colin

Did think of buying again for 2024, but the only cross channel trip we (hopefully) will be making is Scandinavia, and looking online seems not that many ACSI sites there.

Was it on this forum that a member removed their wife from insurance because she wouldn't want to drive the van back any great distance.

Depends how the solar is wired in, the dealer wired ours to the leisure batteries, so technically no charge goes to the vehicle battery, but just to muddy the waters, in summer the vehicle battery voltage has been known to rise, it almost seems as if a large excess of solar charging can cause a 'leak' of a small current to vehicle battery, but it doesn't happen in winter.

I hope that wasn't silicone 'mastic' you used, as it makes repairs that much harder.

x250/290, a month without starting in summer is pushing your luck, and in winter is fairly certain to result in non starting. A decent run out every couple of weeks is good, failing that will need a charging regime.

As above all insurances seem to have risen by large amounts in the last year or so. 18months ago we had three insurances with Saga, motorhome, car, and landlord, now we only have the motorhome with them, and that was only because of haggling hard and them having a good price for the European breakdown cover. Next year who knows, it's the compare sites who will determine.

Standard practice if you have solar is to disconnect panel from regulator before disconnecting battery, when reconnecting it's battery first then panel.

As you ask about connecting a charger to the engine battery I'm wondering why you wouldn't use any standalone charger to charge the leisure batteries?

Maybe the OP wants to 'upgrade' to a euro4 due to ULEZ, but if so should know that for diesel most (?) ULEZ are euro6, euro4 is for petrol.

The problems with QR codes have been known about for many years, and yet they where rolled out for carpark payments!

Clicked on the link and got no message about ad-blocker, might have been that sometime in past I had dismissed this and preference was shown on cookie? I did scroll down and then back up page and eventually a pop-up advert for MMM came up which I dismissed, this is the only time I've had a pop-up with this set-up, and when revisiting that page the pop-up no longer appears. p.s. I've just visited the main forum page, then the 'motorhome maters', then this thread, and no adverts of any kind appear.

Same here when using Windowphone/Edge, or Android/Chrome.

Just like other types of insurance you can go to the comparison sites to get quotes, who will insure you, and how much they charge will depend on your personal circumstances, aside from the usual ones you might also want to try 'insurance surgery'.

I've just visited this site with Chrome(not my preferred browser) with no adblocker, looks like all the old totally unrelated pop-up ads are still there.

I've been running an ad blocker for a long while, don't get any pop-up's on here. There are some news site which detect the ad blocker and request you switch it off, other's block content unless you switch it off.

The data plate looks like one for a standard VW, your conversion will be closer to 'heavy' load than light, so you should never use the 36psi. As for 44 vs 47, technically the only way to know is weigh it fully loaded as you would go away, then refer to a online checker or ask tyre manufacterer, in the meantime I suspect either will do, but if you want peace of mind use 47.

It's only as I've got older that I've realised that when we 'upped and took off' several times when we where younger how fortunate we were. My advice to anyone who says "when I retire I'm going to .....", if you're able to do things when you are younger, get them done then.

For many x250/290 owners it has been no fun, it took thousands of miles and over a thousand pounds to find the problem in my van, someone else had a wreaked engine due to a bodged repair after mice in the filter housing.

OK, time for my stock answer. Have you checked for mice in the inlet?

And I would say there is no need for adjusting tyre pressures for every journey, I have checked our van loaded for touring then adjusted tyre pressures to allow for a bit of overloading, and these are still far below the Fiat/Globecar figures. If you look at the data plate on a car you will see it usually gives three different tyre pressures, light load, heavy load, economy.

Fridge service.

Also many (all?) ifor williams trailers.

I weighed our van then allowed a big margin for 'overloading', and it's still much lower than manufacturers figures, if you have a 'light' chassis it might not be worthwhile. I would note that loading up the van and getting it weighed is no bad thing, many have found they have unwittingly overloaded the van, others have found the van cannot be legally used as a motorhome as there is no capacity to carry anything.

This is a long argued point, I would say do the manufacturers know what you are putting in your van? The answer to that is no, so they take the worse scenario.

Maybe, maybe not, it really depends on the axle loads. Take my Campscout, as it's on a Maxi chassis the recommended tyre pressures are for 2.1t front and 2.4t rear. this adds up to 4.5t which is 1t over the plated weight of 3.5t