Any info of Citreon Dispatch? Are they generally considered alright?

I have a 2009 Peugeot Expert of the 2.0hdi variety. I bought it to replace the old Vivaro I had that was becoming a garage queen. I think I was lucky as it is an ex-police van…a forensics van, so it had done on average 6000 miles a year and was looked after. The mileage is currently approaching 81,000 miles, I got it for 5 grand just as the “van buying for parcel delivery craze” started.

Obviously not as big inside as a vivaro, but you can still fit alot in, and driving wise it is superior. If you are doing motorway miles go for the 6-speed 2.0hdi, the 1.6 hdi(ford derived) engine is on a 5 speed and can be a bit of a screamer at motorway speeds, and if not serviced properly can have issues with oil blockage, and 5th gear can go missing.

No reliability issues so far.

But down towards the bottom is Erbauer. And I’ve probably got more Erbauer than other brands. Sander, Impact driver, SDS, multitool etc. Never had a problem with them, which is a bit of a bummer because my most used tool is my impact driver. I’ve had it for years, it’s never missed a beat and has done everything I’ve thrown at it from chunky 120mm screws to tiny 12mm 3.5s. I wish it would conk out so I could justify a more fancy one! Oh, and being Erbauer from Screwfix if it had blown up within 2 years through abuse, they’d have replaced it without quibble.

Another shout for Erbauer. Most of my tools are now this brand. However, I still use a ten year old Makita drill driver which has taken some serious abuse over the years and keeps on going, the chuck is now starting to go, but I can’t complain.

Lumicycle halogens here, no one else I knew rode at night, just folks on here. Then did the LED conversion mentioned up there, they were great, still actually really good over 10 years later.

Started off with Lumicycle Halogens, then onto HID, before converting them over to LED during the “great conversion” event of 2009/10, with blackcat drivers and LED boards from Cutter. Still got these, and still got the Lumicycle NIMH batteries which are now 18 years old.

Did a bit of cheapo Chinese lights, before the current set up of Moon Meteor 1700Lumen/Halfords 500Lumen lights.

I once went to a Kebab “trailer” in Cranleigh Surrey(Not sure whether the local snobs wanted a permanent kebab shop there at the time), just as I was about to order, some dude crashed his car into the end of the trailer setting it loose to roll across the road.

Not sure whether he was trying to tell us something.

I am wondering how I’m going to get through this winter and if a road ride in the dark on an evening is a good idea or not?

I’m fortunate to have Richmond park and Bushy park nearby which close to traffic at sundown, its good for a few circuits a few times a week.

The only irritation is riders/commuters approaching you with their lights on full blast, the parks are unlit so you are not competing with other light sources to get noticed, so you can turn your lights down, though you do have to watch out for deer and the occasional Badger(tank).

Any one got the previous generation Citroen Dispatch?

Got a Peugeot Expert 2.0HDI. Reliable so far, though it was looked after by the Police previously. I think the engine is the same one used in the cars, its also the engine Ford used at the time. Try to avoid the 1.6HDI as apart from only having a five speed gear box making it a bit of a thrash at motorway speeds, they can go pop if the engine hasn’t not properly looked after.

Are they galvanised?

Yes. Mine is an 09, and does have a little surface rust in front of the rear wheel arches.

Ok, very rough calculation, One of those light fittings if mounted on the ceiling at 3 metres producing 3240lumens, would give about 1080lux at “working height” which is roughly 1.2 metres above finished floor level. (4000k cool white)

The beam angle of the light is 63 degrees, so the lux will start to drop off beyond the light fittings “sphere of influence”, so to speak, so positioning of the fittings in relation to each other will be important.

The recommended lighting level for an engineering workshop which is as close to what I think you are after is between 750-1000 Lux.

The colour of the walls/floors will have an effect, but will change once you have placed stuff on shelving on the walls, and have a car or two in the garage.

As for painting minis, you may need up to twice the amount of lux.

Yes I would still go for IP rated fittings, one thing that is missed, is that the building may well be covered, but if it is unheated, condensation within the non IP rated fittings will be a factor.

10 lights? How big is your garage?

What’s its height and width?

Are the walls painted, and if so what colour?

What is the floor? Concrete? Is it also painted?

What will you be doing in the garage?

All of the above would determine how many fittings, what colour, and whether to go with single or double.

Definitely go with IP rated fittings, and Ansell are a good brand.

Consider double laps to get more rest.

When I did dusk to dawn at thetford as a pair, we did alternate laps all the way through, we just wanted to keep active through the 12hrs, also Thetford in September was cold.

It could be moisture getting in somewhere on that circuit which can cause the RCD to trip.

Actually no the board has an mcb that feeds a workshop via armoured cable, the the workshop has its own RCD with an MCB for lights and an MCB for sockets

I presume the garage MCB, while in the main board, is not protected by the main board RCD?

Just posted on your other thread, Is the main switch an RCD? Is it the only RCD?

Is the main switch an RCD? Is it the only RCD?

It appears that the EICR has been done using the current regs as opposed to what was recommended at the time so obviously it’s going to be in an unsatisfactory condition

That would mean that if EICR’s were carried out on about 75% of the electrical installations in the country, they would all come out as unsatisfactory.

The problem here is the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 are poorly written, and I quote: “Ensure national standards for electrical safety are met. These are set out in the 18th edition of the ‘Wiring Regulations’, which are published as British Standard 7671.”

However, BS7671 18th edition does state that while existing installations that were installed to previous editions of the regulations may not comply with the current regulations in every respect, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are unsafe for continued used or require upgrading.

Yep, as above, television, the drug of a nation, which was also quoted in ZOO TV 30 years ago.

Where I live, motorists tend to dip their lights for walkers, some cyclists seem to just leave them pointing straight into your retina.

You get that in Richmond park, when the commute is in full swing. Granted, that they need their lights full on in the traffic choked streets of London, but the park has no street lighting and no cars after dark, so you are faced with an oncoming stream of retina burning lumens which you just can’t see beyond. Ok, there are deer who come to feed on the grass at the verges after dark, but unless you are trying to break the sound barrier, you can see them in time without using a football stadiums lighting system to see them.

One of the other problems at the moment with not being able to see beyond the lights is that there are a lot more people in the park after dark walking on the roads…in dark clothing. And Badgers.

Well horses are a special case. I assume you don’t ring a bell when you come up behind them? Love them or hate them I always start chatting to them and the rider as soon as they are close enough to hear then carry on chatting passing at fast walking pace unless they suggest different. They are never much bother but getting that wrong risks serious injury to them and the horse.

I think in my neck of the woods, being busy even before the lockdown, I think most users have got used to each other, so the majority of cyclists know what to do when dealing with horses, the only small issue is the rise of the gravel bikers who if in a group, still ride in peloton’s on the wide paths, and really don’t want to slow down for Horses.

That’s us.

I’ll have to wander by one day and have a look.

In terms of workshop lighting you can never have too much.

Yes you can.

This – loops of Richmond Park trail are a lot more pleasant when it’s empty, even if it’s a bit sleety / generally damp.

This. Only ride there in the evenings, even Summertime evenings, its amazing how quiet the park becomes. Same goes for the surrounding area’s.

How dare you sir? We are most definitely Cheam Village!

Knowing North Cheam and Cheam village, I can see how that could be pretty insulting.

You’re the gift shop next to the crossroads in ‘cheam village’ aren’t you?

So you are saying don’t just swap our 18 tubes ,get units ?

Yes.

What unit would you suggest to replace a current one that takes 2 x 5 ft daylight tubes @58w each? They are about 14 feet up .

Daylight? That’s quite a stark light for a retail environment. Do your current lights have reflectors or diffusers on them?

You could look at something like this.

Its a cool white, but has enough lumens to match your daylight tubes when they were new(fluorescent tubes lose up to 40% of their ‘brightness’ in the first year of use), and would be less stark. The light output is reflected in the price of the fitting.

Since I don’t know what size, shape, height(overall) the shop is, how much natural light comes in, what wall coverings/flooring it is, what light level at ‘working height’ you need, and what you are actually lighting I can’t really comment further.

If I remember correctly, your shop is in North Cheam is it?

I could do with replacing the fluorescent lights in my garage with these. If I replace the whole fitting is it as simple as wiring into the existing connection?

Yes.

As for LED tubes, I need to point out that they do not have the lumen ouput of the fluorescent tubes they are replacing. A 6ft 4000k cool white Fluorescent tube has around 6000 lumens output when new, while the LED replacement will have 3500-3800 lumen output.

This is ok for garages, but the loss becomes more noticeable on higher ceilings/commercial/retail environments. As someone who does commercial lighting, I’ve seen some terrible results from ‘just replacing the fluorescent tube with an LED one’…WhSmith did it in a few of their stores.

Better to replace the whole fitting with an LED equivalent.

Right, I remembered I was at home at the very time I was supposed to be at the dartford crossing. I popped across the street to my neighbour who has cameras, and it shows the van parked outside the house, though it only shows the bottom half of the van and not the registration. There’s a shop further down the road which has a camera facing into my road that shows the van being there as well, although this camera is partially obscured by a tree.

Dialled 101, but it pointed me in the direction of a visit to the local police station.

Sounds like the sensor on the fuel rail.

Space X, But Thunderbirds.

If by well looked after you mean ….got the minimum and thrashed by non owner drivers given a good wash before they ripped out all the additional electrics then yes. Yes your right.

Bless.

Moon on a stick.

Not totally, I’ve just bought a Peugeot Expert for 5K, 10 years old, 76,000 miles on the clock…but it is an ex-police van(forensics), so it has been well looked after.

But it did take a month or so of searching, and some of the other peugeot/citroen/fiat vans while cheaper, were either relatively high mileage, had the sh*t kicked out of them by builders, or both.

smallest is not necessarily the most economical – the 2.0 litre dispatch is more economical than the 1.6.. the figures are the other way round

The 1.6 in a van that size, once loaded will struggle, and if not well serviced can have explody turbo issues, also coupled with only a five speed gear box meaning it gets worked hard for motorway miles…and fuel economy.

I got a 2 litre with a six gears, and for the mixture of urban and motorway miles I do is good. The six speed makes all the difference to fuel economy.

just connect the live and neutral 240v into the LED and that’s it?

No. Since you are changing from 12Volt to 230Volt, your fittings will need to be earthed. You will have to check that the cable supplying the fittings have one, and it hasn’t been cut off.

Also your lighting circuit should be RCD protected to meet regs..

No. The electrical regulations are not retrospective, i.e, installations conforming to previous editions of the regs do not need to be brought up to date for the sake of it.

Thank you for your deja vu’s about this deja vu.

Its ok, I’m totally Zen about it.

I would have said the T-34 tank that sits near the old kent road in London qualifies, but there’s no sign of it corroding, plus it gets a snazzy paint job every now and then.

Ordered a free hub, got the email response above, so was expecting a bit of a wait, turned up a few days later.

My first car was a 1984 Sierra 2.0 Ghia estate auto in White. Didn’t have alloys, and wasn’t fuel injected. Really nice car compared to the dirge of Vauxhalls I had after.

Some c**t smashed into the front of it while it was parked in the street and wrote it off.

Ripped off IMO. Threaded tool is 15 quid, threaded BB is about 20 for a decent one. Takes 15 minutes to replace. You’ve been done there.

**** sakes, you all wonder why local shops are going out of business.

Some people have no concept of actually how much it costs to run a business, and heaven forbid how very dare they make a profit from their customers.

See the many “ripped off by trades” threads for details.

This x1000. I seem to have far fewer near misses than many people from reading on here. Helmet lights are not helpful on the road – they’re in an odd place (high up), they move, so they’re not a fixed point of reference. They’re often dazzling too, which means drivers have very little ability to accurately identify where you are.

That’s understandable, but I do have a fixed light on the handlebars as well, the helmet light isn’t a dazzler.

Don’t know if they always hear/understand my “FFS,POINT YOUR LIGHT DOWN “ .

Try riding through Richmond Park at night, its like close encounters of the third kind where you face gets half burned do to the lights being on full blast.

It’s vitally important to understand why people died despite the best efforts of the firefighters. What were the sequence of events that led to loss of life and what can we do to prevent that same sequence of events re-occurring if another fire were to break out. If the fire brigade had known the building better, the fact the cladding was going to make the spread of the fire worse

They did know the building. As I have said above, when you have a building industry that can write its own rules on what’s fire resistant or not, then all the fire brigade can do is point to the fire at lakanal house in 2009, and the fires on the towers in the middle east using similar cladding. In fact in May 2017 the fire brigade wrote to the London Councils warning the about the cladding.

I grew up around there and having been in the building in question many times, there was always one problem when the building was constructed: One stairwell.

If all the fire barriers within the building were intact, then the stay put advice would have been sound. The building was concrete with metal window frames. This changed with the cladding and new window frames, and air gap between the cladding and the building.

One thing that has been mentioned before this report was the slow reaction of the LFB to change from the stay put policy, to evacuate during the fire. While the usual newspapers will have a field day on this, what probably won’t be mentioned is their “hero” the current PM was a London Mayor who oversaw large cuts to the LFB.

In the past, the only way you could close a fire station was with permission from the Home secretary, a holdover from WW2, the fire brigades being the last line of Defence.

Blair Changed all this with deregulation and the commercialisation of safety. And speaking of Blairs Government:

What should also be reported on in the future parts of the report was the ability of the buildings material firms to literally write the building regs. Once again Blair privatised the part of government responsible the testing of materials and the writing of the regulations.

Privatisation eh? And there are still people who think this is the only way forward.

And let us not forget the Council and their failures. Their objective with the cladding was part of the plan to “gentrify” the area, which when I was growing up in the 70’s was just pulling down the last of the Victorian slum housing built in the 1850’s. The tower being right next to one of those other ideological objects so loved by the current government: an academy school.

I find it odd that the first part of the report focuses on the LFB, feels politically motivated, almost scapegoat like. I wonder how hard the next part of the report will be on the other parties involved, and whether the media will be quite so vociferous.

A bit miffed that the box that was put in seven years ago should have had rcd by the sound of it?

Yes it should. It was introduced as an amendment to the 16th Edition Regs in 2005.

Sounds like some great challenges there and some ace placing to well done.

Not going to mention you came 1st in the solo category Jay?

I’ll tell you what though, I reckon pairs could well be harder than solo’ing.

It has been the times I’ve ridden in pairs, That’s because you ride with a team mentality.

Is there an STW call we can use to identify each other? I dunno, something like ‘sanctimonious rider on the right’ or ‘Big hitter ahoy’ or will a simple “Straaaaaaaavvvaaaaaaaa” do?

How about Oi, W*nker? Which can be shouted at you on Kingston hill somewhere around Colombian climb and Norwegian corner.

I have a few KOMS, but age is catching up, so if someone takes them I’m not going to get them back. There are plenty of benign off road sections around my way which was good for KOM attempts, but in the last few years off-road roadies, or commonly known as gravel bikers have been swarming all over them.

Its actually made me head off the gravel roads and find lots of “paths” to ride which is more fun.

I did grab a KOM earlier this year, only to find someone had got the same time as me on the same day. A couple of days later he went and took the KOM specifically, but has lost it again to riders that are far faster then the both of us.