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We have one we picked up from the Aldi middle aisle a few years ago for £30 as I recall. Strongly recommended. It works well, and is really good for sticking in your suitcase when travelling with stuff you would otherwise iron.
It is clearly not the same thing as a full iron on something like a formal shirt. You won't get sharp creases, but you will get wrinkles out. I'm sure you already knew that, but wanted to make sure I set expectations.
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Genuine question, I promise, but why is she expected to meet world leaders and attend state banquets?
That all seems really old school to me. Might she not be happier just doing her own thing in the clothes she already owned rather than being forced to go along to events because of her job?
I fairly regularly have work events and business travel that I'm expected to do. My wife is invited to relatively few of these things. If she was invited and felt she really wanted to buy new clothes for the event, she'd buy something out of our own money. I'd never even think about asking to expense that, which feels to me like the equivalent.
I accept that it's quite different because I'm clearly not PM or in any way important. My point is why should his wife have all these obligations placed on her? I think that's where we should be pushing as a root cause, rather than worrying about what she should wear and who should pay.
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This reply wins at forum.
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Amex really are the best for rewards. Next best credit card at the moment is the Amazon Barclaycard one if you do a decent bit of shopping at Amazon. Otherwise it's the Santander edge credit card.
If you're open to a debit card, the Chase one is really good for rewards. Nearly as good as an Amex. Otherwise I have a Santander Edge current account and get some okay rewards on that. 3 quid a month account fee but you earn 1% back for all spending on groceries, household bills, and travel costs.
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Honestly I think it's down to personal preference. I use 2 monitors that are the exact same, but 1 landscape, and 1 portrait. I have tried bottom alignment, top alignment, and center alignment, and I marginally prefer center. I think I'd be fine with any of them if I had to, though.
Best practice, of course is to make sure that your main screen is centred at eye level so you're not straining your neck needing to look up or down for long times.
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Yes, but then you've got the cost of installation that's gonna take a huge time to pay if the running cost is just similar to gas.
I'd posted a HeatGeek quote I recently got in the heat pump thread. It was 20k once the grant is taken off, and would save me an approximate 8 quid a month. The main reason for this is it being an old house with solid brick walls, being relatively large, and some of the existing pipework being microbore.
In situations like this, heat pumps still don't make sense IMO. In a newer place with cavity walls and insulation, absolutely it'll make sense.
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I am with Hugo on this. Rotating child seat makes it sooo much easier to get them in and out, no matter the age. Also definitely helps with the strain of lifting them in for me.
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Yeah, and this is why I always do my own servicing within reason. Too many experiences over the years of being unhappy afterwards at how much I've ended up paying for things.
Another pet peeve of mine on invoice like that is how they charge the labour. There should be an hourly rate and then they charge you for how many hours were taken. Instead on your invoice there's 75 quid for the oil service, and 113 quid for the other bits. I always hate getting an invoice like that.
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Are they genuinely good in the winter? I've only recently bought a set for summer wheel duties. On the occasion that I've gone over some water on the road during climbs, I've then got a load of wheelspin. This has happened probably 5 times now. This has made me worry about their wet weather grip.
By contrast my wheels with Continental 4 seasons tyres is always so sure footed. Last week I pulled onto a mossy stone pavement, came to a stop, and almost fell right over as it was so slippy. Those tyres have really impressed me with their grip.
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Apology needed. My memory was defective on this. I've checked with her and you and @MTB-Idle are right, the proceeds are not ringfenced as I incorrectly said.
What I was confusing this with is that in 2012 they made a commitment to replace all homes sold via right to buy 1:1. In theory great, but she says in reality there are 2 problems. 1. They didn't meet the commitment, and 2. It isn't a like for like replacement. As such, you could replace a 5 bed house with a studio flat and you've adhered to the rules.
I'll wind my neck back in on right to buy. In theory good, but I'll agree that in practice it is deeply flawed.
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My wife works in housing in the civil service. Apparently there are plenty of bedrooms for the population (e.g. old people still living in the family home and not downsized, or relatively wealthy people with more bedrooms than they strictly need), so there's a train of thought on adding incentives to encourage downsizing.
However, according to her there is still a big shortage in housing, both private and state owned.
According to her, right to buy is counter intuitively a good policy. First it helps break the cycle of poverty within a family who now have an asset. Second, it relieved the local authority of a usually ageing property needing a decent amount of maintenance. The money the local authority gains from the sale is then ringfenced and can only be used to build new social housing.
I think supply and demand is only part of the problem. Again, I'm not the expert myself, but many experts feel like successive governments have followed economic policies that jack up house prices in order to gain popularity. However, for anyone other than an investor or someone downsizing or moving to a cheaper location, house prices growth isn't actually a good thing. If you sell a 4 bed home in my part of Derbyshire for 500k and want to move to a similar property in a similar location, you still need 500k. It doesn't matter what you bought it for and how long ago.
Finally, movement of people is emotionally difficult for many. I have moved away from where I grew up because it's unaffordable to own the type of house I would like, I happen to love riding bikes up hills, and I can work remotely. As such the edge of the Peak District makes sense for me. However I see many of my family and friends fairly understandably not wanting to move away from where they grew up, or working in an industry based in a specific geographic location. Rightly or wrongly, these people don't want to move somewhere else, and so you end up with the issues we see in SE England.
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So what do we do about the housing crisis then? Or would you argue there isn't one?
London is very different, but in Derbyshire where I now live they really struggle to sell new builds at full price. Most end up sold at 10 - 30% off, and then sold on again 3 years for slightly less than the buyer paid. It seems to take around 5 years for them to come back to the value they were originally marketed for.
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Fancy, or cheap but decent?
Honestly you could do worse than staying in the YHA at Castleton. You can get a private room with private bathroom. I believe they also have private glamping pods that depending on the time of year should be nice.
A friend has stayed here and said it was good.
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Well quite. I'm no expert on housing, but I believe there are many other ways to convince homebuilders to build in the UK that aren't allowing them to cut safety critical corners. It's a pretty profitable activity in the UK at the minute without needing further incentives, IMO. However, I know homebuilders often buy land and then sit on it for many years to wait for house prices to go up. You could ban that practice, or simply fine them for buying land and not completing the first homes within a period of time.
It seems to have been the David Cameron era war on red tape and regulations that was a big part of the problem. New cladding and insulation products were coming onto the market that were cheaper and simpler to install, but had potential fire risks. As such we needed regulation to address that potential risk. However, in order to add 1 piece of regulation they would have had to find 2 other pieces of regulation to get rid of. As such, they just didn't add regulation for this. Instead they told home builders to use their own judgement to arrive at a system that they thought was safe.
I'm sure David Cameron would say "well it was obvious to anyone with a brain that this rule of mine shouldn't include safety critical regulation like fire safety in buildings". However, according to testimony from multiple people in the housing department of the civil service, Eric Pickles was an absolute stickler for abiding by this rule.
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Umm what? If your business is building homes and you decide to build multiple developments, you should have a system that insulates you from the risk you have knowingly taken on by making the decision to build multiple at the same time?
This makes no sense to me. If you don't want the risk of building multiple developments you can just build them 1 by 1.
This system just feels designed to encourage risk taking behaviours.
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Yep Bike Tart are fine for Shimano stuff. I've also used the fluid by epic bleed solutions, direct from their website. I also often order both from Amazon.
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Agreed that the companies that profited should pay for it. Many have, particularly the bigger home builders as their reputation gives them a lot to lose.
For many, though, there isn't a good way to hold the company accountable.
In my case, the company who built our block of flats was wound up as soon as Grenfell happened, and one of the directors who had become the building freeholder attempted to sell the freehold. The same directors have since created new companies to build new buildings, and now seem to just create and then end new companies for each housing development.
I personally am in a building that is covered by a government fund. However, I personally am out of pocket for about 60 grand despite this. It has been hugely expensive and there's a lot that isn't covered by the fund but needs to be done. I try not to think about it too much, as it makes me feel very angry.
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Perhaps too late, but have you considered Blink cameras?
Amazon owns 2 brands for video doorbells and security cameras. Ring is positioned as "premium" and is more expensive. It's also really best if you pay a monthly subscription. Blink is positioned as the budget option, but they are just fine. I have 4 of them in various places in my garden and garage.
They'll try and get you to sign up for the subscription, but what's great is that if you have a sync module, you can plug in a USB storage device and just store the clips on there, rather than on the cloud (cloud storage is basically what the subscription pays for).
I have mine set up to record to a USB thumb drive, but I'm pretty sure a hard drive will also work. It records video when the system is armed and there is motion, so it's not strictly what I would call CCTV. However, I actually find it more effective for this purpose - I want to be able to review footage if someone has come into my garden, rather than having to trawl though all the footage captured. It'll also do notification on your mobile if you want.
Happy to chat through my experience with them or answer questions if that is helpful.
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Note the quote marks around "rooms" in my original post. In reality many of them are not distinct rooms, but the heating engineer needed to put them into his calculator as separate rooms to get an accurate heat loss estimate. For example, hallways, landings, and storage spaces were all counted as separate rooms. Also, our open plan living/dining room had to be split into 2 "rooms" as some of it is in the extension, but the rest is in the old house. Same story in our kitchen.
Don't worry, we're not talking a mansion!
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Yeah, the loft conversion is well insulated to modern standards. The rear extension is a cavity wall with insulation, but also massive bifold doors and a lantern skylight. Everything else is solid brick wall.
I'm adverse to rendering, as I've heard that's likely going to cause huge damp problems on such an old house. As such our only other option is internal insulation, which means we'd lose some floor space and need to completely redecorate everything. I think fairly understandably we're not keen to do that.
250 square metres is dreamy! Maybe I should get working on my wife about a move to rural Spain! ;-)
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Eeep, I mentioned a couple of months and pages back about getting a HeatGeek round to do a survey, come up with a design, and give me a quote for a heat pump install. As a reminder, 200 year old detached home with some more modern extensions. Single storey extension at the rear from the 1970s, loft conversion from 2017. Approximately 155 sq m, or 17 "rooms" and 13.74 kW of heat loss in Heat Geek terms.
I'm in fairly rural Derbyshire, so really not LFGSS golf club territory, thank you very much.
Quote after BUS grant is pretty much 20 grand. Estimated saving of £8 a month of my bills, so it'll only take 209 years to pay back the investment. Yeah, there's no way I'm doing this. I thought I might get a nasty surprise at the cost, but I didn't think I'd be this surprised!
Heat pump would be a Vaillant aroTHERM plus 12kW / hydraulic station, and cylinder would be a Joule Cyclone 250L. In fairness, they've specified 15 new radiators, which is a new one in every room and landing, and were this even close to be feasible, I'd pushing on whether it is really necessary.
Full details in the attachment if anyone is interested to see the breakdown.
I really want to do the right thing, but I'm not spending 20 grand on this. I think I'd be much better off just replacing the existing gas boiler when it breaks and if I want to sink 20 grand into making the house more green, spend that on solar panels, battery, EV charger, EV. Hopefully then one day heat pumps will be more economical and the payoff will be better if I'm generating a lot of my own electricity.
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Gorilla PVC glue is good for this. Clean off the surface so it's clean and there's no dust or debris. Apply to multiple spots. Push together, weigh down and leave it.
This stuff expands to fill gaps. Also will set in the presence of water.
Other retailers are available.
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Ah wow, it's looking great. I've heard very good things about the Milwaukee nail guns, and I am already in their battery ecosystem so that's what I'll be buying when the time comes. The only downsides seem to be weight, and I've heard from builders that if something goes wrong it's not as easy to service yourself as a paslode gun.
Paslode is the OG and many people love them. Apparently they can struggle with enough power to properly seat a nail in thick wood. Also if doing things in very cold weather the gas can freeze and then it doesn't work until you can warm it.
All of the above is gleaned through the experience of others. I don't have personal experience myself.
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Most SRAM uses Dot fluid, not mineral. Check yours via Google, and if the system uses Dot fluid, only lube the sticky piston with Dot fluid.
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Absolutely brilliant!