. Or as an additional bilge pump should the leak be just a bit bigger than your existing pump can manage :D

  3. I guess that giving all assistance to your rescue is very wise. And also, I have yet to be stranded somewhere watching my ticket out of wherever somewhere happens to be turn into a wreck so maybe my calm and collected " I would not have used the EPRIB if cell communication were good " comment might have become a "F*** me, come and rescue me ASAP !!"

  4. When he has cell phone communication is an EPIRB really needing to be set off? Assuming he didn't set it off as a reaction to, say, his phone getting wet or going flat, he had already notified coastguard of his position and predicament, appeared to be not that far out ( water taxi responded being my indicator for this assumption ) and was not in imminent danger personally. 

     

    I would not have set off the EPIRB in this case ( unless the phone died ). What do others think?

  5. Rocketguides for Vanuatu and New Cal come highly recommended. I hope they are good - will be there in a coupla weeks ex Fiji. Looking through them having installed them on Monday, they have a lot of information on both navigation and also a "what to do" guide in the various places, lots of information to sift through.

     

    For fiji, use OpenCPN with the google earth "charts" as they are more accurate than most charts we had. Specially more so than the Navionics or Cmap ones for our plotter and on tablets which would have had us high and dry many a time.

     

    Nothing beats a keen set of eyes and a conservative speed through the reefs though. 

     

    On that note, does anyone know of OpenCPN charts for Vanuatu or New Cal ( be they proper charts or the google earth "charts"?)

  6. Agreed that generally things go to plan, but its amusing watching the Riverias all bouncing off each other. Full length keels and a full tidal current can be fun if there is a bit of a breeze also. I have had a couple of worried moments. Piece of cake when the tide is slack.

  7. Often I have seen people miss one air bleeder on a system when filling or recovering from an overheat, I have done it myself once or twice. Can be really hard to get the system to work if there is an airlock in it.

  8. That's one way to do it TT, or use a flow switch. It's a simple little paddle that moves with the water flow, but if the flow stops, the paddle comes back center and trips a magnetic switch.

     

    Harrytom, when you fit the new impellor, use so KY jelly to lube it up real good. Damage can be done to the impellor the first time you start up before it gets water to the pump.

     I had not thought of a flow switch. I have many of them in differing applications around the farms too. Very simple and effective. Not the requirement to know the exact pressure first. Only downside is a pressure sensor could ( if it has 2 setpoints or is analogue ) sense both low pressure ( no flow ) and overpressure, indicating potentially a blocked exchanger. Getting a bit pricey to go to an analogue type setup though.

  9. That amount of water going through a modern common rail diesel would cost a full set of injectors and a high pressure pump. 

     

    Scary.

     

    All our common rail diesels now have 5 micron filters on them, and we have also added large bowl water traps which are drained automatically. Were not cheap but injectors and pumps are certainly not at all cheap.

  10. 2 6v 100ah batteries are only half the capacity of a single 12v 200ah battery.

     

    That 12v battery will be very heavy!.

     

    I believe that the physical construction properties of the 12v batteries vrs 2 6v batteries will give the 6v in series bank a better lifespan if both systems are charged and maintained correctly. Also, as noted above, the 12v battery is going to be one heavy unit, unless you make up the ah rating with multiple parallel 12v batteries.

  11. On a related note, what sort of pressure is going to be on the output side of the pump? I am guessing only .2 bar or thereabouts? After all, there should be not much restriction through the exchanger or injection to exhaust. But no doubt there is enough that a suitably sensitive pressure switch could be installed to sound an alarm should the pump not be pumping sufficient water for whatever reason?

  12. Wheels, your missing one little point in your calculations - Alternators are not overly efficient. Is it not a rule of thumb that you need around 1HP per 25 amps? thats 750w input power to get out about 345w assuming 13.8v.

     

    I have some Balmar literature here which states their 70a alternator has a power draw of 2.8hp. 100a alternator 4hp and 120a 4.8hp.

     

    Assuming mounting a 25a alternator on the prop shaft on an inboard..

     

    You would need an impeller which could produce the sort of work output at a speed which could be nicely geared to get the alternator spinning at the correct speed. There will be further power losses in the gearing mechanism and also the bearing/glands and where the shaft enters the transmission your going to get power losses even in neutral. 

     

    All told, your probably going to be losing upwards of 3hp to gain 25 - 30 amps. How much speed would you lose if you had a 3hp outboard fighting the sails? Probably a quite noticeable amount. 

     

    With an outboard modified, you need to overcome the power losses in the 90 degree drive, and any bearing etc drag. Probably a similar amount of loss?

     

    The specifically designed units are going to be considerably more efficient I believe. Be they something like a rope towed impeller spinning a purpose built generation device on the transom or a "outboard leg" type which you can fold down. 

  13. Wheels, years ago I owned an Audi A8 with the W12 motor. I believe that you needed a post graduate degree in both Audi maintenance, and contortionisim (sp?) to change the filters on that thing.

     

    Unfortunately you also needed unlimited funding to own one as it made my prior Jaguar look very reliable. I also found that over a bit of time, it became a very bland and boring vehicle to drive. Didn't keep it long. 

  14. First things I would look at being you state the raw water pump appears to be operating.. ( although check volumes running through that too ).

    Is the circulation pump operating correctly? Its not got an airlock? pully sizes correct? or possibly the heat exchanger could be clogged?

  15. I have had a somewhat similar miss in a stationary diesel engine once - albeit a 300hp one attached to an effluent pump. It was a fuel problem, and it was the pressure switch in the supply pump was faulty and not turning the pump on when it should. At unloaded, the engine had sufficient fuel pressure reserve in the filters etc that the pump would supply fuel again before starvation occurred. Under load, at high RPM the supply pump never shut off. At low RPM, again, enough reserve. But at around .5 - .75lpm fuel demand resulted in the fuel supply pump still cycling off, but not sufficient reserve in the fuel system to keep fuel supplied to the injector pump.

     

    I would tend to lean away from it being a fueling issue, but it could be. A lot depends on just how those engines feed the injector pump. I have no experience with one so can't comment further than this. 

     

    As a suggestion, put your ear near the exhaust, hopefully you can hear if its a genuine miss vrs a sudden "shock" loading causing the perceived miss.

     

    Did you comment as to the regularity or frequency of the miss? I might have missed it if you did.

  16. Our dealings with L&B have been limited to a few small things, and never overly exciting.

     

    Navico have offered some pretty good support, including getting parts couriered to various pacific islands, and even tracking down one of their retail installers who was cruising within a few hours sailing time to come and offer some higher level technical assistance which could not easily be done over the phone with my father when I was not there - and that was to fix up a poor job by the installer who did the job here in NZ ( not at all related to the guy who come to sort out the issue ). Navico arranged this all at their expense. No doubt the installer who cocked up the job originally was asked to come to the party, but as far as customer service goes, at least with B&G and Simrad, Navico's locals are awesome. 

  17. Generally, yes, but its inefficient.

     

    Some switch mode chargers are a little unhappy with modified sine wave inverters however. I have not really ever used one, so have not had reason to look into this issue so others will have to assist.

     

    Phone and laptop - get a 12 volt charger. Drill might be harder to source, or very expensive to source, a 12v charger.Phone chargers ( assuming it will charge off USB ) are a dime a dozen on DX.com or still pretty cheap at supercheap, JBhifi etc.

    • Upvote 1
  18. Wheels, unfortunately the cost of the fuel is only a fraction of the cost of the overall transport and production cost. 

     

    Everyone keeps on telling me that the reduction in the price of fuel must be helping us farmers a lot. Really? On the farms expenditure I was analyzing yesterday, we have spent for the year to date, $11500 on fuel give or take. Thats out of a total expenses figure of $1,070,000 give or take. ( This includes interest and tax, but its something we all have to pay )

     

    If fuel doubled in price, thats only going to make the overall expenses figure to lift to 1,081,500 or there abouts. Around 1% Sure there will be a little bit of flow on from suppliers who may lift their prices, but again, their costs are not overly highly affected by fuel prices.

     

    Even transport operators, for whom fuel is a more significant part of their expenses will be finding not more than 5% or  so changes in their true expenses I suspect, by the time they have paid for maintenance, road user charges, wages, fixed costs, office staffing and operating costs, plant replacement allowance etc. 

     

    Yes, if would be nice to see prices drop every time fuel prices dropped, but prices don't always leap up at the first fuel price increase either in my experience. 

  19. we have an Inreach Explorer Screen edition.

     

    You need the screen edition IMO - the phone connection is flaky at best, and it also is another thing to go wrong. If your phone was drowned, you would like to still have more or less full functionality.

     

    They are absolute pigs to actually send a message on - very, very poor user interface.

     

    They are good for 160 character text messages. You can have a full conversation with them, but remember to index your messages as they dont come in matching the order in which they were sent. Inreach need to modify the software and their website to allow message spanning - such as cell phones do - to allow much longer messages to be sent easily as opposed to a hard limit of 160 characters. 

     

    Only concern is that should the unit fail, you would like to have a means of communicating to your family that your actually OK but your tracker has failed and not to panic. 

  20. Deal Extreme sell the full range of UniT gear - or you can buy them from the TM reseller who buys them from DX initially. Or, you could go into Jaycar and pay about five times the DX price but you get full NZ warranty and CGA protection. 

     

    I have not had one fail on me yet apart from having had one I dropped in the bilge of a yacht with a rather leaky gland. That killed it outright.

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