Its heating up

My first meeting with Gary the heating guy on Saturday was very fruitful.  I now understand how it all fits together and it was refreshing to meet someone who was laid back about how things could work and not try to sell the whole end to end solution.

So it turns out that the build should be relatively straight forward.  We calculated that a boiler (system) of about 25 to 30 KW should suffice and a twin feed tank.  However,  I was surprised to hear of course that a fire with a back boiler should feed the second coil in the hot water tank but would could not be controlled.  What this means is that there is no way to switch off the back boiler when the hot water in the tank reaches temperature.  It will switch off the gas boiler but no secondary controls.  This is an interesting risk to have.  It means that the back boiler on the fire may ultimately boiler the hot water tank.   I will need to think through that.  I also find that hard to believe and will look into it.

The second coil in the tank is designed to be fed by solar power.  So in theory that would never be able to heat the tank to a dangerous temperature.    But someone must have cracked this problem.  I will look into it.

I can also put my radiators in zones with controllers to have them independently run.   I am yet to decide if this is useful.  I am not sure why I would only want to hear part of the ship and then let the rest freeze.

The rest of the day was spent sorting the deck.  Yawn.  Not much to tell there other than the amount of scrap metal is far more than I thought.

Garbage compacting

I have to admit that it has been quiet for a while in terms of boat activity.  There has been plenty going on, just not really by me.  Dave has progressed well and all the windows in the wheelhouse should be cleaned and put back in by this weekend when I go down.  The chain holes in the windlass are now covered as are all the old porthole holes. 

The only things for Dave to do then is to fit the portholes.  However, the porthole cleaning job is taking a long time.  They have been unable to get the screws out of some and they need to be machined out.  Until that happens they cannot clean 5 of them and so we are a little stuck.

Started on the deck clearance last time.  It was taking yonks to break down all the scrap into manageable chunks.  Luckily the neighbours had taken all the wood and so that has reduce the volume considerably.  Saturday's job will be to have it all broken down into moveable bits.  Boring work but necessary.

This will then leave us in a position that we can start to rebuild the wheelhouse.  Electrics, heating piping and so on.  Yea!  Finally some construction work.