And then there was even more Gosport (sorry, can't make that sound exciting) and some heater work

We had a very nice interlude looking after the fluffy barky thing again for a while. We took her to Mr Toddler's 88th birthday celebration and whilst we were drinking something nice and fizzy, the furry barky thing showed how unimpressed she was with her water bowl:

Attacking her new toy improved things for her though:

Around various hospital trips for Mr Toddler, we did a few bits of odd maintenance on the boat, used the bikes for a jailbreak from Gosport and met Captain Rae who is also in Haslar on board his Nordhavn 47, Albatross. In case you have forgotten, Colin is the recently retired ex BA 787 / 747 captain who flew Lightning (frightening) fighters in a former life with the RAF. How Mach 2 became 7 knots is a mystery. Anyway, these images demonstrate the kind of fun that he used to have:

Yes, he actually got paid to make all that noise and burn up all that kerosene. 

Maintenance news:

The old Webasto boiler that was "getting on" in years - like the captain and crew really. We had talked about replacing it as it is very mission critical during the winter. Oh, during Scottish summertime too. We had purchased a new nice Webasto Thermo Top Pro 120 after getting lots of advice from folks who repair the units as to which was better - Eberspaecher or Webasto. The nicer option of a Kabola heater was not possible - not enough space in the lazarette to fit one and it was unclear as to how the existing Webasto aircon system would behave if it had to run pressurised as needed by the Kabola boiler.

So, we enlisted the help of Biscuit again for the swap over. The original unit came out easily enough and just treated us to a bit of spilt diesel and coolant:

We found a couple of horrors with the installation too - a wire had been "draped" rather than run properly behind the unit and so it was getting nicely melted by the heat from the casing. You could not see it but one day it would have shorted and the fuse would have popped. Secondly, one of the elbows used in the coolant system plumbing had been "sawn off" by the original installer and the hose attached to it was very fortunate not to leak or come off. The little hose clip had done well to grip on the tiny bit of the elbow left.... Cowboy installation by some so called experts based on the Hamble...

The new boiler looked rather high tech in comparison and since it had no coolant or diesel to leak out of it, was allowed to lay on the saloon floor before fitting:

Luckily the new boiler fitted nicely on the old bracket and the bolt holes were identical. Thank you Mr Webasto for that. The plumbing changes were not tricky at all but two isolation valves were added into the cooling system to make removal easier in future when it needs service work. The wiring was a whole other game though. The info supplied by Webasto was not that helpful as we wanted to be able to fire up the boiler using the controls of the main aircon system, like we did with the old one. Getting clarity on how that could work took ages, phone calls to the supplier and lots of head scratching.  All to decide how to plug in a simple 24v DC feed from the aircon controller.

We also needed to feed power to one terminal connection on the new boiler to tell it to turn off at a lower temperature of around 55 to 60 degrees C when running, not the standard 80 C or so.

Amazingly, the new boiler fired up on the second attempt, Now we have to move the exhaust position (more on that in a later post) and check it is all working OK. However, some progress towards a better winter heating solution.  

with some nice neat wiring this time too: