We’ve waited patiently for our credit card statement to come through for December (ouch!), before renewing our Canal and River Trust Licence. Just a standard Canal and River licence for us again this year even though we plan to spend an amount of time on EA waters. But that won’t be enough to justify a gold licence.
With a rise of 9% from last year we obviously wanted to leave it as long as possible, but still be able to get an online prompt payment discount.
Mick has been talking to a man about new batteries and if we can get a super cheap train ticket next week we’ll pop down to see Oleanna and check measurements in the ‘Shed’ cupboard so we can see what options we have and if we’ll require any wood work doing.
So Oleanna is all ready for the New Year, we’ll print out her licence to pop in the window on our next visit.
Comments
Thank you to those who have been making comments on the blog recently, we really like hearing from people. However since sometime in November we seem to be getting mostly anonymous comments. Only one or two have come from specific people via wordpress and all we have to work from is an IP address. I’ve worked out a few people from previous comments, but not many. We don’t mind getting anonymous comments, but it would great if you could pop your name at the end. Thank you.
Hope everyone enjoys the New Year festivities however you celebrate or not. We’ll be enjoying a nice bottle of wine at home with Tilly and a Salmon en croute (need to start emptying the freezer!). Depending on our colds we may not manage to reach midnight.
Thank you for following our travels through 2023 and we look forward to sharing more with you in 2024.
Salmon in a parcel on a bed of leeks and mascarpone last night. Tonight for New year’s Eve beef Wellington, crispy sliced potatoes and asparagus. Sue has kept me locked in the kitchen, but she did make the prawn cocktails!! The Cleddau crew wish you a Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to the Cleddau crew. Sounds like you are keeping very well fed
Happy New Year
Dave (scouts)
Thanks Dave Happy New Year
Mick are you implying those expensive 23V lithium batteries need replacing already??
Tom & Jan
Tom. Back when Oleanna was being built the builder suggested lithium batteries from a company called RELiON. They seemed good at the time but you may remember we had supply problems. Last summer one of the three 50ah 24v batteries went faulty. Our builder had never used RELiON again after our supply problems so they had no relationship with them. I looked at claiming under the guarantee and it turned out in the small print that the 10 year guarantee worked like this: a failure during years one to three would result in getting a foc replacement. A failure during years four to six would get you a 20% discount off a new battery. A failure from year seven to ten would get you a 10% discount off a new one. Their new prices hadn’t fallen as much as others in the lithium market so a new battery with 10% off would be more expensive than one supplied from elsewhere.
So we decided to limp on with 100Ah for the rest of the summer and decide what to do at our leisure. There is a well renowned facebook group “12 volt boating group” which has a lot of useful info and some recommended suppliers. So I have found a 24v 230Ah battery available for about a third of the price we paid for our 3 original batteries. We could keep the two batteries that are still working and add the new one to the bank but there is no access to the Battery Managment System on the old batteries so that might be problematical. So I am going to ditch the two remaining 8 year old batteries and replace them with two of the new ones giving us redundancy if one fails (thanks Paul Balmer) and a massive increase in capacity which will be very nice. I might do a blog post about it when I come to do the fitting.
Mick
Just testing – I don’t understand how someone can comment anonymously, or at least without an email, as that is demanded before it will enable the Reply button. OTOH, I did post a comment on your previous blog entry which did not appear so I was wondering whether I had done so anon’ly but I cannot see how. So really this is just to test whether it happens again.
Mike T
Hi Mike, thank you for testing. Today we’ve changed the comments to require a name and email. This is what used to happen but for some reason it stopped.
Which blog post did you comment on recently? We have to approve every comment before it is published. Pip