Just a cheeky build on the OPs post – has anyone installed / used a storage Combo boiler – the ones with a 20L hot water tank built in?

I’m looking at one of these (either Vaillant or Glow worm) to replace an exist Condensing system boiler and hot water tank. We’ve got around 17 rads but rarely use the shower and bath at the same time – so don’t use huge amounts of hot water. The online info suggests this should work ok but has anyone got any real-world experience?

Wow – so much negativity…

Good luck to them – a small company that’s innovating and has come up with an eBike that isn’t half as ugly as many of the alternatives from bigger manufacturers.

I bought some for use on my moped and they were great. Used them quite a few times cycling to work and they worked surprisingly well for that.

Whilst on a couple of business trips there I noticed they are quite popular in the Netherlands where most people cycle and the weather’s just as bad as here. For £20 they are a winner.

My heart sank when I read this.

Nick must be one of the nicest riders from BITD and it’s terrible to read something like this has happened to a family that’s done more than most to encourage and support young riders and the sport in general.

Sometimes life is doubly cruel.

DickyHepburn above – you didn’t used to live in Backwell did you?

Have tried both and for our house – victorian so insulated as best as we can without demolishing and starting again, running it on constant definitely works out cheaper.

We’ve got the upstairs TRV valves on the radiators set to 19 and the downstairs ones at 19.5 – by stopping the house cooling down it means that the moisture in the air never condenses enough for the house to feel cold. It also takes a good 8 hours for the house to feel warm if the heating has been off for a few days so again, leaving on constant sorts out unexpected cold snaps.

Our bills are around 35% lower measured over 4 winters than than we were keeping at low temp in the day and just heating it up for the evenings.

Terrible to read about another event like this – not least after the incredible generosity the Germans have shown to others in recent years.

I’ve got it on a 2016 touran but to be honest find it quite unpredictable / dangerous.

On several occasions the ACC has incorrectly detected an obstruction and applied the emergency brake – it’s done it once on the motorway and several times on urban roads when rubbish has blown in front of the car ,metallic crisp packets seem to be the usual culprit.

I’ve also been the passenger in a brand new vw golf that did the same thing at about 50 mph on a dual carriageway – the driver was actually a VW salesman and it was a crisp packet that time as well.

I’ve also had problems with the VW city collision thing – on roads with shallow potholes it can “sense” those as obstructions and again applies an emergency brake. Having done some digging round I’ve found a case where a driver had the ACC apply coming round a bend into a motorway service station. The wheels locked and the car went sideways into a curb causing significant damage.

To all of these things VW come out with “if we can’t replicate it while it’s in our workshop then there can’t be a fault”.

I’ve never had a VW before and based on the significant number of software problems with our car and the attitude of their dealers wouldn’t think about doing so again. The contrast between VW and Nissan for reliability and dealer service has been very revealing.

46p

http://www.wickes.co.uk/Wickes-Engineering-Bricks-Red-65mm-Class-B/p/213642

New year Digital Sub price will be £20

Still too cheap. Stick it up to £27.50 or £50 for two years.

Personally I’d vote for dropping the frequency of the print edition but given the shift to digital I think STW’s biggest opportunity is to raise the price of a digital sub.

If I compare the quality of STW to other cycling mags I’d say that it’s as good if not better than Cycling Plus.

A sub to the latter is twice as much so I’m wondering why STW is only £15 a year – this seems a little low for the investment of time and effort that undoubtedly goes into it – and the fact that it also gives us this forum.

I’d echo some of the posts above – please don’t get a second dog before you’ve had the baby and got a feel for whether it’s manageable.

I lost the battle on getting a second dog and it’s extremely difficult managing a baby and two dogs – as others have said some of this is just the practicalities of controlling a pram and two dogs or space for everything in the car but the bigger issue is that when the baby is sleeping and the dogs need a walk it just gets very difficult juggling everything through a period in which you’ll be very tired to begin with.

In reality, babies consume huge amounts of time and attention and that means that the dogs will be getting less fuss for quite a long period. Unless you’ve got someone on hand / family close by to make sure the puppy gets plenty of training and attention you’ll find it difficult trying to balance a baby, train the puppy, walk the other dog etc. One practical point to consider is that until it’s 9+ months old the puppy will need shorter walks than the other dog so you’ll land up doing two walks or having to come home half way through a normal walk.

Always seems to work when I use it – but my mum had endless problems with it until I deleted “trusteer” from her computer.

Me after several months of training for the century ride

Amazing telly and the “how we made this” bit showed incredible patience and planning by the crew – but it’s gutting to see the BBC are cutting jobs at the Natural History unit in Bristol whilst carrying on with the endless waste of money almost everywhere else.

Just in case anyone is confusing them with the full size soreen loafs, the soreen lunch bars are pretty small – between 80 and 90 cals each depending on the type.

So eating 2-3 an hour gives a max of 270 cals / 57g of carbs for around 600 cals of energy expenditure.

Over a whole ride I’ll burn 1500 cals and will have eaten < 800 cals.

From the advice above I’ll switch to porridge before the ride and a kebab afterwards.

I think I’d like to ride with Binners. Thanks all.

additional disclosure – I also have fish and chips the night before a big ride.

sorry what was that you were saying?

We’ve had fireworks going off in the neighbourhood till 4 or 5 in the morning for nearly 2 weeks now – the combination of a baby that wakes up every time the dogs bark and the dogs barking every 20 minutes or less has been a nightmare. I finally got to sleep around 5.30 this morning only to be woken half an hour later by a magpie tapping on the window. FFS.

I really think it’s time the sale of fireworks was restricted to organised displays only – as much as anything it must cause a significant extra workload for A&E units that could mostly be avoided.

Rock and

The “cleanest” way of doing it is just to go with one of the one day specialist policies – cost is about £20 ish.

If it’s in his name there’s no liability on the owner of the car / the owner’s insurance, no matter what happens.

It also avoids a lot of potential aggro because if something does happen the OP’s car would get sorted no matter what and without any impact on the premium the next year.

I spent ages looking at trackers for dogs and landed up getting one of these:

http://www.traccauk.com/tracca-dog/

A lot of the trackers will only use 3g data services but the Tracca one also works on 2g and also without a data signal at all.

There’s an app for the tracca collar but you can also just call the mobile number and it will text you back the map coordinates in a format that google maps uses. The battery life is extremely good – the only downside is that the GPs unit needs to be zip tied into the rubber mount as it can pop out if the dog runs through undergrowth.

I used a sim from anywhere sim that roams across the uk networks – so far we haven’t found anywhere it could t get a signal on one network – the £60 a year pre paid “annual sim
Lite” sim has more than enough texts and data included (our dog runs off – – lot!).

http://anywheresim.com/buy/#anywhere-sims

Based on the experience of a relative I’d hot wash all of the clothes several times but the key thing is to sling or fumigate luggage / bags before you bring them in the house. Bed bugs can live for up to a year without any food so it’s really important that everything is checked very thoroughly – especially the Zips on bags as they are quite good at hiding in those.

Wookey hole is worth a look especially if it’s raining. Also consider:

– hiking up to rowberrow warren which is an Iron Age fort or something like that
– the food at the Queens Arms in chew manga is top notch … Salt and Malt is quite hit and miss
– the industrial museum and harbour ferry in Bristol

I’m a massive fan of the Deuter range.

The Deuter Cross Air is great for bike commuting:

http://www.deuter.com/DE/en/bike/cross-air-20-exp-32094.html

The suspended mesh back keeps all of the weight from making contact with your back – I did several years of commuting 25 miles a day with one complete with a change of clothes, washbag, shoes, laptop and docking station.

“along the money” err… that should be “along the way”

The autocorrect feature on my web browser has just reached a new low in machine assisted spelling correction.

not sure Blair gave us peace in NI – much of the ground work and the big political risk taking move to talk to the IRA was done by John Major. Even Blair said as much.

I think he’s been a pretty good PM given he’s held the role through a period of unprecedented economic turmoil.

Things I’d call out as successes during his tenure:

– The UK has overtaken France to become the 5th biggest economy
– More new jobs created in the UK than in the rest of Europe put together
– A record number of working adults
– Started a very long overdue of welfare, albeit spending is now higher than it was despite “austerity”
– Managed to convince the country we’ve had austerity when the opposite is true
– Strengthened rights for same sex couples and despite significant resistance from his own party
– Led the UK’s first coalition government – and for 4 years and 6 months longer than most “experts” predicted
– Crime is down
– Spending on healthcare rose in real terms – the “ringfence” commitment was held.
– The reduction in the size of local government / quangos hasn’t resulted in the sky falling in yet.
– Honoured his commitment to abide by the will on parliament on military action in Syria even when this commitment was abused by shameless cheap politics by Ed Milliband
– His wife have up her business interests when he took power and maintained a dignified / low profile throughout – in stark contrast to Cherie Blair

He also took a pay cut at the start and waived his right to the Prime Ministerial pension which is worth £65K a year from the point he leaves office.

All in all not a bad job – and for that he’s had to put up with frankly disgusting baseless stories like the Pigs head that his political peers have used with abandon even when they know the story to be untrue.

“Absolutely no one voted for the Mastricht or Lisbon treaties. “

150,000 were polled in 2008 and asked if the UK should have a referendum on before signing up to the Lisbon Treaty. 88% said yes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7273668.stm

Arguably if the population had been given a say on signing up we wouldn’t now be in the position of having an unplanned exit and people voting “leave” for such a wide range of issues.

We also shouldn’t forget that the Dutch voted against much of the same policy objectives when it was encapsulated in the European Constitution – and the French voted against it twice in referendums.

Also just found a YouGov poll from the same period – only 13% of those polled said they would for for signing up to the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum (see page 2).

http://iis.yougov.co.uk/extranets/ygarchives/content/pdf/DT%20Europe_27-Aug-2009.pdf

If these two polls are representatives they seem to tell us that the majority of the public wanted a referendum before signing up to Lisbon, and that an overwhelming majority would not vote to ratify Lisbon if they were given a say.

Which is presumably why Gordon Brown pushed it through parliament and reneged on Tony Blair’s two promises to give the public a vote on the provisions originally part of the EU Constitution.

So is the current mess all the fault of NewLabour knowing what’s best for us and being too scared to test their convictions with the public?

We’ve only got a young family (so I may land up eating my own words) but my own experience of standing on my own two feet and watching friends completely unable to do this even into their thirties has led me to conclude:

– Getting a part time job at a youngish age (14+) was a good way for me to learn how the world works and how hard many people have to work just to earn the “minimum” wage
– Not getting loads of pocket money forced me to get a part time job. This actually gave me some financial independence from parents – as well as teaching me to value the things I’d worked hard for / saved for and appreciate how difficult it is for adults who only have limited incomes to live on
– These two experiences combined with part time work from 14 right through A-Levels and University meant that when I finished my degree I was already financially independent and head learnt to keep my spending within a weekly budget

I didn’t expect a free ride when I finished Uni and was independent from that point on.

I think the OP should:

– Have an open discussion about the state of her finances
– Encourage her to set and stick to a weekly budget
– Charge her a sensible amount to cover the actual costs of keeping her
– Put the money she pays to one side (without telling her) and when she’s grown up a bit and is trying to buy a flat give the money back to help buy furniture after she’s saved for the deposit.

If she doesn’t grow up hold on to the money and use it to pay for stamp duty and downsize to a smaller property with one less bedroom to force the issue :lol:

Not sure I agree that this is all CMD’s fault as the conditions for a Brexit were created a good 5 years before he came to office.

The root cause of all of this is in how the Lisbon treaty came into existence in the first place.

Tony Blair and other then leaders negotiated a European Constitution Treaty in 2004ish. 2 member states held referendums and their people voted against what was quite clearly the mechanism to transfer greater decision making powers to Brussels / facilitate political integration.

Tony Blair promised the public a referendum and then reneged on this – with much of the powers subsequently shoved into the Lisbon Treaty and which no-one got a vote on.

The tension over European Political integration has been present across Europe from that time – CMD was the PM who picked up the pieces.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/domestic_politics/factcheck+did+blair+promise+euro+referendum/558277.html

We’ve got a ginger one and a stray one – In the week they get 30-45 mins in the morning before work, an hour at lunchtime and 30 mins to 90 mins in the evening depending what the weather is doing. At weekends they get a 2 hour off lead walk and a shorter early evening trot.

In between walks our ungrateful beasts spend their days listening to Radio4 and snoozing on the sofa.

I had a pair of Schwalble One’s on a new bike last year and picked up a puncture on the first ride and another one 2 rides later. By contrast the GP4000s tyres on the old bike had done around 3k miles without a puncture. I binned the Schwalbe tyres and put the old tyres on the new bike – no punctures in the year since.

On the subject of recalls, CsG / cannondale still haven’t made any substantial effort to publicise a recall of OPI / lefty steerer tubes supplied over a 4 year period in Europe.

Although they eventually started a recall in Europe more than a year after they were forced into doing so in the USA and dealers have records of who the bikes with OPI stems / steerer tubes were sold to, they don’t seem to have made any effort to ask retaillers to contact the customers with bikes that still have unsafe stems fitted.

Our local park is pretty bad during the run up to local marathons / half marathons due to the huge number of runners who think it’s ok to dump behind the bushes and leave it – apparently they can remember to bring toilet paper with them but not a bag to chuck it in the bin with.

What’s worse is when you realise a runner has dumped behind a bush because your dog appears wagging its tail with a visible mix of toilet paper and human poo smeared all over its beard.

Osmo decking oil works pretty well – they do an anti-slip version as well:

http://www.wood-finishes-direct.com/product/osmo-decking-oil?gclid=CKqr26L4g80CFUE_Gwodu3IOiw

awesome – thanks everyone!

I have more of a problem with the judgement of the senior officer who apologised than the people who designed to training exercise. The latter is supposed to simulate real conditions to that participants can learn.

Handsfree has been shown to be just as distracting, so don’t even use that these days.

+1. I’m quite militant about this as well and refuse to speak to colleagues or join meetings when they are driving and speaking at the same time. I’ve been knocked off my bike three times – all of these were as a result of drivers pissing about with their phones and not looking at the road / lights.

The police need a massive kick in the a55 though – in our neck of the woods they apparently have endless time to amble through local parks in threes and fours but no time / inclination to deal with the significant number of drivers who are more interested in calling / texting / tweeting than paying attention to the road. They also make no attempts to enforce the green ASLs / boxes for cyclists and often stop their own vehicles in the middle of them.

I think we need an Australian style law – no phone in arms reach of the driver and no devices stuck on the windscreen and / or that impedes the view of the road for the driver. Having driven behind a car where the driver was making a facetime video call while driving (with the phone on a suction cup straight ahead of him halfway up the windscreen) I’d also like to see immediate car seizures and automatic loss of driving licenses for this sort of stupidity.