The older SMETS1 are the ones tied to the provider. If you subsequently change providers, nothing happens other than the ‘smart’ bit will probably stop working. They don’t limit anything.

A lot of the SMETS1 meters can have the firmware updated by the original installer which then enables them to be enrolled with the centralised DCC system just like a SMETS2 meter and be switched between suppliers.

Some suppliers are a lot closer to delivering this than others, but it is something the industry is working on.

Green 4 here as well. Will be a few Stourbridge CC and Stourbridge Velo guys on a black and white Scott.

Haze is in our group as well.

Split is roughly a third MTB and the rest on the road.

Was crossing my fingers for mid June.

Will it last another 4 months I wonder…

Distance: 5,050.8 miles
Time: 371hrs 5m
Elev gain: 400,922ft
Rides: 150

Split is about 60/40 road/MTB, with no commuting as I can walk to work :o)

The time spent washing could be spent riding, which is what the bike is for surely?

My rigid winter (and summer family bimble) bike has been washed twice since the start of October. Once to remove a big lump of dog egg, the other so that I could find the worn out BB I needed to replace…

I’d not try the million either, its the only place locally where I’ve encountered people with loose and aggressive dogs and genuinely expected to get bitten.

Maybe they’re trying to scare off the freaks!

It sounds like you don’t live far from me Andy.

The Wyre is somewhere that takes a fair bit of exploring find the good stuff and then be able to link it together into a route without to much fire road.

I’ve got a GPX I can send your way for a 27 mile ride that takes in a fair mix of singletrack.

IMO, the laziest bit is Birmingham as most of it just shows population really, but there’s not much light blue for the population around that part of the country!!

They just all drive to Cannock instead…

I’ll also side with being a bit of a non-lover of the 500, as long as you don’t use the courses functions it’s a nice bike computer with added GPS recording. I use mine for quick evening blasts when I know where I’ll be going.

If you plan on using the courses functionality look elsewhere. It regularly tells you that you’re off course when you’re bang on the line of the breadcrumb trail, then the course randomly vanishes. This is well documented on various forums.

Battery life is fine as long as you don’t use courses, I’ve never run it flat when used just as a computer. On the other hand it won’t go much beyond 3 hours if you’re following a course.

The bar mount isn’t the best for proper off road riding. I manage to eject mine a couple of times before I added a lanyard to the handy attachment point.

It’s pretty robust though.

I don’t do any commuting by bike, and this is the 1st year where I’ve done more riding on road than off (60/40 or so):

4109 miles
291 hours
234k ft
128 rides

I know a guy in Stourbridge that’s pretty cheap for bulk deliveries of smokeless fuel who I’ve used for the last few years (assuming that’s near where your new place is). Will look it up when I get home.

As long as you have a bed of hot coal you can chuck almost anything on an open fire, but:

It can make some nice popping and crackling noises, throwing red hot fragments of wood onto your flooring as it does so. Stovists miss out on the excitement of trying to get to said hot embers before your carpet starts looking like someone has been stubbing ciggies on it.

You can cause tar deposits in the chimney, which are hard for your chimney sweep to remove.

Never let patriotic drum banging get in the way of interesting discussion 😆

My mother getting a loan analogy? He blames my mother obviously because I’ve never been into the bank and he may not even know that I exist.

But you’ve said a lot of things on the TV that the bank manager has seen and makes him a bit worried.

Except that it hasn’t and so your analogy falls apart

I was referring to just the cake, to keep it simple.

but we’d not be taking 10% of the car

It’s not a perfect analogy by any stretch, I could have used 2 fat people taking out a lone to buy a huge cake that they eat up front. That would have been better.

The cash has already been spent on an asset that has been irretrievably consumed, and the liability for furnishing the debt remains.

You could argue that the bank manager was a fool for allowing a loan to buy a big cake, but if they’ll pay an acceptable rate of interest and the risk looks good, what the hell!

Two neighbours want to buy a flash car and are with the intention of sharing it on a 90/10 basis.

They can’t afford to buy outright so take out a 100% loan in the 90% partners name because they’re such good mates, and don’t expect anything to get in the way of that friendship for the length of the loan. They pay their respective share each month, the bank is happy, they play with their car and all is well in the world. 🙂

They have a bit of a tiff and the 10% guy runs off with 10% of the car and refuses to meet the remainder of his obliged payments. The 90% partner can scrape together the cash to replace the missing bits and pay all the loan on his own. The loan doesn’t default.

Unfortunately the bank manager lives next door and can see all this playing out, and Mr 10% needs a huge loan to pay for the big extension he’s promised his wife and kids.

Mr bank manager places a very high value on people fulfilling their obligations no matter if technical or otherwise, so tells Mr 10% he can either **** off or pay an eye watering amount of interest on the money.

Mr 10% has now made his life very difficult and his wife and kids pay the price.

Mr 90% would have been happy for Mr 10% to keep the parts and pay the outstanding portion of the 10% as a lump sum or monthly, Mr 10% would be looked at much for favourably by the bank manager to get a better rate on his loan.

Pretty simple I thought! It’s not so much the point of paying the loan that’s the issue, its that the bank manager can see you’re being an arse about it and will make getting credit that you must have more expensive.

The bike mount I have is pretty awful

My etrex 30 went bouncing along a main road on its second outing and then spent a night in the bushes on one of my local trails after it launched itself from a proper Garmin bar mount. Fortunately I found it the next day but it now has a lanyard as additional security.

It is pretty good with the TalkyToaster maps, the batteries last well and it seems pretty rugged!

We’re in the process of putting insulated plasterboard up in each room of our 1930’s house as we gut and decorate each room.

Most of the rooms have been done with Gyproc Thermaline 50mm boards (9.5mm boards with 40.5mm of foam on the back plus have a moisture barrier built in) dotted and dabbed with a couple of mechanical fixings through each. The pointing on the walls has been tidied up where required and the edges sealed with foam to minimise drafts.

They’ve made a massive difference to the temperature in the rooms we’ve done, but it massively shows up any drafts through floorboards and round windows. The next job I have to sort is a draft coming through the bay window in my lads room that I wouldn’t have noticed before.

Make sure that you put something into your window reveals as well. I didn’t engage my brain and used uninsulated board in the windows of one bedroom and get a tiny bit of mildew in winter. 👿 😳

edit – your damp could just have been bad condensation. It was for us in both bedrooms, the walls were so wet I thought the roof was leaking at first when we moved in!

I don’t qualify for this promotion apparently 😕

I’ve used an etrex 30 on the bike for just over a year.

The bar mounts are crap and I’ve almost lost it 3 times after it decided to make a bid for freedom on roughish terrain. Have put a camera lanyard on it and around the stem now as extra security given the cost of the thing.

With the talky toaster maps and some software on the PC for plotting routes its pretty good for navigating and the track recording is great for endomondo.

There are probably better gps for dedicated bike use, but its good enough for what I need and has been pretty reliable, especially when you think the poor bar mount has left it bouncing down the trail…

Are you looking at new or used and if used how old?

My mechanical skills have come one in leaps and bounds since owning my 1st gen MINI, I certainly didn’t envisage replacing it’s gearbox on my driveway when I got it! The main reason for buying was it being more fun to drive than most of the similar cars I looked at at the time, but it’s not he most practical and the ride can be uncomfortable.

1st gen = poor economy, power steering pumps likely to fail, prone to high oil consumption, harsh ride, early 5 speed gearboxes suffer bearing failure and worse at relatively low mileage.

2nd gen = Timing chain issues, turbo engine in Cooper S prone to carbon build up in the inlet valves and rough running as a result.

We’ve used it to go on holiday with a 3 year old toddler and not had too much trouble fitting everything we needed in the boot and on the back seat. Rear leg room is non-existent if any of the front passengers have long legs.

What tyres are you thinking of running? Off the top of my head 719’s are narrower than Arch’s but as long as you don’t go silly wide either will be fine. I’ve used 2.25 Schwalbe tyres on Mavic 717’s before and I’ve not ended up crashing in a ball of fire.

It is very easy to get caught up in other peoples preferences for tyres and rims!

Being only ever so slightly lighter I know exactly the problem you’re having with striking a balance between weight and strength.

For what it’s worth the Crest I’ve got on the rear of my main bike is in dire need of replacement after less than 12 months. While it’s still bearably straight and round I would have expected better after time I’ve had it. The killer has been the cracks between the spoke holes in the well of the rim.

I had a 719 do the same but that took more than 3x the riding to get to the same state.

I’d say 719’s if you’re going with that offer (Merlin’s wheels are pretty solid), or Arch Ex (or even Flow, if you break wheels) Hope Hoops if you can find them on offer somewhere.

+1 for stands

I’ve ended up with 2 of the ~£40 2 ton jacks and to be honest I wouldn’t feel entirely comfortable trying to lift their full rated weight with either.

The lifting height isn’t much to write home about, if you need to get the car onto stands and at a height with a reasonable amount of space to work underneath you will struggle to be able to get it to reach under a subframe or engine without resorting to blocks of wood. Don’t ask how I know this…

Given the same choice again I’d go for a low entry 3 ton job instead, some of them have the ability to fit an optional transmission cradle should you be keen to do things that you should really leave to a pro mechanic 😉

I’ve used this at work to change local admin passwords before:

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/%5B/url%5D

It can reset the password to being blank on almost all common Windows versions unless the drive is encrypted. Take care as it uses a Linux boot CD and hacks the password database using a command prompt based tool. I’ve not managed it yet, but it is possible to completely screw things with it. 🙂

If it works you’ll get an email, mine took about 10 minutes after I completed the payment.

You’ll also appear in the signups list if it worked successfully.

For my sins I picked up a 52 plate Cooper brand new many moons ago, and despite it being crap in plenty of ways I still haven’t felt the need to get rid. Not just yet anyway…

Things to be aware of:

1st generation BMW Mini’s give very poor MPG for a 1.6 (32MPG average is good out of town in my experience).

The pre-facelift 1st gen (which that is) have a Rover baser gearbox which sometimes fails with bearing or diff issues at lower mileages than that even if driven carefully.

The 1st gen engine consumes oil. Mine doesn’t leak or smoke but I still put in at least a litre every 5000 miles or so. Owners often neglect this and let them run almost dry.

The electric power steering pump can also cause problems.

If the front seat passengers have long legs, then it helps if the rear passengers have none.

Good fun to drive though!

Uh oh – I just owned up to having a Five AND a Mini. Let the onslaught commence!

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one!

They’re hopelessly impracticable, rough riding and my 52 plate has started to fall apart needing well over a grand in parts in the last year. Great fun on the open road though 🙂

I’ve got a Saris bones 2 with a pack of hatch huggers. It’s pretty secure and has even carried a DH bike that was a good bit over the recommended weight limit without any issues.

1997 Orange O2 – Cracked along head tube / downtube weld a just before the warrenty ran out. Replaced with…

2000 Orange evO2 – Cracks top and bottom of drive side chainstay, and the bottom of the none drive side. Had never seen a frame crack along the length of a tube before. It was 10 years old by this point, and was being used as a winter hack. I now clean the mud off more often.

2008 Cotic Soul – Cracked head tube either side of the hole that lines up with the down tube. Flakey paint and a fine black line perpendicular the the weld looked a bit strange until I took the forks out. Replaced under warranty, Paul at Cotic said that it was a very strange palce to see a failure.

2005 Orange 5 – Managed to kill this twice. Cracked on the seat tube/BB weld with about 2 weeks left ont he warranty. Orange repaired it and gave it a new paint job without any fuss. It lasted another 3 1/2 years before going in the same place again, but on the opposite side of the tube. Closer inspection lead to me finding 2 more cracks in the swingarm. Orange sorted me out with brand new frame on their crash replacement scheme with a much bigger discount that I expected given the age of the old one.

I’ve got a support ticket raised for something very much like this problem right now. No reply so far though.

I created a segment, and it wasn’t being logged every time I rode it. The GPS track I used to create it wasn’t very accurate compared to the Google aerial photograph so I deleted it and set it up again using another ride log. It now appears on the Segment Explorer about a mile further along the ride from where I saved it. No matter how I move it around, the start point, end point and length are all screwed up.

Tonights 22 miles has put me up into 5th so far 😀

While there is no commuting (work is either a 5 minute walk or 2 hour drive away), I will admit to adding a few towpath miles onto the end of my regular ride.

Why are you guys so desperate to ridicule and to try to find fault?

It really is rather amusing the logical leaps some folk are making here. that and the total lack of understanding of the issues

Isn’t that what democracy is all about? 😀

Just got in from a ride, if you look on my profile you can see the miles, but they are not in the STW Challenge Mileage? Any ideas?

Sometimes it doesn’t add the workout to your total for the challange until some time after you upload the workout. It usually takes no more than an hour or so.

After getting in by the skin of my teeth last year, I made a point of opening the page before 10am.

Number 11 😀

I’m just crossing my fingers that the weather is kind this month, and that me and the rest of the Buck clan avoid illness unlike December.

My waistline needs a top 10 finish!

I had an ’05 frame crack in 3 seperate places after 5 years of regular riding. Given the use it’d had I didn’t expect orange to do much but gave them a call anyway.

The guy I spoke to was more than helpful and sorted me out with a new frame on their crash replacment discount scheme. I was more than happy.

The old frame had already had a weld in the front triangle reworked by Orange just before it went out out of warrenty, and the repair lasted longer then their 1st attempt at putting it together. The cracks that finally killed it were all elsewhere, 2 of them being in the swingarm.

Great minds think alike and all that! 😀

Try here:

Garmin Connect[/url]

Lots of folk have uploaded stuff on there for the wyre, and i used some of them to make my own route. The search functions on there are ok once you get to grips with them.

One i’ve done before