Boaters update and battery replacements
A COUPLE of things came to mind while reading the latest edition of Towpath Talk!
‘Boaters urged to fill in new census survey' (News page 9, Issue 203, September 2022). I am annoyed at Canal & River Trust as they recently sent out water resource information to licence holders and buried the item at the bottom of their boaters’ update.
As I am registered with CRT to receive notices I received a copy of the boaters’ update, not the water resource document.
A survey of licence holders seems to only apply to those who have a current licence. There are many boaters who moor on adjoining waterways who may or may not obtain a CRT licence at any given time and many of these will obtain shortterm licences as and when required. The views of these ‘users’ do not seem to be important, yet these are often the people who are best placed to judge the trust's provision of services and performance.
If you look on the CRT website (www.canalrivertrust. org.uk), there is no mention of any alternative way to take part in the survey! Of course, by the time this reaches the readers it will be too late!
'Batteries on your boat' (Technical page 50, issue 203, September)
Ben Sutcliffe-Davies makes some valid points, especially in regard to boat safety and it is reassuring that he too can suffer some of the problems other boaters face. However, he states later on: “One last point is that if for any reason you need to replace a battery within a bank, it’s important to know that you cannot replace an individual one, unfortunately the whole set should be replaced.”
I accept it is good practice but unnecessary unless specific capacity is important. One battery in a bank may fail after five years, the others may last much longer, although their capacity may diminish. Provided the batteries are checked regularly and maintained, any failure can be dealt with and a battery replaced as required. By replacing the whole bank the capacity of the bank will be brought back to maximum, but it has presumably been operating for some time below this level?
In the present economic climate it might be somewhat shortsighted to insist an entire bank be replaced just because of one battery.
Any battery in a bank will accept charge up to its individual capacity and provided none of the cells have failed, the fact that one battery accepts more charge than another is of little consequence unless the bank is deeply discharged. This is going to be more important for continuous cruisers or those reliant on non-land based resources.