Sorry about the lack of pictures in this post. I have turned off lots of plugins on our website to try to get to the bottom of the spurious posts promoting gambling. At the moment there is not the facility to upload pictures. There might also be some other things you are used to that aren’t there, hopefully all will be restored to normal when we get to the bottom of what is going on.
A visit to Oleanna was required to check on the central heating. I am able to remotely monitor our electricity use on the boat using the Victron VRM facility. When I last visited the boat I managed to get the shore power connected. So I turned on the Alde central heating boiler with it set to to work on electricity only (gas use disabled) and the thermostat set to very low. With the weather getting colder over the Christmas period I expected to see some shore power use as the boiler kicked in but there had been none.
A visit was required to see what was going on. I caught a train from Scarborough at 06:48 on New Years day. A change of train at York and another at Sheffield got me to East Midlands Parkway at 10:45. Oleanna was very cold when I got there. The domestic water system had been drained beforehand but I hadn’t been able to completely drain the calorifier (hot water tank). I didn’t expect any burst pipes or leaks but it would be nice to keep the temperature inside a bit above freezing.
The control panel for the heating is inside the electric cupboard. There is a temperature sensor outside of the cupboard but I could see that the cable from this had somehow become disconnected from the back of the control panel. So the heating used its built in temperature sensor instead which of course is inside the electric cupboard. Inside the cupboard there is also the inverter, mppt solar power controller, internet router and a Victron Venus GX (which all the systems connect to. This it enables the remote monitoring). All these things create a bit of heat, not much but collectively enough to keep the temp sensor of the boiler above its cut in point.
I reconnected the cable, after having to dig out the Alde manual to see where to connect it. and the heating came on. Hooray!
While I was there I started the engine and ran it up to temperature. I had to keep a close eye on the engine temperature, Oleanna is out of the water so the skin tank cooling will be much reduced. After about an hour the temp gauge had just about reached the normal operating temperature and I stopped the engine.
I went to check the shore power connection that we had plugged into. The plug was in a different socket to the one I had left it in a few weeks ago. There was 70kwh remaining on the meter. This was less than had been showing on the original meter but as we hadn’t paid anything for any electricity I could hardly complain. And anyway, with it being New Year’s Day there was no one to complain to. I thought that 70kwh would probably be enough for now. Famous last words but that’s another story for another day.
The very nice cafe at the marina was closed which was a shame so I headed back to the station where the buffet was also closed. Good job I’d taken sandwiches although I could have done with a hot drink. No catering trolley on the train either but there was time at Sheffield to visit the buffet there for a nice cup of tea and a mince pie.