Member postings for pgk pgk

A preliminary report from structural engineers states that the bridge can carry a 3.5T Land Rover plus 1T trailer but is subject to sensitivity testing and a final report.

pgk

For an ally greenhouse?

Some sort of vine eyes for lifting the wires down in spring?

Instead of allowing them in the henhouse you get them to lay by the yard.

Note: you can boil eggs in a kettle but you can't pour them out.

Roman cruises were cheaper with the opportunity for plenty of fresh air, exercise and adventure..

A search for 'camping power packs' on amazon etc give a host of offerings and I believe for added capacity some can be daisy-chained It comes down to whether a couple of hundred WH is enough and where to keep the thing. I'd be cautious about lithium batteries unattended in a house.

pgk

A darning needle as a source of material?

How about carefully masking the edges of the breaks.. perhaps with a paintable product. Then it's (hopefully) just a matter of trimming down any proud excesses.

When to pick coffee cherries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D8zuY7W1QY&t=3s

Well done on successfully germinating and growing a plant UK.

Off grinder topic coffee comments.

I almost bought a Jamaican coffee plantation (as in had the documents and decided not to sign). Although that was low slopes Red Mountain growing Robusta rather than the purist high blue mountain Arabica. Jamaica has widened the areas they consider Blue mountain for higher yield. There used to be one small independent high blue mountain grower one could order from directly but most goes to the government intervention buying.

For folk old enough to recall tins of Lyons ground coffee - they no longer make that but do sell coffee bags. My wife favours 'Go-Joe' in compostable bags (but non-recyclable individual outers).

Presumably real aficionados who can't afford Kopi Luwak might consider swallowing coffee cherries and straining their faeces....

Douwe Egberts Instant comes in useful jars. The lids fit my small ride-on mower tank as a replacement lid. Removal of the nylon seal allows the jars to be used as easy kitchen storage (lentils, nuts etc). With the seals they work quite well as jars for making flavoured gins (currants, damson etc). The trick is to remove the seal. apply it first deforming it to extract as much air as possible before refitting the glass top. That brand is occasionally available as double-sized adding to kitchen storage options (pasta etc)

pgk

Something sold as a spice grinder or coffee and spice grinder should give a finer grind. Coffee is a personal thing but I gave up bothering with bean grinding or high strength variants or even long duration perculation etc. Currently quite happy with the rich flavour of Lidl Kenyan with a short stand time in cafetiere.. can always increase amount. It's economical is excellent IMO and the grind stays fresh so long as well folded over and a decent bulldog clip.

Even more kitchen space saved?

Perhaps a daft question but have you checked the aperture sizes with gauge pins (or in my case it’d be drill shanks and calipers). Agree that while they claim to sell a 2mm nose piece they don't list that as a spare for the 3/32 rivets. Make your own?

pgk

The concept of the 'kelly kettle' might work without the base unit but I couldn't see just the kettle part being sold as a spare. A more extensive search might find similar rival offerings.

pgk

Bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake.- one of the primary aims of government to create jobs for themselves.
The 'money laundering' excuse really irks when it blankets everyone instead of simply being targetted at more sizeable accounts or with significant money throughputs and checks on multiple accounts to similar names and addresses.... the sort of things computers really are good for if programmed competently - another thing gov isn't; good at.

pgk

That worked here today - fill in all the boxes then delete them all and repeat with exactly the same data. Carp system!

Just make sure you don't leave buying your insurance too late . If an isurer know you need the insurance yesterday the price will sky-rocket . If you have time to shop around and put the start date say in a fortnights time you get a better quote . We , my wife and I found out the hard way .

The sweet spot used to be 3 weeks prior but some guys on one car forum have found that's a bit more variable and nearer a month now. In my case I’d done a quote 5 weeks prior and got good results -had to lie about start date cos they only go 1 month ahead - but then edited the start date on the quotes that were returned.

It's like haggling in the souk

pgk

My Tesla's insurance renewal is coming up. Last year it was £401 with LV. Their quote through the post was £502. An online comparison site gave me assorted cheaper quotes including one from LV for £398. Second cheapest was from the RAC @ £319 - underwritten by LV. Fiddling with figures for 'extras' ended up with £337 but also a reduction in voluntary excess from £500 to £250 with a promise from the comparison site to give me £250 towrads that if i had to claim.

The combinations of continually having to check comparison sites and those Co's not on them for every utility and insurance as well as the time wasted listening to phone calls listening all the disclaimers and options for button pressing and then being held in interminable queues if you need to speak to utilities, banks, insurers, doctors and others probably explains why this country is low on productivity scales.

My wife has been trying to register some trusts via the gov website. So far 5 days of sessions of over an hour each have failed. She starts through Gov gateway then onto the second gateway entering data to get automatic call-back phone confirmations that it’s her. Then finally starts to make the appropriate trust entries to find either the site times out while she’s still entering stuff or puts itself into a continuous loop of 'processing'..

Emails to the help desk came back with 'site is busy' then next time 'we have a problem' followed by the problem is resolved, followed by other error messages but no-one to actually talk to to resolve the thing. A complete waste of time. Currently, we get data mismatch errors probably due to the site's previous corruptions of attempted entries.

Other things to consider.
A while back we had a powercut = No borehole pump. We had a builder on site and I borrowed his ancient little 2KW Honda frame genny which ran that pump nicely. As a result i bought a fancy new 'suitcase' inverter genny rated at 2.5KW. Officially portable I’d call it luggable.. OH couldn't cope nor pull start the thing. Worst of all it didn't run the borehole pump - I think because it was modern and fancy and didn't like the start-up current effects. In the end I sold it and bought a 7,5KW old tech for the same money - electric start and on wheels - which happily runs borehole, fridges and freezers, internet and PC;s etc and one can even swap the loads for the few minutes needed to boil a kettle or run a microwave. Conveniently it even has 2 x 16A type blue sockets, 2 x 120v yellow sockets and a 12v output option and a huge petrol tank.

I find at least 2 a year on my 50 acres of fields so hate to guess how many are released annually.

I know it sounds picky but run-off water collected will pick up other elements while running off. And even if used just for flushing toilets that action will aerosol out of the pan and will have washed insects into the tank

When I bought this small farm there was a legacy grey water system as well as a more recent borehole. As it happens the grey system was clogged so I went to investigate. It was a series of three concrete cisterns - around a metre cube each set into the hillside across the driveway joining each other with a shallow gully and a terminal pipe to the house. It became obvious that the topmost cistern collected run-off including that from the roadway near the ridge and fields above. Potentially that would include run-off from sheep fields (fluke and faeces risk) as well as the roadway (tyre muck and fuel risk). I did'lt bother reinstating the clogged section, just re-plumbed for borehole water..

It's all moot now that we're being warned of flooding over the net few days...

There are obvious pitfalls using rainwater unless filtered and tanks checked from mosquitos through legionnaires disease to acid rain and lead or copper roofing components?

pgk