Take care about what your neighbours attitudes are. These days of fossil fueled gas boilers, remember the official line line that it's better to pollute with global warming Co2 emissions, than anythig which people might complain about. The law is firmly on the side of the gas-boiler. Many people are not used to the smell of any woodsmoke in the air. – You will always get some returning to ground in the vicinity. There is no such thing as a zero-odour woodstove or pellet boiler.

Your taxes have been funding Environmental Health visits numerous times to my house because the neighnours have been complaining. Zero "findings" by the official Environmenmtal Health nose test so far, but they are obliged to keep on visiting as long as they receive complaints.

A court (I'm told) can technically stop you using your 100% legal biomass boiler or woodstove. Don't believe it if your council say they are comitted to encouraging carbon neutral heating systems, it's hogwash because there is no joined-up thinking. If it came to a crunch, it's the complainant's word against yours and a single judge, no scientific evidence being necessary.

Oh, to answer your question. Yes they are lovely, very efficient and easy to run. Buy a good quality clean burning stove and you'll scarcely ever need to clean glass or sweep the flue (in my observation), and buy a small one.

"Layer of hot air trapped under a layer of cold air." ..spot the mistake.

Nice pics though.

It was impossible to ride off road here in Surrey. Up to the axles on the flat. I tried, but just couldn't move the bike forwards. – I had to ride to work on the roads. – Bad karma, but it was quiet.

And the rest of it is on my bike.

Grrr I had to ride in on the road for the first time in 7 years.

Car drivers don't know how cushy they have it. – only took me an extra 15 minutes.

The more it snows
(Tiddely pom),
The more it goes
(Tiddely pom),
The more it goes
(Tiddely pom),
On snowing.
And nobody knows
(Tiddely pom),
How cold my toes
(Tiddely pom),
How cold my toes
(Tiddely pom),
Are growing.

We all got an email saying our site was closed. – not so useful for those who only picked it up after cycling to work!

Reba/Rev/Pike/Recon Air Service Kit
So TFT do a oil/dust seal kit £17 and a Reba/Rev/Pike/Recon "Air Service Kit" £25. Does the Air service kit also cover the motion control O rings? -The picture indicates the kit contains 5 O rings, but I can account for only three in the service manual for the air spring side.
They also do a cheaper "motion control service kit" which I assume contains nothing for the air spring, – but that appears to contain four O rings which is too many.

How so?

Assuming one should ideally do the lot, what's actually to be bought and is there somewhere cheaper than TFT for expensive O rings?

OK, changing the oil only is not too bad I guess – I have at least got the 15wt already and need to only get some 5wt. I'll save cash by not replacing the seals as I'm guessing by the air-seal performance that they must still be OK.

I'll be riding back up here in about an hour from now..

Millers Damsels . Wheaty, salty, expensive. Just the ticket.

Alpin,

Yes, all true, but it's also true that the Christians hyjacked what was otherwise a really good time to have a party. So forget all the Jesus bollocks and just enjoy it. In fact the more materialistic and crass you become, the more it annoys the few remaining Christians (bless them), – so go for it.

Also having kids puts a different perspective on it, however hard you try not to, they love it. And they really don't get corrupted by the school nativity if you tell them straight that it's all nonsense.

Hi Dezb,

We had the same problem. One who used to sit on the other side of our open plan office till recently would stink the place out. Enough to make my eyes water. I was on the point of approaching our secretary to discuss what would be a tactful approach to the problem, but thankfully she moved out to inflict her contamination on another office.

Along with air freshners it's one the of the key "don't do's" which would come up in any review of Sick Building Syndrome. Lots of the fragrance chemicals used by perfume manufacturers aren't covered by any sort of laws. We recently had this at our place where the cleaners installed nauseating air spray freshners. Interestingly the health and safety info for these says quite bluntly "don't breathe spray", along with descriptions of the safety handling requirements (mask, goggles and impervious gloves). 30mg by inhalation (about 1 drop) also has a 4 hour LD 50 on a rat.

Chemical fragrances have many compounds in common with spray air freshners.

And it's not always the women. Air freshners can be sabotaged, but not so easy with a person.

Tell her you are asthmatic, she's cauzing you problems. That should put a stop to it.

I've just got planning and building regs passed to upgrade my flat kitchen roof to a 15 degree tiled pitch. The right tiles can go to 12.5 degrees these days, proper insulated warm roof.

We got given them at school (Not sure that happens these days).

Anyway, I burnt mine.

OK, I found the bar mitts $200! Expedition Pogies. hmmm..

Stratobiker – what are those bar mits?

In the daytime riding in the woods, you can't see about 510000000 KM^2 of the earth's surface. At night time, you can't see about 510000000.001 KM^2. That's um, about 2e-12 change in what you can't see. -Does that help?

It surely depends on how dirty it's going to be? I wore a hole in a previous alloy frame with a nylon tie-wrap. It wasn't the tie-wrap at fault, but the grit beneath it.

I cleaned mine two years ago

Hugh:
"flats, in theory should give you better technique as you are not relying on spd's to keep your feet on the pedals."

Why "in theory"? – What is the theory behind this?

Isn't it rather like saying "No seatbelts, in theory, should give a Formula 1 driver even better technique, – not relying on webbing to keep their bum on the seat".

Hi Speaker2animals.

I've twice seem metetors in broad daylight. Once whilst on holiday in Spain, and another time looking East over the sea near Edinburgh.
They do happen – I guess when they are visible in full daylight, they are pretty big!

Wire baskets are the most useless contraptions ever.
You will probably get ten times (yes really) as much heat out of a small woodstove.
It's worth buying a modern clean burning stove, – (which might cost three times a cheapo iron job from Machine Mart, but is well worth it). Look at Clearview, Charnwood.. er several others but I can't recall now.
Flue? Dunno, you'd need to inspect it or get it checked.

I heat a 4 bedroom house with only a 4KW woodstove.

We tried one, it didn't seem to do anything that we noticed. The general impression was that the more noise the better though. It didn't matter if if was my hammer drill, music, guests, a pub. – Just as long as there was noise.

You need to download part J of the building regs from the .gov website. You can look in there for all the details you need, including answering your hearth question.
I followed the rules, – never having done one before, and the building inspector passed it without a hitch – You MUST follow the regs though, they are made for a very good reason. Solid fuel stoves get bloody hot, and need adequate ventilation.
You also can't use a "tube" as you say for a flue, it needs to be the proper stuff, twin wall insulated. I used Poujoulat brand, but there are others. It's expensive.

I've used Google Latitude – with mixed success, it often gives huge errors because the system will frequently report to on-line viewers the cell mast location of the phone, even when it's simultaneously reporting to the user the correct GPS location, and the phone had good GPS and GPRS coverage. The problem occurs at random, but frequently in my experience.

I've also tried Phonelocator (free)
Trackr! (free, but didn't work very well for me)

I have semi-used Google Latitude to recover my phone which I lost on a mountain in France. It would have been rather more useful if the phone had reported it's real location rather than a KM away (A frequent and annoying weakness in the system as noted above). But it was good enough for me to establish that it hadn't been taken away by anyone else, so I went back up and found it the next day.

I suggest if it's on quite a bit BECAUSE you have the doors and windows open then it's set way too high! Normal practice (which has worked quite well for hundreds of years), would be to open windows to dry the house out. – Not open them, and try to dehumidify the outside air!

Might be worth looking for belts from Screwfix etc, hire company see these as useful extra money – and charge you plenty for them.

Stair carpet. Slippery, dirty, cost a lot, and wear out fast. – A bit like my last set of brake pads then.

I think I'll carry on without one.

It's not just the ring type. If it's going to voicemail too quickly after that, then it's a setting your servicer provider (eg Vodafone) controls.

I've long suspected that they keep the default ring time very short so that they maximize revenue from people forced to call their mailbox, simply because they did not answer their phone fast enough. They also make no money whilst your phone is signalling (ie ringing), but not in a voice call, so there is more pressure on them to minimize the ringing periods, especially where networks are busy.

If you call your provider (Vodafone or whoever), they should have a setting they can give you to set the ringing time for longer. I did it and needed to key in a control string involving lots of control characters. I got it out to 40 seconds once.

Indeed – baggies over Lycra tights? – Now which is sillier?

Do all baggiers thrive on those freezing winter legs?

Lycra every day. Can't beat it.

Saying that I do have one pair cheapo baggies which I wear only if we go on a family ride to a summer open garden, or National Trust or something. – I believe it pays not to upset the senior citizens taking tea in the orchard.

Yes please. Send it to maverictable.jdn_at_neverbox.com (I hope you like that 🙂 Better still Google Docs like Rootes1 suggests

Double layer (two pairs) of Polartec fleece didn't work for me. I still lost feeling in my thumbs and fingertips.

I've only recently moved to low-cut Goretex MT-60. Of course they don't keep the water OUT (Well they do pretty well for light spray and a bit of mud).

Important thing is, riding every day through multiple downpours the last few weeks, I notice that once they fill up (really fill up properly, like tipping water out), then the water is trapped trapped nicely inside and has a real opportunity to warm up, and my toes stay warm.

In the past every sloshy puddle was replacing the existing water with fresh freezy stuff. So Goretex shoes are good..even when they fill up with water. (Plastic bags might be about as effective mind :lol:)

I got tailed for several miles last summer, ending up in Marlborough.

Naturally I was watching the speedo like a hawk, hardly ever looking at the road in fact.. Then he has the cheek to pull me over and say "I think you were doing 31 MPH there.." WTF, haven't they got better things to do?

"almost Messianic zeal ". Problem is that if all that happens is a few polite reminders, (perhaps like before like the impending bank crash), then who would take any notice? We do need Mirror style headlines to crack the proletariat.
Naturally this works for both sides as we've seen recently in the Telegraph.

rightplacerighttime,

Unfortunately you can't convince a denier. It's religion, no point trying. What has evidence got to do with it, when there are clearly bigger things at work that we don't understand?

Sooner or later overconsumption needs to become socially unacceptable. The best way to affect things and to make your own abstention the norm, is by going public about what YOU think. There is little point rubbing people up telling them what THEY should think, it doesn't work that way.

So (a plug just for example), I think the Greenpeace Airplot is brilliant and I'm signed up to it. I was also so impressed by those folks on the Houses of Parliament roof the other day I decided to give them £10 a month, – I see it as an investment towards my family's future with one of the biggest paybacks I'm likely to get. I also thought this was a rather less boring video: http://greenpeace-uk.thetarsandsblow.org/, but Deniers shouldn't watch that, it's grist for the mill.

Mine sticks sometimes, always did from new. I just bounce the front once, and it returns straight away though.

Once you accept the lycra is the way to go, tights are easy.

Bloody glad of them this morning. 5C, pissing down and most of the trails turned to streams. They are quietly drying out next to me and dropping their grit on the office floor.

Mrs Mc's been doing mine for years. Saves ££. We just bought a little wee book, it's not hard to do – After all, hairdressers can manage it.

I used to do hers as well for for 2 or 3 years. Quite fun really. It was fine (I thought).

Nowadays though she goes to the girlie haircutter – no faith – and I just get into trouble because I don't notice when she's had it done!