Inspired by this Reddit thread, what are the cheap items (bike & non bike) you’ve bought that you rate & get a lot of use out of?

Subscriptions to online porn sites 😉

Eggs are pretty amazing if you think about it.

Petrol. Amazingly useful stuff.

I was thinking more along the lines of cheap gadget stuff, but hey eggs and porn are pretty cool too (and yep, am sure there’s a website which combines them)!

jaffa cakes

LoveFilm subscription. Saved me an absolute fortune.

Haribo jelly babies, £1 a bag from poundland

A few from me:

Sumvision media player – around £30, plays back pretty much any file format – download films/tv shows and watch them via your TV.
£6 speakers – great for festivals, powered off AAAs
USB battery pack – charge your phone several times over, cheaper/smaller versions also available.
Sansa Clip – £30 mp3 player, with microSD card slot (up to 32gb), can browse music by folders rather than IP3 tags – cheap enough so if you lose it, it won’t really matter.

70p 2 meter micro USB to USB cables. Bought about 6, chuck them in every room of the house. Never far from a phone charger.

€12 watch from a service station on the way to Les Arcs. I bought it so I didn’t smash my Suunto on the trails. The lads ripped me for my little girly watch and then spent the whole week asking me what time it was so we didn’t miss the funi or the last lift. 😉 Best bit, I crashed three times and it still works fine.

You can buy them from decathlon for £9. Clicky

Sweets and chocolate. They make me feel so good.

Bike related, ASDA brand flashing lights. Cost about 27p for a pair, the lights last long time, rarely allow water ingress and will usually see a number of successive winters through. Where ASDA could teach the big name branded lights a thing or two though is the bar mounts. Presumably the ASDA ones cost 0.01p to make but they last forever, unlike one of the big name brands which will cost you about twenty quid and last five minutes.

And my ALDI winter jacket. Picked it up while I was browsing those big trays one day for about 15 quid, I haven’t needed another warm winter coat for cycling for about 7 years because it’s freaking ace. I keep thinking it’ll need replacing each winter but no, it just keeps on giving.

Crank Bros Speed Lever – the very peak of gadgetery awesomeness IMO

click click zip, tyre off. click click zipity zip, tyre on

Subscriptions to online porn sites

Can’t believe anyone pays for porn these days.

My cats, ok they weren’t that cheap, but they give me loads of happiness and whenever I’m in the house or garden they’re always with me.

free berries on the side of the road where i ride.

Good allen keys. decent socks, but most of all, stationary. I love buying stationary. I have a fountain pen at the moment and buying fine ink for it is a luxury of little cost!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Generation-Capsule-iPhone-Laptop-Speaker/dp/B001UEBN42/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1375445548&sr=8-2&keywords=x+mini+speaker

I bought some little ipod speakers on the way out to lake Garda this year.

For their size they sound fantastic and only £15 too!

Bell peppers stuffed with goats cheese.

Nom nom nom

Decathlon running socks. 5 pairs for about £7 I think (but I can’t remember as they last so long I haven’t bought any for years)

And Orangina. And those little coconut macaroon things.

£8ish, last years, and available in less silly colours too if you’re miserable like me 😉

Two black bottle cages from Sainsbury’s for 46p each. Bargain.

GAP plain drew T-shirts. About £8 a pop and actually better than the big label jobbies I’ve had. I have about 5 now and wear them all the time.
T-bar hex and torx wrenches from Aldi/Lidl. I think they were under a tenner.
Also, my dog was very cheap from the RSPCA. He’s given me 12 years of joy so far. That’s VFM.

Fish for one pound, available most good markets.

Bolls contour glasses for biking. About 7 quid and do the job just fine. Got several pairs.

This is a handy little gadget if you like cutting things…

Eurosportplayer subscription for one month during July. the whole TdF, streamed in good quality with great commentary. Bargain @ 4.90 EUR

Bike? Good question. I get a lot of pleasure from the carbon bottle cages purely because they are carbon and it blows my mind that the stuff is so strong and springy, whilst at the same time is so light.

Non-bike? The cheap ceramic kitchen knives I got from Aldi a while ago. They were cheap, but so bloody sharp and my wife has yet to ruin the blades by the endless dishwashering. Either that or my topcats. Sleeping is so much easier if you can’t see the sodding blinking streetlight.

Kitchen equipment – a flexible plastic bowl scraper. 75p off amazon and I can’t imagine why I didn’t have one before. Gets used virtually every day.

tyre lever and saw guide above could do with links. can people please provide links? thanks. 🙂

just so i’m not all take and no give, my recent inexpensive awesomeness was these –

50p each and we converted all the high power halogen lights in our flat to LEDs. £100 all in including bulbs. Super.

The 400 quid Honda Accord I just bought 54 thou service history ,goes like stink !!

Crank Bros Speed Lever – the very peak of gadgetery awesomeness IMO

I’ve snapped two of those and gone back to metal tyre levers for tight tyres.

Can’t believe anyone pays for porn these days.

I was thinking more along the lines of cheap gadget stuff, but hey eggs and porn are pretty cool too (and yep, am sure there’s a website which combines them)!

If you want the really good stuff such as Petrol, eggs and pron all combined, you have to pay 😉

Pedro’s star wrench with 4,5,6mm Allen heads!

Greggs cheese and onion pasties. 2 for 99p. Be still my beating heart (and expanding waistline) 😀

Bike related – My first Smart lights. about ten years ago, I reckon. I think they were 40 quid, the battery weighed the same as the bike, but it opened up the world of night riding. I used ’em for years. For the amount of pleasure I got, per quid spent… absolutely unbeatable. Decent LED lights are ridiculously cheap nowadays too

Oh wait – I’ve got another.

2 x 12 pack of Durex in Boots for £9 🙂

Bombay mix from the local newsagent. 46p for a bellyful.

wrecker, you want to get on amazon for the £1.95 premium 200gsm fruit of the loom jobs. 21 colours and mildly associated with slavery, I’d expect, but probably no more than the Gap ones.

My cheap useful thing is a £14 240V inverter for the car. (Belkin, aAazon). Lets you use normal wall chargers for everthing: laptops, phones, cameras, 300W max.

And “used – like new” CDs off amazon too. Cheapest way to buy music.

2 x 12 pack of Durex in Boots for £9

A lifetime supply for £9! Bargain.

Speak for yourself!

Better than rags and tougher than kitchen roll. Perfect.

http://www.halfords.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_storeId_10001_catalogId_10151_productId_224324_langId_-1_categoryId_165609

reggiegasket – Member
Better than rags and tougher than kitchen roll. Perfect.

Rolling your own eh? 😀

Cheap Chinese MTB lights – £28 for the 2 year old ones, less for the newer ones – bought so many I could light up Sheffield at night and still not event close to the price of the ones in the mags.