Battening down the hatches

The forecast doesn't look very nice for the next few days, so we've taken care to do our fresh food shopping and the like before the rain and gales arrive. We've got enough bread, veg and so on to keep going until the weekend, though if the possible break on Friday turns up, we'll nip out again then.

Unfortunately, the turkey will be ready for collection on Saturday, presently expected to be wet and windy, but that's just unfortunate, I guess.

My other achievement this morning was to change the sender for the water tank gauge successfully. Some may recall that the gauge stopped working a few weeks ago, and Peter Mason arranged for us to be sent a replacement sender, as the display part was still functioning. It has a Hep2O type connection to the T off the supply pipe between the stop tap and the pump, so it was a matter of turning off the stop tap, turning off the pump and opening a tap to run the pressure out of the system. Then I closed the tap, positioned a disposable nappy to collect any water that seeped out and removed the old sender.

In the event, no water escaped at all, and fitting the new sender and connecting the electric plug to it was straightforward. Open the stop tap, turn on the power and away we went. We had already filled the water tank to be ready to calibrate the new sender. This was a matter of running a bit of water out to empty the filler pipe, then turning an adjusting screw under the cover plate of the sender until the gauge just read full; empty is preset at the factory.

So we have a functioning water gauge once more. Peter tells me that this is the first water gauge he's had fail without being frozen, so I guess we were just unlucky.

The rest of the day has been spent safely indoors, reading and stuff. T-mobile have just texted me to say that I've used 80% of my data allowance, which is a bit odd as we're just at the start of the month and the modem doesn't show any unusual usage. The website is presently inaccessible, so I suspect that there's a problem with the T-mobile system somewhere.

Finally, anyone looking for a really nice, shortish leisure boat, well cared for and ready to sail away could do worse than look at Waterlily, presently on sale through Great Haywood marina. Nev Wells has been blogging about her for a good few years, so no problem catching up with her past history!