Ok - I'm back

I missed my blog!!! But now it's summer and I have solar power coming out of my ears, I just couldn't resist writing again. I've also been getting some work done, so desperately needed to be distracted once more.Well, I'm hanging around a bit on the Shropshire Onion canal, waiting to have my boat out the water for a scary repair. I had a battery acid leak last summer cos my solar controller broke (details in a mo) and allowed my batteries to boil and the acid has been chewin through the steel in my engine room ever since. Thought the problem had been sorted and I had a new controller, but I didn't realise the acid was still there - munching, munching... This summer, I finally got to work to sort out the rust problem down in the swim and to my horror, the rust came away in flakes and more flakes, until I was scared to carry on. The boatyard man says it's down to 4mm and I'm having to get a new plate welded on from below cos you can't get down into that part properly. Bugger.So, how did it happen? This is what I think, so if you have panels and a controller, watch out for this. Occasionally, I needed to isolate the batteries for various reasons and I didn't first detach the solar panels. There was an 'error' sign came up on the controller and you could hear a high pitched noise, obviously protesting. But as it was only for a few minutes, I ignored it. Trouble is, there was still current coming in from the panels and I think this blew the internal fuse of the controller. Later, I noticed very high readings and the batteries got over excited. When I had my boat blacked and had to be away at the time, the boatyard isolated the batteries to weld on anodes (I'd left the controller instruction taped up but forgot to tell them to detach panels first). When I got back to the boat, the controller was dead. R.I.P (that's the sound of my wallet being emptied of all its savings).