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By carlmeek
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1846882
Cost is easy - it was about 20k. Self install.

Returns - much harder to answer! I think this very much depends on circumstance. I consume rather a lot of energy, and have 'smart' system set up to bias my loads toward sunny days (for example heat pump heating a swimming pool). I literally have no numbers on returns, but my gut instinct is that it will pay off in the 5-10 year bracket.
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By carlmeek
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1846999
Sadly no. I once worked out a calculation on these, and concluded I needed about 2 football fields worth.

My pool is used commercially for teaching babies and children to swim - and as such is 33 degrees C (as per national swimming guidelines for children). Our sun simply isn't hot enough, especially in the colder half of the year!
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By skydriller
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1847109
carlmeek wrote:33 degrees C (as per national swimming guidelines for children).


Wow!! Thats positively bath-like!!

I certainly dont remember the outdoor municiple pool we used when I was at school being anything near that kind of temperature!!
#1847176
I notice that the SETT (Submarine Escape Training Tank) at Gosport is being decommissioned. I’ve been through it a few times on continuation training and the water in it was wonderfully warm. I think about 8 servicemen from the U.K. and other nations had perished in it before I left so H&S must have called it a day. It must have been a great location marker for Lee-on-Solent. Is it still standing ?
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By Flying_john
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1847182
carlmeek wrote:From my perspective it’s pure business, babies and young kids like it warm, so that’s what they get! :-)


I always thought the baby pool was warm because of what they did in it ,Ew.....
:lol:
#1847796
Bill McCarthy wrote:I notice that the SETT (Submarine Escape Training Tank) at Gosport is being decommissioned. I’ve been through it a few times on continuation training and the water in it was wonderfully warm. I think about 8 servicemen from the U.K. and other nations had perished in it before I left so H&S must have called it a day. It must have been a great location marker for Lee-on-Solent. Is it still standing ?


Bill - total thread drift on this one - what do you consider to be the most impressive "submarine escape" you know of? I've watched a few documentaries and read of various escapes. As someone who scuba dived off the west coast of Scotland...for years in the early spring months after a heavy winter with loads of snow run-off...for fun, and dived with military/police/North Sea pro divers + happy little scoobie-doos like me - this whole "how long could xyz" be done was a mainstay of post-dive banter.

Mates who were training to be military or police divers were tough as nails - as were those who'd actually spent years on the rigs. Their actual "extreme performance" - compared to muppets like me - at the end of the day didn't appear to be all that different though. I kinda got the impression that genetics/physiology played a much stronger role than was expected.

That wasn't at all a reflection on their dedication - no way on earth I'd have done what they did!
#1847816
Submarine escapes are rarely impressive but their is one worthy of note which was not an emergency but rather to test the equipment. Men from the SETT set up a world record for a free ascent form 600ft from a diesel “O” boat off Malta in the 60s. It was a gutsy thing to do - no special equipment with them, just a random selection of escape suits from the on board stock. They went out one by one from the escape chamber, into total blackness - the chamber flooded so quickly that their ear drums all burst. I think the record still stands although, at the time, the depth was recorded at 750ft. When the Dreadnought went into refit, the escape gear was unloaded and every single escape suit pack broke like fluorescent tubes due to the heat at the stowage point above the main engines.
A real life escape happened in the Thames estuary in the 50s(?), from a diesel boat in collision with a coaster, was a textbook escape but the majority of them drifted away on the tide and perished. There are several types of escape - if water is coming in you keep the water level down by opening up air into the compartment to balance the outside pressure. A canvas twill trunking is lowered and lashed down below the escape tower. By this time you have to plug into an emergency breathing ringmain. Chamber upper and lower hatches are opened and you work your way toward the the chamber, take a final deep breath, pass the breathing piece to the next man, duck under the twill trunking and away you go but you must”whistle” all the way to the surface or the inevitable happens.
If you know that a rescue ship is waiting up top and their is no rapid flood, you go out singly in a Michelin man suit using a system of - enter chamber, shut the lowed lid, the others still inside flood the chamber and when the pressures balance the upper hatch flips open and your away like a rocket. But, the last man to go has a unique set of operations to do, by memory. If he gets it wrong he will be forever trapped in the chamber.
The final method is by Deep Submergence Rescue Vessel DSRV, which is piggy backed on to another boat and taken to the stricken boat. It latches itself on to a ring around the upper hatch of the escape chamber and the crew are extracted 20 at a time ( I seem to remember) and taken up top.
Sorry for rambling on - I hope it all makes sense !
Forgot to add - all this is done in the dark, except for those plastic things that you bend to break a glass phial inside which sets off a chemical reaction giving out a green light.
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#1847822
Bill McCarthy wrote:Submarine escapes are rarely impressive but


@Bill McCarthy - yeah....


....why haven’t you written your book?!

;)


Yeah, I know - not my place etc, but having spent so much time with gents like you, trained and dived with your ilk - to have those “day to day” stories just drift off into that wash...
#1847831
I used to be a ships diver (as another string to my bow) when serving on the Dreadnought but got cheesed of with the quality of the “dry suits” - they were anything but dry. The final straw came in Singapore when I was sharpening up and removing tiny nicks in the propellor as it was “singing” underway. We were in the Stores Basin which is “U” shaped. In came another ship on the opposite side of the basin, making big manoeuvring power changes. Anyway, large slugs of water were moving round the basin to us which tended to flush us out of the basin taking me with it. Rather than the rope springs taking the strain, our shore supply cable (3” in diameter) started to go taught and I grabbed it to prevent myself getting swept out. A leccy on the casing shouted ffs let go, whereupon the bliddy thing exploded when I got several feet away. I didn’t like the bloomin’ sea snakes either - they said “if you get bitten, try to hold on to it in order that they could identify an anti venom. I surrendered my qual - a load of hassle for a couple of bob a day.
Back on thread really - it was a 440 V three phase cable !!
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