So we have spent another few days at Kingfisher. During which time we had a slight scare with our batteries. They ran so low on Wednesday night that the inverter alarm went off. As it was about midnight we went to bed and decided to sort them out in the morning. I had to shut the fire down so it would go out so the heating pump wouldn’t keep coming on all night using up what power we had left.
Investigations the next day revealed that there wasn’t actually anything wrong with the batteries. The display on the solar panels was giving an incorrect ‘state of charge’ reading so we thought we had more power than we did and didn’t run the engine enough! Fortunately this problem has now rectified itself.
We had to wait until Friday (yesterday) for the glass to arrive for our internal windows and it was gone 1pm by the time John had fitted them. We are really pleased with them, they look a hundred times better than the original ones and are far more substantial too.
So with all the work completed (for a very reasonable price too) we made the 1 mile and 2 lock trip back to Sawley Marina. It had been raining all morning and the river which had been just in the green earlier was edging towards the amber again. We were glad to get back to Sawley before it went up any further.
Back in the marina I started to address the washing mountain. This was a two fold exercise – 1) to do the washing, obviously and 2) to use up the toxic water which our tank got filled up with at Trent Lock.
I say toxic water, it wasn’t dangerous it just tasted like TCP! Had we have been going to move on straight away when we got back on Monday we could have got it ourselves but we had to stay until Friday for the jobs to be completed. We were really low on water and we weren’t moored near the tap.
To get to the CRT tap would have entailed a tricky manouvre across the canal and back so when I spoke to the chaps at Kingfisher before we came home on Monday I asked if they could fill our tank from their tap at the end of the dry dock. They said they had a new hose and would do it for us.
God knows what went wrong but we ended up with a whole tank of this ‘TCP’ water! We have containers for storing extra water so Ken took one round to the CRT tap and got some fresh water for drinking, cleaning teeth and cooking. We had to use the rest up for washing, cleaning etc.
Last night after several days doing loads of washing, having showers and cleaning the boat it finally ran out! As it was dark and pissing with rain by this time we left it until this morning to re-fill the tank and thankfully it is all ok again now.
What else have we been up to? Apart from the usual shopping and going to the pub that is? Well, a happy consequence of letting the fire go out when the batteries were low was that we were able to clean the chimney and flue that afternoon. This is always a difficult job for me as there are so few times, especially in the winter, when I haven’t got a fire going and even if I let it go out over night it is still usually too hot to stick my arm in to clear the ash etc off the top of the back boiler!!
We have also been to the Dulux Decorator Centre (conveniently there is one in Long Eaton) and had a load of red Weathershield and cream Metalshield paint made up as we have a lot of painting jobs lined up for the Summer, deep joy!
It has transpired that our cratch cover will not be ready until the end of next week so we are going to make a start on our trip on Monday and have it fitted where ever we happen to be when it is ready. This is looking likely to be Willington. I have to say I will be really glad when it is on because I am getting fed up with getting the coal, mats and cushions in every time it rains, which recently has been nearly every day!
