Especially during the winter, the oven door is left ajar after use to warm the kitchen/flat.

A marginal gain that literally does nothing to help. The oven will warm your flat whether the door is open or not.

Is it a marginal gain if it negatively impacts quality of life (as many of the suggestions above seem to imply)?

Disabling the stop/start system on your car should be banned.

I’ve just bought some plant based sellotape

Hasn’t it always been plant-based? Sello => cello => cellulose.

Double check with O2 roaming. I looked into it but discovered that at the time they capped the speed when abroad.

I used to pay a fortune for expensive roaming packages with EE / Vodafone etc. That all stopped a year ago when Flexiroam (and other eSIM) providers started offering global packages at a sensible price. I’m out of the country for more than half the year but spend only £70 or so on data for the whole time. I just use 3 pay as you go for everything else, and it still includes a decent chunk of roaming.

You realise just how much UK mobile providers are out to rip you off when they’re more than a thousand times more expensive than Flexiroam and more restrictive. Airolo and Nomad are also good providers, but Flexiroam has overall been best for me with the phone hopping straight onto local 5G networks.

A bonus from this is that if you have no signal on your own sim at home, chances are that another provider does have coverage. Because the Flexiroam sim can roam across all UK networks, it’ll generally get data unless you’re truly in the middle of nowhere.

This is my referral link for Flexiroam, gets you 200MB of data to get rolling:
https://roam.my/7KCJ444U

You might need to wait a week or so until one of their big discount codes roll around, which give 25-40% off the standard price.

I think TVs will even cope fine if you put the wrong frequency in these days.

My Macbook has been subject to 415V and 115V/400Hz at various times and still works.

Never found electrical stuff complicated.

What was needed in that debate was a big hammer and the words “SHUT UP” shouted by the host. And maybe a tiny bit of fact checking fed back to her through an earpiece.

And ultimately the fact that Starmer couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) answer some very direct questions made him seem evasive. It was frustrating because I expected him to do better considering his experience as a barrister cross-examining others.

I would always add a chlorine dioxide tablet regardless of how good the filter claimed to be.

>> Lidl own instant. I took it back because it had a really odd chemical smell.

It’s rebranded Kenco. The chemical smell was so bad that it used to make you gag when you opened the cupboard door. Morrisons did give me my money back though.

Hated Dark Matter. It might just be me but I really don’t like it when I know what’s going on but the protagonist doesn’t. I can’t face multiple episodes of conflict and extrapolation. It’s not like he has an excuse, they even gave him the script before filming started.

Pixel 8 is about £20 more if you wait for the occasional sale.

>> Announce it via cabin crew like they do now?

No announcements on night flights though.

>> My thought process being why would there even be a ‘fasten seat belt’ sign/announcement

But what do you do in that case if you want everyone sat down and not queuing for the toilets etc? Seat belt signs going on usually means turbulence ahead.

You can always tell a British tourist in a cycling friendly country because they’ll be the ones ambling side by side along a bike path or lane.

The “AI” chat bots used by big companies to filter technical support requests. Irrespective of the pointlessness of them, why do they introduce a deliberate ten second pause between replies where the page shows “typing…”, when the response should be instant.

Watch the YouTube video on the effect that shifting the van’s centre of gravity has on towing behaviour. Also depending on age you might not have the required category on your driving licence for towing. There was talk of giving it automatically a few years ago but I can’t remember what happened.

Definitely consider some lessons if you’ve not towed before. Reversing is easy with practice but remember that in a pinch it might be easier to just unhitch it and push…

Not LED, 5ft fluorescents, but they were free…

If you can splurge £75 for three LED battens you’ll get about 16 squazillion lumens more light.

A truly miserable 4.0 miles per kWh on the first leg of the trip. It’s only 12C and pretty wet, but even so that’s rubbish.

I dunno, I think that’s actually pretty good for any EV on the motorway. The Skoda Enyaq, Mach-E, and awful IONIQ5 that I took for test drives used more than 300Wh/m on the motorway with the cruise pegged at 70mph.

My Musk-mobile, on the other hand, will trundle along at 220Wh/m with winter tyres on and the cruise set to 72. A-roads will see more like 180Wh/m.

I’m going to hazard a guess that you’re the type of person who drives onto a motorway straight into the middle lane and sits there for your whole journey, regardless and oblivious of everyone else?

Only after trundling down the slip road at 28 mph and then swerving across the HGVs in lane one. Sorry, the “slow lane”. I shall then vary my speed wildly, increasing it if I sense that someone is attempting to overtake me and slowing down again the moment they give up and pull back in.

Is there a certain threshold of car value that has this option enabled by default, or is it the **** in the cars making this decision for themselves

I’m just going to hazard a guess here, but are you the person who straddles both lanes approaching a merge point to enforce your idea of fair queuing?

People try the exit and rejoin technique a lot on the A1 at Darrington. I’ve watched out of idle curiosity and they frequently rejoin in about the same relative position, so there’s no benefit that I can see.

MG5 estate will do what you need for that budget. It’s not the fastest charging car in the world, but my dad has no issues trundling from Devon to North Yorkshire in his. Make sure you pick the version with the 61kWh battery. Loads of them on Autotrader for your budget.

>> Guardian and BBC have predictably shoehorned the claim into their
>> reports of the story that the climate emergency is making air turbulence worse.

Well, it is.

I cannot see any large scale hydro being built again in the UK as I do not believe we have suitable sites anywhere.

This might be controversial but I’ve always felt that Grasmere is a bit up itself, and it sits in a nice deep valley…

A good friend from Uni is a BA pilot and he’s a climate sceptic 🤦‍♂️

A surprising number of pilots are. I usually wait until they bring up their conspiracy theories and try to convince them that chemtrails are a thing.

The thunderstorms this year are earlier and more intense than I’ve ever seen them. Flew back across Colorado a few days ago and the supercell there was glowing like a light bulb from continuous lightning discharge.

It’s very easy to say flatly “you don’t fly through a thunderstorm” and that’s broadly correct. On the other hand, if you have a wall of them in front of you there’s really no choice but to pick your way through the least worst bits based solely on the world’s most paranoid weather radar and experience.

Eg in the picture below there are four options, none of which are ideal and all of which will likely have significant turbulence associated with them. The 777 also lacks the vertical situation display that you get on an Airbus.

Come again? Moving electricity generation at speed to renewables, enabling people to switch from fossil fuel transport, home heating etc. Key word there is enabling, rather than telling people what changes have to happen and leaving them to fail to make them.

But it’s devolved to local authorities, of which exactly zero will be prepared to put the idea of wind turbines or pumped hydro in their vicinity. Off-shore sounds good but is cripplingly expensive when there’s a perfectly solid foundation called The Ground.

Decarbonisation and grid upgrade needs to come ahead of any massive consumer heat pump roll out.

But if you don’t do one there’s little incentive to do the other regardless of the order. Nothing on EV charging provision or price controls.

Guilt isn’t enough, our whole national energy use needs to be changed… by government… not just be lecturing and taxing people for using what’s available to them.

But it isn’t, though. Where’s the policy that says that all new builds need to have generous solar panel provision and battery storage? What about something that says a new-build estate must have a segregated safe cycle route to the nearest town? What about dynamic road pricing?

There’s nothing about cyclist safety. No word on rolling back the new anti-cycling legislation.

Great British Energy. We will create a new publicly owned champion – Great British Energy, to give us real energy independence from foreign dictators. It will be owned by the British people, built by the British people and benefit the British people. It will invest in clean energy across our country- for example by making the UK a world leader in floating offshore wind.

How does this work with their scaled-back green energy plans? Privatised energy is not necessarily a bad thing – look at Octopus, for example, one of the “big six” but distinctly un-evil. So you invest in off-shore wind. Great. What about energy storage? Solar? There’s just silence. It could be they’re squashing Ed Miliband out of fear.

Nothing on aviation. Nothing on discouraging fossil-fuel use. Nothing on heat pumps. Nothing on rail electrification in the north.

Stick to tough fiscal rules with economic stability at their heart.

By giving tax cuts to the highest-paid public sector workers while re-introducing higher taxes on the private sector? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t overtly object to paying more tax, but I am unhappy that an arbitrary decision has been taken that I’m less useful to society than other people paid the same and should be punished financially for it.

This also implies that the current cuts and squeezing of public services are unlikely to change.

Will be Green Party again for me. This can either represent hypocrisy or a view that Labour is little more than David Cameron’s Conservative Party. Up to you…

Anyone sweating about being away when postal vote arrives.

Nope. They don’t need signing for so the postman can just stick it through the letterbox.

How do they know they are going to hit massive wind shear? I can’t imagine that shows up on weather radar ?

If it’s bad then the message gets passed back down the chain, either by ATC or via the air-to-air chat frequency. Clear air turbulence in an area can be forecast to a degree but identifying it in flight before hitting it is a crapshoot. You can get an inkling from your “spidey sense” but that’s about it.

What’s wrong with a grease port and a squirt every service?

Couldn’t you argue that a properly engineered bearing doesn’t require lubrication at all? Greasing bearings is to account for poor fit and to keep muck out.

Avis. They’ll try to fiddle you on the fuel on every occasion regardless of the branch by claiming that it’s not completely full, or pretending that you opted for their “short distance” policy. You get the money back – I wait until I’ve had the email receipt before leaving – but it’s still a needless waste of time and their customer service on the phone is awful.

For example, yesterday they charged me for three gallons of fuel. On an EV.

I’ve never had a bad experience with Thrifty or others in the same group. Enterprise is slow when it comes to getting the car but also OK. Make sure they see you taking a video walk around of the car when picking it up and returning it, avoids a lot of hassle later on.

Yeah, I had an Ioniq 5 as a hire car today and it was awful. It had 5,000 miles on the clock and everything rattled and clunked.

Using the built in sat nav was akin to programming the timer on a nineties video recorder, and the charger database was spectacularly out of date. I would blame Hyundai for this, but my iPhone / Google Maps was no better.

The cruise control was agricultural, the lane assist was awful, the brakes grabby, the economy mediocre, and the ride clunky.

I like to complain about my Model 3, but even at three years old it’s more than twice the car that the Ioniq 5 is.

Oh, since I suppose I should be balanced, some pros: I like the pixel styling. And the V2L capability. But that’s it.

Anyone here got a 2018-2020 Model S Long Range? What was a £100,000 is now sub £30k and may do to replace my Model 3 when it goes back to the big Tesla dealership in the sky. I don’t want a new Tesla out of principle, but a big floaty electric barge is quite tempting.

>> That’s one of the issue for me. These tax breaks for EVs are tax breaks for the rich.

All relative, innit? It’s got to be affordable for someone, and there needs to be an incentive for the first owners. If a consultant takes one of these on salary sacrifice as an alternative to going part-time or even retiring early, then there’s a wider benefit.

Let’s not turn this thread into yet another “they earn more than me so they should be taxed until we take home the same”.

I can get 600 miles on a tank with my 1.2l engine and achieve over 50mpg. The car is shaped like a box too. When EV’s can achieve the same I’ll consider switching. The tax is not a factor for me. Still cheaper to keep my current car.

No, you can’t. 600 miles at 50mpg is 12 gallons, or 54.5 litres. The tank capacity in a Skoda Fabia is 45 litres…

It’s fascinating how deep people will dig to support their paranoid conspiracy-theorist led anti-EV bullshit propaganda.

I wonder how many miles it takes to offer the energy and materials of a new car v trundling around in an existing car?

13,500 miles according to Reuters. Other models give 15000 – 20000 miles. There is one model that predicts 700,000 miles, but it’s developed by the oil and gas industry.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/

I suppose one of the reasons you might be a bit hacked off if you have a newish EV is that existing low taxes on diesels (many of which fiddled their emissions reports) have remained unchanged, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem to do this to EV drivers.

Personal suspicion is that over the next few months there will be a lot more anti-EV legislation pushed through or announced as the government try to appeal to their target demographic of grey-haired climate deniers.

LGV blind spot

There’s blind spots and there’s a problem with drivers not looking properly. Any LGV with true “blind spots” shouldn’t be allowed to mix with vulnerable road users.

Bound to get re-set when the Govt start losing money ! If you can afford £40k plus cars, you can afford the measly amount of VED.

Except, of course, that thanks to inflation that £40,000 should actually be closer to £50,000.

It’s hard to take a tax described as a “luxury car” tax seriously when the owner of a Rolls Royce pays exactly the same as a Golf or Citroen DS4.

Or is this the STW theme of “they earn more than me so they’re bastards who should be taxed until their take-home is the same” kicking in? I would guess from the space between the last word in the sentence and the exclamation mark you’re of the typewriter generation?

The diesel pays far more tax overall though in fuel duty and VAT

But isn’t the tax band supposed to be representative of emissions? I agree that electric vehicles need to pay their fair share of the costs associated with providing infrastructure, but this tax change is merely to appease the anti-EV lobby / climate change deniers.

One could argue that since a camera sensor is arguably the more accurate representation of what’s actually happening, using a phone on long-exposure mode is the best way to view it.

The philosophical attitude doesn’t bother me. I can’t see microscopic items, or wavelengths outside of a tiny range, or things a long way away, but with the right instruments I can and it doesn’t stop me thinking they’re incredible.

The simple fact is that the bits of your eye that see colour aren’t good at night. It took me 30 minutes of night adaptation before I could see the red and purple shades on Friday night.

See also: self-appointed road police who straddle two lanes, ignoring the countless signs saying “MERGE IN TURN”.

Like people who drop litter, these imbeciles do not benefit the human race and in the wild would have been eaten by their parents.