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SafeFill Experience
Our experiences with a refillable gas bottle
We've had it nearly a year now, and I've got to say, we have had no problems. Morrisons are a filling partner for SafeFill, and have a station with lpg which I can pass on my way to and from work. What is also nice is that they have AdBlue on pump there too, primarily for HGVs, but our tow car has adblue, and seems to use a lot more when towing. I actually had someone on the checkout tell me to put the carton down, and take the car to the pump, as it was cheaper!
So the routine before going away is to collect the gas bottle, and take the tow car into work, and get it full to the brim of diesel, adblue and fill the gas bottle too.
One of my previous cars was an LPG hybrid, so filling it is nothing too new to me.
It has an internal valve, which if no pigtail is connected, prevents gas flowing out, and as ever, when disconnecting the filler nozzle, there is a small amount of discharge
The bottle is nominal capacity of 10kg, with a tare of 5.57, meaning when full, it weighs about 15kg, and provides 10kg of gas. For a traditional metal cylinder. for a similar total weight, you get only 6kg of gas, so almost twice as much! This has been useful when the 240v internal fuse blew on our caravan heater while away for a couple of weeks, and also over the new year. The dealer wasn't local to our campsite, and mobile caravan repairers were hesitant, as it was technically a warranty job. So we just switched heating to gas, and got the fuse replaced at the next opportunity
10kg of lpg equates to about 19L as measured by the pump. With it being about 60p/l, fully filling it is only about £10, yet for 6kg of propane, it was more like £25, so I'm sure its cost effective
Size wise, the largest size they do, 10kg just about fits in the front gas locker of current caravan, which is made by Swift:
If there is a place near by that offers lpg, and you do use gas often, or camp throughout the year, then I would recommend them to you: SafeFill
I also hasten to add, that unlike some of the adaptors available on your favourite market place or auction site, these are safe and legal to refill, as they have a shut off valve that works like in a water cistern, that when by volume the LPG is about 80%, it prevents it from filling, and the lpg pump will shut off
Longleat 2019
Our summer holiday in 2019 was to Longleat. However, we started with a trip to Coventry for weekend.
We stayed at Gate Farm CL. It is right under the flight path to Birmingham Airport. Great for plane spotters, including 18 month old ones! I should add that the noise doesn't seem to disruptive, and doesn't carry on late into the night or too early in the morning
It wasn't the greatest of journeys. Traffic bad in places along the way. Some of this was due to roadworks for major improvements, however there was also "normal" Friday afternoon rush hour, not helped also by a partial shed load of rubbish too. But once we arrived and got on site I think I spent more time talking to our neighbours for the weekend rather than fully directing the reversing onto the pitch. However, practice and rear view cameras ensured that it was an uneventful process.
Once pitched up and the dogs made comfortable, we popped out for our dinner with my brother an his family.
Saturday was a damp day, but we made ourselves useful, providing Uncle and Auntie childminding services while appointments were kept. The dogs got taken for a good walk, and came back very damp, but happy
On Sunday afternoon everyone came over to our camp site to see our caravan, and to join us for a dog walk. My youngest nephew was confused / curious as to how we steered our "camping van" as he couldn't see a steering wheel! He didn't immediately get that we tow it with our car, rather than sit in it to drive places.
There was a nice long length of solid track with a public footpath along it. With the ground still being muddy, it made for an easy walk for the various little legs with us.
On the Monday it was time to move down to Longleat
Easter 2019
Carrying on the recap of last years tours. we were able to get away for a few days at Easter last year. With the current pandemic, this years Easter camping was held on our driveway!
This was another return to Slate Hall Farm CL, which we have stayed at a number of times now.
We had a day to ourselves, and met up with family at Hylands Estate park. It was somewhere approximately in the middle for all of us, saving overly long drives for all, and with warm spring sunshine we were able to exercise the dogs, and enjoy the gardens and the play area with the family.
Over the rest of the weekend we spent time with friends from all over the country that were visiting for the weekend for an event at a near by church. The weather was really warm, so our little one had her bath time in the awning rather than in the caravan! Certainly less damage could be done when things got splashy!
It really did feel like summer, and we were glad to enjoy walks across the fields. However, we were mindful of the wildlife, as there are plenty of deer in the area, so did not wish to have the dogs chasing them!
I took one of my favourite caravan pictures while there. My daughter was looking out of the window at the next door 'van, and the dogs decided to join her. I took a photo from inside, but before the moment passed, popped outside and opened the window wide to get a better angle:
On the Sunday we had lunch at a friends house in a nearby village. A post lunch walk beside the village river was enjoyed by all, ensuring the dogs got some exercise and stimulation.
OpenWRT PPPoE and IPv6 tunnels
A bit of a techie post for the first time in a while
My current ISP doesn't provide native IPv6, even though I do have a static IPv4 address, so as a project to keep me out of trouble, I thought I'd get my Hurricane Internet IPv6 tunnel up and running. On the main router on the network, I'm using OpenWRT 19, so I figured this ought to be fairly easy. Infact, there is documentation on OpenWRT on how to do it with the UI, so I thought it would be a 5 minute job.
When I attempted to follow the steps, it didn't seem to show the 6-in-4 network type, I suspect I'd not got all the dependencies so I did some more looking around, and found the command line example on tunnelbroker.net, and tried that, having ssh-ed into my router.
This still didn't work. It started assigning my block to devices, but there was no routing on IPv6. This not being my first networking or routing problem, and with tcpdump already on the router, started to get it listen for packets on various interfaces for packets going to the selected IPv4 tunnel endpoint. I noticed that packets were not getting replies back. Various firewall IP protocol type suggestions of whitelisting were tried, and still nothing seemed to be getting through
With this in mind, I double checked I could get other devices on the LAN to run IPv6 tunnel, and confirm if it was a NAT or routing issue.
These didn't work immediately, but only started to work when static routes were added for traffic to the tunnel endpoint were added with the next hop on the network.
With a standalone device on the LAN working, I then worked to configure the router with similar settings.
I've not seen this suggested as a requirement anywhere for getting IPv6 tunnels working, but I suspect that is due to how the network is set up.
The WAN connection is provided as part of UK Fibre Terminated to Cabinet (FTtC). This uses VDSL2, which there appear to be very few devices that support this and OpenWRT. So I've got a separate VDSL modem in PPPoE mode, and have been using standard router, with its WAN port configured to dial my ISP over PPPoE. Its not that this is causing anything strange like double NAT, but it seems to have introduced some added complexity to the route table that although the IPv6 is in the WAN firewall zone, it was not then routing the encapsulated IPv6 packets to the IPv4 default gateway.
But with that route in place, IPv6 is fully operational
