Wednesday, March 14, 2018

A soaking indoors

You know those farcical scenes where the man does something to the plumbing and a powerful jet of water shoots him in the eye, and he tries to hold his thumb over the leak and it sprays everywhere? Well that's me that is.

The little drain plug screw in our Morco water heater sheared off as I tried to remove it when we winterised the boat in November. Doing something about it has had to wait until we were back on board, ie. now. The plug has been dripping since we turned on the water and we've had to put a jug under it to catch the drips. So this afternoon, I attempted to fix it. I won't bore you with the details except to say that only a fool would remove that plug while the system was under pressure. The box of matches in the cutlery drawer will no doubt dry out eventually. Of course I didn't have the proper replacement screw to plug the hole again, but a 5mm stainless screw wrapped in PTFE tape seems to have done the trick.

I don't manage to cock up all of my diy jobs. In the last 24hrs I've installed my smart new solar panel tilting stand and replaced our old 100watt solar controller with an uprated one ready for the new second panel which lies waiting at home. It all seems to be working ok.

Tonight we renew our attempts not to come last in the Reindeer pub quiz in Banbury. The cruise down here from Cropredy was fine despite the canal being alarmingly high. At least the strong current of a couple of days ago has stopped. I guess CRT had all sorts of sluices open to dump the excess water, hence the current.

Unsurprisingly the canal is closed at Nell Bridge above Aynho because of the height of the Cherwell there. Boaters coming up from that direction have told us of ferocious currents through the narrow lift bridge holes. Luckily we don't plan to go that far.

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