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oh wow, my childhood kitchen had the same cork tiles and cupboard doors. Wasn't expecting to see them here

Thanks freezing77 -- will message

Hi,

Life's taken a slightly unexpected turn, and I'm now living in London (without my bike!). I'm looking for a something cheap (maybe ~£100?) I can use to do a 25 minute commute to work/the shops on - and I thought I'd post here to see if anyone had anything they wanted to get rid of.

I have this cheap and nasty one from Amazon, but it does the job. There's no backlight until you touch the top and it has a dim glow for a few seconds so you can read the time.

https://nitter.net/behavinaint/status/1542614164824260609?s=46&t=v8mVJToGE_oslVixZ0eVkQ&fbclid=PAAaYS7YxPPf-d8qvPSdecW9Jui1MLbKp2GWgjh6iJ8iEaKeRdE0m4EuOccg8

We get money in dollars where I work. Most people use Wise to receive it (they provide you with a US account) and then convert it to pounds. The fees were the lowest when I last looked about a year ago.

I've not done that ride, but I've done others organised by Tom Deakins and they've been great routes. I've ridden parts of that route and it looks like it would be a good first 200km to do, nicely spaced stops. Only thing to be aware of is that there is no real bail-out option between Cambridge (50k) and Manningtree (150k).

My wife makes small cages/supports out of willow - if you can find a large tree nearby you can harvest some and weave it together.

A bit like this but less substantial to make it less visible.

https://www.crocus.co.uk/product/_/willow-herbaceous-cloche/classid.2000045219/

I bought a hultafors recently and it has changed my (measuring) life. It's a basic manual tape measure, but has some nice features for marking, measuring gaps between things and measuring diameters.

Specifically the talmeter - https://www.hultafors.com/products/talmeter

ha, we have those same stickers, although we have an extra one with a bonus spelling mistake that doesn't fill me with confidence

I'm no electrician, but that does look like a bit untidy! So all of the green ones (shower, sockets and cooker) are protected by the RCD with the blue switch, the lighting gets a RCBO and the water heater just gets a breaker.

on the 'old' system, which we have currently, you have a breaker on each circuit (which protects against too much current being drawn). The two RCDs are then protecting half of the circuits each, so if there is a fault where more current goes out than back in on any of those circuits the RCD trips. Normally you get it laid out something like this in the consumer unit: RCD..[a set of breakers] RCD [a set of breakers]

This means if the RCD trips all the circuits connected off it wont work. The 'new' style is to have the RCD and breaker combined for each circuit (RCBO) so only one circuit trips for a fault.

It's not absolutely necessary to pass an EICR, you can just upgrade the two RCDs (if there's space in the consumer unit) if they're not the type that is now required.

yeah, I was a bit careless with my language there. It's a pretty sensible move to require them for rented properties, and I think more people should get them when buying houses too. It's the creep on the requirements I'm slightly less convinced about - I think it's easy for a committee to make new requirements which do increase safety, but it seems like relatively small gains from a pretty high baseline. But maybe I'm just being grumpy because I'm having to spend so much :)

And yes, I agree about plastic consumer units too :) I just don't think they should have been given more time to continue selling them....

In our case we ended up replacing them, in one case as we were running out of space in it once we'd put in the different type RCDs/SPDs that were required, and in another case because the manufacturer is no longer around and we can't get the right bits for it.

I've come to the view that it is partly an improvement, and partly a scheme to keep the professional bodies going. The electrician said they were now being made to install surge protectors, which are a one-time thing, and they've never been called out to replace them so the odds of a surge must be pretty minimal.

The thing that wound me up was reading that the fire service convinced the government to force consumer units to be made of metal rather than plastic because there had been too many fires where it hadn't been contained - and consumer units tend to be by the stairs/on a means of escape. The industry then moaned that they had a huge stock of plastic units and got an extension to use them up - which now means when people get the NICEIC done for renting or whatever they get made to install a metal one.

BTW, one tip for saving money is that you may not have to have the test done by a NIC registered electrician-there are other bodies (like NAPIT) which are cheaper to join so the tests end up being a bit cheaper, but are equivalent.

I can only speak to our electrician, who is a mate of a mate, but it was very thorough. It took him a day and a half to go through everything, so although the cost was quite high it seemed reasonable in terms of the hours he put in.

We just bought a thatched house, and getting one was a condition of our insurance. We paid £40 per circuit (in Suffolk though, not London).

The real cost though was putting everything right :| Annoyingly, I'd missed that the previous owners didn't have one for the garage/shed.

The report is assessed against the latest regulations, which changed significantly in 2018 so we have lots of stuff to do. New consumer unit like you, and they discovered that the outbuildings hadn't been touched for a long time so need completely rewiring so we're about 5k down!

The EICR should come with a graded set of recommendations, from C1 (the most serious) through C3. Really, I think you only need to address C1 and C2, C3 are more a 'if we were installing this now we'd do it this way', but it's not actually dangerous.

What are you using as your DNS server? might be worth trying an alternative if you are using the standard VM one (e.g. 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 - others available!)

'occupy.fired.farms' sounds like a coded call to action for some sort of uprising....

The purist in me says until Christmas Eve, but I'll compromise on December

I looked into it for a while, although didn't go ahead. The key thing for the cable is that its waterproof, but also UV resistant as normal cable will degrade in sunlight.

I was told that it was also important for the two buildings to have the same earth connection to prevent ground loops, but that's only an issue if you need to use the less common shielded cable for some reason.

I work in the field, currently as what gets called a threat hunter but I've had roles across various different areas. Feel free to message :)

this(2)?

Number two has some extra lights underneath the main lamp which are meant to make you more visible because they shine upwards, whereas the main beam has a cutoff to stop it dazzling drivers. I think they'll also come on automatically in the day when the main beam is off

Does anyone know anything about this event next year? It looks kinda interesting, but there are no organiser details on their website and I can't find any reference to it anywhere else on the internet...

https://www.solsticesprint.com

I think it's just an artefact of the ferry crossing tbh

I'd be interested in the DHB gel mitts if you'd be happy to post? I left my old gloves in my bag after a long hot ride and I think they're irreversibly smelly....

Ah cool, sorry I didn’t know that was a thing :) good to know about for future adventures though, thanks!