the services I stopped at had 4 charging points

Charging at motorway services is improving at an incredible pace; whilst at the moment it’s prudent to check that the services you stop at will have enough chargers (the last one I used had 24 plus 20 Tesla superchargers) I expect in a couple of years you won’t have to worry. I drive at “motorway” speeds. Teslas still go flying past me.

You normally connect the EV charger to the incoming power at the meter box, not through the consumer unit. Mine has its own mini weatherproof consumer unit sitting next to the meter box because the installer couldn’t fit all the gubbins in the box, ymmv, the cable to the EV charger goes outside the house.

Sounds like a good result. Just checked and I still have my waranty email just in case, hope I don’t need it!

I was about to post something similar to julians. To quote the paper Edukator linked to –

For example, if a battery is discharged to 50% of its capacity and then fully recharged, that’s defined as half of a charge/discharge cycle.

If you redefine a cycle as any charging event as some people seem to be doing then as Molgrips points out you’d be doing a “cycle” every time you took your foot off the accelerator, in wehich case you could do 1000 “cycles” just popping down to the shops. Just shows that taking a rule of thumb and arbitrarily redefining the terms does not necessarily result in anything useful..

AVA offer a 10 year warranty, or 5 years if you don’t bother to service them. They also claim repairability as a feature/USP. As an AVA owner l’ll be interested to hear what response you get from them.

The 1000 cycle thing is a finger in the air thing, but don’t forget it’s 1000 full charge/discharge cycles, so basically the range x 1000. On my car that would be somewhere between 250000 and 300000 miles, which with my current mileage would be 30-40 years. I’m expecting something else to expire before the battery, not least me.

The situation in the USA is far worse than here and yes, it is pretty messed up.

Not really, they’re pretty much standardised on NACS going forward, which is a neater solution than CCS but doesn’t accommodate the 3 phase AC that hardly anyone uses for car charging in the UK.

In a theoretical perfect world the extra weight makes no difference to an EV in a straight line as the extra energy used to accelerate it is returned when you slow down, unlike an ICE where it all ends up heating the atmosphere. IRL roads include bends and slopes and regen is not 100% efficient, but even so on a motorway speed may well make more of a difference to efficiency than extra weight.

Don’t have any personal experience but Mrs R was diagnosed with secondary adrenal insufficiency in 2010. Just spoke to her about this thread and the first thing she said was get hold of a copy of “Living with Addison’s disease” by Professor Simon Pearce and Sarah Spain, available from your favourite online bookstore.

She was diagnosed originally by her gastro professor who referred her to endocrine, where the consultant said he’d eat his hat if she had Addison’s disease (what would a gastroenterologist know about it?) but sent her for a day curve test anyway (the power of being referred by a professor), followed by panicking phone calls from the hospital to come in at once to put her on hydrocortisone. Day curve tests seem to have been superseded by simpler blood tests now. The hydrocortisone solves the immediate problem but taking the right quantity is not always trivial – read up about sick day rules on the Addison’s site if you want to kn ow what I mean, and hope that we don’t have another pandemic any time soon; as someone said above we need a continuous monitor for cortisol like the diabetes things

Her other advice is to challenge everything you’re told by the medical establishment- she was nearly taken off the supposedly life critical hydrocortisone because of a mistaken assumption by a doctor, her GP practice knows very little and she has to train them, I’ve had to be trained by the practice to give injections using the emergency kit we have to have; it makes her a priority for flu jabs but the searches the GP practice do don’t recognise the condition so she has to fight for it even though her medical record at the surgery has red flags all over it. We’re had some medical people panic about it – she was once rushed to A&E in an ambulance because of a series of apparently unstoppable escalations after using the surgery’s Ask First app to ask about pleurisy symptoms.

Reading that back it sounds a bit alarming but in practice if she takes the medicine appropriately all is ok and we’ve never had a crisis and it seems likely she’s had the condition undiagnosed for most of her life.

edit: apparently they’re trialing a monitor but it’s currently the size of a suitcase. Oh, and carry a steroid dependency card.

It’s really easy, but just to reassure yourself I’d just rock up to your nearest fast charger (Zapmap will tell you where) and put a few kWh in just so you’re aware of how easy the process is and the little quirks to be aware of, like where the often short-ish CCS cable is in relation to your charging port, before exposing your family to it.

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That was a surprise.

Any reasons why not?

Possibly too late for the OP, but on the Worx site it’s £80 with a battery and fast charger and maybe 10% off if you sign up for their newsletter. Or oddly on the Amazon link £72 with no battery, £110 with one battery or £108 with 2 batteries.

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Never had an anagram before. First time for everything and all that.

can charging be simple and easy

It is, and it’s only complicated if you make it so. For public charging people will tell you about signing up to schemes, having apps, cards, dongles etc but it’s no more necessary than having a Shell+ card and app if you’re filling up an ICE car (other fuel loyalty schemes are available). I think there’s still some legacy thinking from the early days of public charging when you weren’t even sure if the charger would have the right connector, you needed an app and a special card to make it work and even then you needed the wind to be blowing the right way for the car to talk to the charger. It’s not like that now; it’s plug in, wave a credit card at the reader and off you go. Again, for home charging it’s as hard as you want it to be; last night I plugged my car in, this morning it’s charged. Not really hard at all, and a lot easier than filling up at a petrol station.

If it’s the standard Somfy motor thing then the door stops when the position switches in the motor tell it it’s at the top or bottom so if something’s stopping it from moving it will just stall the motor until the controller times out. More likely the motor capacitor has packed up, which happened to ours. Replacement is DIYable but not for the faint hearted.

There’s Wahl and there’s Wahl – they seem to do everything from disposable cheapos on Amazon to professional haircutting tools. I went through the same thought process in lockdown and after struggling with a Braun thing bought a Wahl Cordless Super Taper, which will probably outlast me and if the battery goes you can use it plugged in. As an extra bonus you can use the cordless one outside if the weather’s half-decent (warm enough for Mrs R who operates the thing) thus avoiding much of the mess problem.

As a PSA to the OP’s PSA, they’re slightly cheaper in store. Picked up the kettle yesterday for £71 at Costco in Watford.

Has your vet suggested metacam? Don’t have any experience with dogs but it’s done wonders for our cat’s arthritis.

I don’t know why people persist with Safari. It’s idiosyncratic on a good day and notoriously temperamental with STW. Use something else.

Safari is the second most used browser globally and it’s one of the most consistent and stable browsers I’ve come across. So I suspect most people would see this the other way round, to the detriment of STW –

I don’t know why people persist with STW. It’s idiosyncratic on a good day and notoriously temperamental with Safari. Use something else.

There doesn’t seem to be any market for old windsurfing kit and I’d hesitate to sell any of my old stuff as it’s probably no longer safe, never mind being old fashioned. I took one of my boards down to the reuse shop at the tip a few years ago, they said there was a demand for them then – I can’t imagine who from and I suspect that’s no longer the case. I have another board in the garage that’s been there since we moved  25 years ago but no longer have any roof bars to take it to the tip intact, I expect when I can bring myself to cut it up it will go into landfill. Sails and masts do seem to have some reuse value as awnings though.

I tie mine down to the lashing points with a ratchet strap then lob an old duvet on top to stop the rattling and hide it from scrotes. Main reason for tying it down apart from potential damage to the interior is that I wouldn’t want it joining me in the front of the car in an accident.

Some use White Spirit too.

I’ve had some success cleaning lacquers and enamels from my airbrush using some stuff called Clean Spirit (B&Q or Screwfix), which is perhaps not as effective as white spirit or cellulose thinners but is lot less fumy and is less environmentally unfriendly so I’m happier disposing of the residue.

Conkers on the window sills in our house – wife says they deter spiders?

Conker tree in our front garden, covered in spiders’ webs. Draw your own conclusions…

Four – green general waste, blue mixed recycling, brown garden waste which we have to pay for, and small food waste bin which gets used a couple of times a year for stuff that won’t go down the waste disposal. Small electrical goes on top of a bin to be collected seperately.

As the general waste goes to an incinerator I sometimes wonder whether the two big bins should be for burnable and not burnable.

Nice to see that not only do recycling policies vary by area but even the bin colours aren’t standardised.

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well that was… surprising!

Whilst bog standard Frontline seems to be completely ignored by fleas we’ve found Frontline Plus still works, plus a rigorous regime of combing with a flea comb – fortunately our 20 year old cat quite likes this except in the more delicate areas where PPE is required. Plus spraying round the house (and the flea comb) with one of the many flea sprays available and if possible leaving it for a few days before vacuuming. Last infestation took a couple of weeks to completely get rid of. I’ve found by accident that a good way of detecting an infestation in the house is to lie on the floor in the dark reading STW on an iPad and the little bastards jump onto the screen.

The trick with Worx, in my experience, is to keep an eye on their web site, their eBay site and Amazon for sales and discontinued products. Often you can buy something with batteries for less than the cost of the batteries on their own, and you get the tools essentially thrown in for free. My two 4Ah batteries came with a lawn mower and 2 port charger thrown in for about £120 late last year.

Well, that quickly removed “India beats Russia to moon landing” from the front pages. Two birds with one stone.

So its maybe a new MO to use a number of a random reputable company as a caller ID

Not just businesses – we’ve been on the other end of this, having had our landline number used by scammers. Cue lots of calls and messages saying “why did you call me?”, some of whom were quite belligerent or unbelieving when we said we didn’t. One of the more coherent callers told me what the original caller had said but I forget exactly what the scam was. Apparently they just choose a genuine phone number, use it until people get wise to it, then move on. There’s nothing you can do about it, but I guess our number must now be blacklisted by thousands of blockers!

You don’t say what sort of cable it is. Ours goes under the door but the installer used SWA cable. It was exposed where it went under the door but I asked the installer if it was ok to subsequently extend some existing (brick) steps to cover it and he was ok with that. If it was normal cable I’d probably been a bit more cautious and use conduit to protect it.

Just going through this process with Mrs R’s car insurance. Theoretically price walking is no longer allowed, but the renewal quote she’s been given is about 30% higher than last year and 15% higher than a new customer quote. It’s wierd that in trying to attract new business they’re quite happy to lose existing business.

My iPad is asking whether I want to increase my storage allowance to allow singletrackworld to use  2.7GB. No I don’t. I’ve said this before, it’s mining crypto in the background isn’t it? Stwcoin to the moon!

@IHN – we normally use this stuff https://www.mirka.com/en-gb/products/top-brands/abranet—the-dust-free-net-abrasive

usually P80 or P120, because it doesn’t clog too much, last longer so you don’t need to replace it so often and because the dust extraction is more effective. We’ve just started using a B&Q alternative because hardly anywhere has the Mirka stuff in the size we want but the jury’s out on whether it’s as good. Danish oil – coats with a cloth until it stops soaking in, and then one more.

Edit: having read the above may give the Osmo a try!

That reminds me, ours is due a re-oil. Sand off existing oil (assuming it’s set hard) – we use mesh sandpaper on an electric sander with a dust extractor so the kitchen doesn’t end up full of dust – then re-oil, we use Danish oil because that’s what the fitter used in 2008. Repeat every 5-10 years as necessary. Ends up looking as good as new.

Whilst nobody can fill the shoes of Iain M Banks, Adrian Tchaikovsky seems to be one of the go-to authors as an alternative. His output is prodigious; I’m currently half way through the second in the Final Architecture series but most of his stuff is worth a go.

don’t cancel any contracts until they have actually completed the installation work.

This. They’ve been digging up our village since late last year and invited me to sign up in February for a very reasonable price. I thought yay! 21st century broadband comes to the home counties at last, but when I asked them when my service could go live they said maybe March 2024.

I have the Worx one because they were selling them before Christmas with 2 4Ah batteries for about £120, and I wanted the batteries so the mower was effectively free. It’s fine, lasts for plenty of time with the 4Ah batteries, but it’s not a patch on the Ego I already had; I guess you get what you pay for.

See https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

<h3 class=”section-subheading”>In most cases, it just blocks or hides cookie related pop-ups. When it’s needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you (sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what’s easier to do). It doesn’t delete cookies.</h3>

Weird and inexplicable

Best description of this site I’ve seen for a while. I solved my problem through the power of STW. There’s a thread about ChatGPT which prompted me to ask it why the STW cookie popup won’t work with canvassblocker and what I could do to fix it, which eventually led me to the Idon’tcareaboutcookies addon for Firefox. Works a charm.

I have the same with Firefox on Windows with canvasblocker enabled. Disabling blocking on this site allowed the cookie pop up to work and the site then works fine with it re=enabled. It’s almost as if it needs to download a shed load of trackers before it will let you decide whether to allow cookies.

I dream of a world where all this ‘allow cookies’ rubbish is binned.