Go to Retrobike, do not pass Go, do not collect £200.

I know there’s a few Pace experts on there, at least one guy on there who supplied Pace fork bits who used to work for them IIRC.

May’s christian approach seems more like:
The Parable of the Talents

You clearly have no idea what that parable is about. Try reading around it a bit more.

If at certain times all the rads heat up then there might not be a blockage. I reckon you need to balance the system properly first, it’s not very difficult, a cheap pipe thermostat and a screwdriver is all you need. It might be that when it’s cold the upstairs rads being closest to the boiler are using up all the heat before it gets downstairs. I had this issue with a new rad I put in downstairs, balanced it all and it was fine.

Where is the boiler? Upstairs?
Where are the rads that work and the ones that don’t?

Most of these upsold special treatments are complete crap, poor quality for the price you pay, applied badly and don’t do what they say. Mind you most people think when they pay for it they’ll never need to wash their cars again 🙄

The latest one I’ve seen was on a Honda Jazz a friend bought. They said they’d managed to get a great deal on the car and got this treatment for free. I saw the car the day they picked it up (2/3 years old) and the whole car was covered in swirl marks and looked extremely shoddy. If it was a betting man I think they just took it to the local £5 drive through place and pocketed the profit.

Spend £50 on some decent cleaning equipment for yourself and most importantly learn how to use it properly and save your money.

I have short legs and arms and a huge head. It’s a miracle anyone ever wanted to marry me.

I do have a thick head of hair which puts me ahead of a lot of other guys though “provocatively runs hand through hair while smirking at baldies” 😆

How will you be marking this monumental occasion?

Staying out of Lancashire will be pleasure enough. 🙂

Photo calendars. Hate them, pure evil, and I despise the people that peddle these pieces of tat.

I hate these too BUT last year I got an ace one. A friend of mine has a really battered Barbour jacket which really should be binned (I don’t think even Barbour themselves are prepared to fix it) and we all take the Mick out of him about it. Last year I got a flip desk calendar with a different picture of him wearing this coat in various countryside situations – I have it on my drawers in the bedroom and it makes me laugh every morning!!

Shower gel and spray sets – I LOVE THESE! I resent having to buy them when I’m shopping and so I love getting a stash of them at Christmas as they will last me most of the year and save a ton of cash.

How can anyone not like an envelope with cash in it? I’d rather have that then something I don’t like. The trick is to go out and buy something you really want with it, if it doesn’t pay for it alll then it’s like the person has given you a big discount on something you really want. Or if a few people give you cash you can get something really nice.

A surround amp with 2 floorstanders and a centre speaker is great. You get great music, great TV and films are much better. Speech is fixed to the screen which sounds ace. You can get an amp for £200 which will do Bluetooth etc for streaming and another £200 will get you speakers. Far better than any soundbar.

£150 for this amp is a steal. https://www.richersounds.com/tv-home-cinema/av-receivers/yamaha-rxv381.html

£99 speakers https://www.richersounds.com/tannoy-floorstanding-speakers.html

Plenty of centre speakers here. https://www.richersounds.com/tv-home-cinema/centre-speakers.html

I’ve done my whole house up and changed all the bulbs to the LED ones from Screwfix. Seem very good and a nice warmish light rather than stark white. They sometimes do the fancy LED ones that look like old fashioned bulbs really cheaply – got a few for 99p which is a bargain and they are great for feature lights.

I’ve done my whole house up and changed all the bulbs to the LED ones from Screwfix. Seem very good and a nice warmish light rather than stark white.

I’ve had an iPhone since the 3 (had a 4,5,6 now a 7) and I’ve never even cracked a screen never mind smashed it. All I do is put a screen protector on it and a mid range Otter box case (not the mega tough ones). I’ve thrown (by accident) my phone on tiled floors, dropped it loads of times, it gets attached to my bike when riding on road and always comes out with me on the MTB.
I’m careful with it but I don’t treat it like I’m Frodo with the One Ring.
How do people manage to break phones so often?

If you have your iPhone set up to back up regularity to iTunes setting up a new one takes minutes and you’ll see no difference whatsoever. Must be the easiest phone to replace!

are you aware that the Nespresso capsules can be recycled & Nespresso will send out an envelope with freepost on it, so users can recycle their pods simply?

Crappy excuse for dumbass middle class faux convenience. If you know anything about how waste should be reduced you’d know the first rule is not to make it in the first place.

Nespresso, tastes like crap and very expensive to use. Proves consumers will buy 650b anything.

I’ve never had V8 pedal go rattly. Tip – when you first get them pump them full of grease with a grease gun (not the tiny thing you get with the pedals) and they seem to last forever.

So you’re staying buy one when it’s discounted with any other sale name

Pretty much. Why would any retailer sell their stock at the cheapest possible price on the one day where you are guaranteed to have your highest sales? You’re just a busy fool. Cheapest prices are when sales are at a slower rate.

There are exceptions but I guarantee they’ll be cheaper at the end of January. But by then you probably will have decided not to a buy a new TV after all so you’ll save 100%. 😉

Mind you, the general public are completely daft when it comes to sales, as can be proven by the continued and inexplicable popularity of the DFS half price offers and Next sales. 😆

If you want to buy one cheap wait until it’s cheaper. Don’t get suckered into the Black Friday con. I worked in retail a long time and know all the tricks!

A friend has some and loves them, he’s a bit sensitive to stuff like that having had issues with his wrists in the past and he absolutely loves the Vibrocore bars.

wish all the naysayers would just Muck off themselves. nobody cares.

Plenty of people care about diesel emissions on here but chucking ecotoxic crap into surface water isn’t the middle class green issue of the moment it seems. 🙄

@20K miles per annum definitely take the company car. You will be covered for tyres, insurance (which can go up with mileage) and servicing which with that mileage will be high. Lease cost on 20k PA car will be sky high.

This.

A personal lease car will be very expensive. A personal privately owned car will have to be decent (therefore more ££) to be reliable over 20k a year unless you want to take chances.

I have a company car and do 20k a year, I pay nothing towards it and just put diesel in it. New tyres? Drive into an ATS and with a signature I’ve got a full new set if I need them. Servicing? Dealer picks it up from my work and sorts it. New gearbox (happened in my last works car)? gets picked up and a shiny Avensis estate given to me for 3 weeks while they spend £3k putting a new 6sp gearbox in it, no charge to me.

Its a major blessing to have and it means I was able to buy a 2nd car which I have for fun and it only does 3k a year so I don’t have to worry about servicing or breakdowns as I have my works car.

Yay! Because I love something that strips the anodising off my bike and pollutes the environment. I’ll sticj with EatMyDirt thanks.

I can’t see the scratches as the pictures aren’t great but most of that would be sorted with a tube of silicon which is what I’d expect after having something fitted like that. I don’t know about the joints between the worktops though , that isn’t what I’d expect for £8k.

My whole new kitchen with solid oak worktops cost less than half of your worktops!

How did that printer thing happen? Surely not just from dropping a toner cartridge?

TG – the popularity of CD’s came at the same time as when vinyl pressings were starting to get worse and worse. So the difference was much bigger than it should be. Not saying that CD wasn’t better in many ways but vinyl is easier to sound good when the source material is as it should be.

I got a Project Debut 2 turntable for £40, amazing condition, a technics amp with remote and phono input for £47, some small Gale speakers off Freecycle and a Sony CD for nothing. All in £87 and the guy who sold me the turntable also gave me a load of vinyl and about 100 CD’s for free!

I’m buying a module which means I can play stuff wirelessly to my separates system. Best of both worlds!

Perhaps some of you should get out if your cosy warm offices and have a go at dealing with the general public!

I dealt with tens of thousands of customers over a long period working in retail. If I treated a customer like a lot of tradespeople do every day I would have been fired on the spot. Most have no concept of even the most basic aspects of decent customer service.

I have a friend who has his own carpet business, he had one fitter who did my carpets who did a good job but left quite a mess behind. All he had to do was pick up the bits and give the room a vacuum. I mentioned this to my friend because I knew he was trying to provide a quality service rather than the cheapest available. The fitter was there too and he absolutely refused to do it and said it wasn’t his job and he’d never done it. I tried to suggest to the fitter that maybe he could charge a little more for the extra time it took (10 mins extra so hardly anything really) and that it would provide a better service and help him secure more work and make him more money. He got quite angry (my friend agreed with me) and my friend told me later that he wasn’t using that guy any more because he just wouldn’t change.

I hate talking on the phone with customers.

Seriously??? I don’t expect someone to be available 24/7 but a ring back would be nice.

I’ve tried texting tradesmen but that almost never gets a reply. 🙁

I think a lot of tradesmen are operating like it’s the 1970’s still.

We can only hope so. 😀

I can’t help thinking if you’re reading a book and falling asleep it can’t be a great book! I’ve stayed up until the early morning to read a book, they keep me awake most of the time.

Newrob, I guess they came across ascretins and condescending to you as they probably worked you out quickly…especially as you spoke to them as you post on here?? Not worthy of your worldly knowledge???

I just told it as I saw it. I went to each house with an open mind and only asked politebasic questions which anyone would ask if they weren’t in the particulars. I would expect anyone trying to sell me a house to be professional, knowledgable and informative, however 95% of the contact I had with local EA’s was anything but. I’m not the only one to think so either, my brother had the same issue in Sheffield but I know loads of people equally frustrated.

Here’s some examples:
1) Cant be bothered working outside office hours to come and look at our house
2) Out of the 3 agents we went to go and see (3 biggest in Hudds) none of them phoned us back as they said they would when we enquired about selling through them.
3) When asking for help on houses they had for sale in the high street shop they said they didn’t know, and it was pointless taking an information sheet as they didn’t have much info on them compared to what was online. They said look at Rightmove instead to find details.
4) Not turning up for viewings appointments and not apologising afterwards.
5) Turning up for appointments without the keys or alarm codes. One house my wife went to see the EA set the alarm off and got almost nasty when my wife said she didn’t want to look round a house which had an ear splitting siren going off inside it. He then proceeded to curse and swear on the phone as he was trying to sort an alarm code out.
6) This happened at least 50% of the time – turning up with zero knowledge about the house they were meant to be showing us around. Not even knowing how many bedrooms there were or which was the biggest one or having keys to the garage or knowing what council tax band it was or when improvements had been made etc etc.

I fully appreciate it might be different in other parts of the country but there’s a lot more internet EA signs going up round Huddersfield all the time. Certainly round here the trad EA’s are doing a generally very poor job. I don’t know why, maybe they can’t get the staff, maybe they don’t have to try as they know everything is selling.

I understand that internet EA’s aren’t for everyone too, if you can’t show people round or have a particular house which might benefit from some specialist selling you may want to stick with traditional services.

I also think a lot in internet EA’s can be poor. I went with HN as they had been round the longest and offered the same service as a trad EA but many times cheaper probably because you weren’t paying for their high street rents.

There was simply no “working me out”, they could barely work out what they were doing themselves most of the time.

Robdob, are you doing that at the moment? I’m still in the free period but will continue on if it does work that way

Yes I’m in free period.

Takes 2 seconds to check on Google and EE website to check the data issue – http://ee.co.uk/why-ee/apple-music

Of course it’s not you’re paying a subscription to stream music you pay your mobile provider for the data.

With EE you pay EE to subscribe to Apple Music and then you don’t have to pay for the data. I suppose if you subscribed directly with Apple then you’d have to use your own data allowance.

I got it for free for 6 months with EE and it doesn’t use your data allowance at all. I’m just not using it much though so I don’t think I’ll continue with it. I listen to radio more or iPlayer radio.

I have a Bertie (bigger version of a Henry) and it’s ace for more agricultural uses, was ace when doing building work and cleaning the car and big spills etc but it can’t match a proper upright on piled carpets – you need a beater bar to sweep through the pile.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Dyson keep bringing out new stuff all the time, is this to get people buying them and upgrading? Sebo vacuums have looked the same for years and years and looo very traditional.

Our church is flipping huge and th congregation clean it – acres of carpets. We used to have some Dysons but they all broke quite quickly. Bought 10 Sebos – nothing fancy – and they still work just as well as the day they were purchased. Lightweight, efficient, simple but powerful. It’s what I am buying next.

My wife is an estate agent

So probably biased against them then?

and has said there are a growing number of customers who are trapped into contracts with online agents where they have to pay even if they sell there house via another agent.

So some people have signed up to something without reading the contract. High street agents can do exactly the same sort of thing (say they have to be paid even if no sale) unless you make sure you’ve got the contract you want.

Not to mention having to manage the sale process and chasing.

I didn’t have to do that. Only difference with Houseneteork was that I showed potential buyers around myself.

Many high street agents will do flat fees,

They dont advertise that round here. Every one I went to would have been £1000 – £1500 minimum more than HN.

in fact my wife will match purple bricks on a like for like basis.

Why do they charge more in the first place then? I know from a long career in retail that “price matching” is hardly ever taken up.

Saying all that, I wouldn’t use a high street EA even if they were free in Huddersfield. Apart from one exception (and I saw 45 houses before we bought ours) all the people showing us around houses were total cretins, completely clueless about the house and actively insulting and condescending to us on several occasions. The EA’s we went to before we went with an online service either ignored us when we went inside their offices, or never phoned us back or were so useless I actually couldnt use them – one example being that they simply would not come round to value our house outside 9-5 hours. Wouldn’t even entertain the idea and looked at us like we were idiots and insulting their family when we asked for an evening (6pm earliest) or weekend visit. When asked how they got any business from couples who both work full time they just looked at us blankly. Utter utter morons.

My brother had the same issue when trying to buy a house in sheffield, don’t know if it’s a Yorkshire thing or not but I’m not alone amongst people I know I’m having this experience.

House network offered their own conveyancer to us, they were very honest and admitted they had been having problems with their last conveyancers and had recently got a new company to take over that side – they actually said “we don’t know what they are like yet so I can’t recommend them too much until they’ve been proven to be as good as we expect them to be”.

I am Christian and it doesn’t offend me. I am now hungry though. 😀

I used House network and they were brilliant. Honest, Efficient, good online system, their listing looked way more professional than other agents. Sold quickly for more than we expected in a local crowded market. Wouldn’t hesitate to use again.

I had some new decals made up for my Pitch Pro Rockshox Pike forks to match them to the gold anodising – in style of original RS1 forks.

This is a genius idea! Bookmarked!