jmak

Chase ..

Good point. My TV is "smart" and I think pretty much all of them are. I just wouldn't let whatever smart features are claimed influence my choice in any way.

IME the smart functions on TVs are always worse than cheap streaming sticks/boxes. They're mediocre when new (either they use a 20 year old processor with 256kB RAM or have software written by incompetents), never really get updates and are completely out of date within 6 months. I only buy TVs based on picture (which is subjective to viewer preference - objectively better tech or quality doesn't necessarily mean it'll look better to you). Sound can also be easily and relatively cheaply fixed. Edit: the only thing the built in "smart functions" do that the streaming boxes don't seem to is allow BBC iPlayer play from start. I use it just often enough to remember how bad the built in smart functions are!

Before our current house I lived in a flat in central London. Having grown up in a small village in a similar area, I bought a camping stove and a box of candles in a camping shop on the day we moved in. We did actually use them a few times when we first moved in, but they upgraded the sub-station and replaced all the overhead power lines, so I haven't used them for over 10 years. Last time was when a builder put an angle grinder through our power supply [emoji2357] When it became clear it was going to be an overnight thing, we went and stayed with friends; that'd be my plan if we had an outage lasting over a day.

I've been looking at home storage batteries, partly with the idea of buying electricity at low rates and using it at peak time, but also to give me an option in the event of a power cut. I'm no worse off since getting rid of the oil fired boiler as the boiler wouldn't fire without an electric supply and the water wouldn't circulate through the radiators without the electric pump being supplied. However, on a cold day I seen to be able to get through 70kWh of electricity to run the heating system for 24 hours, so a home storage battery probably wouldn't do much either for my bills or emergency supply. Maybe I should buy a couple of old Nissan Leafs or a crashed Tesla...

That's quite different to a hard 31st March deadline though. I'd definitely be trying to get on with making a decision and there will be a limit to how many new customers the other suppliers can onboard by March.

My account is linked to the car my OH uses to drive to work. Apparently I'm in the top 0.5% of Dolly Parton listeners and my favourite songs are Working 9 to 5 and Joleen...

Unless you're coming from a red listed country (which South Africa only became here on Sunday 28th) there's no requirement for vaccinated people to have a test pre-departure.

Pepper

It's complicated and varies a lot... October looks like 11.2kWh/day November looks like 27.5kWh/day, but yesterday it was more than 60kWh and today will only be about 18kWh The system provides lots of data, but not in the way that I would like. It seems to focus on kWh of heat produced which takes varying amounts of electricity depending on relative temperatures. The electricity usage information for individual days resets at midnight, but yesterday I estimate it says it produced 200kWh of heat and when I was looking during the day it was running at a scop of about 3.2, so about 62.5kWh electricity. Today we're using much less heat and it's warmer; so far it's produced 75kWh heat from 15kWh electricity, so much more efficient at a scop of 5. This is a graph showing heat generated over the last month: To try and get an idea of how much electricity we're using for heating, I'm comparing our monthly usage against a month when we didn't have the central heating turned on (September). Our electricity usage in October was 347kWh more than September. November was 825kWh higher than September. Not all of the increase is heating - obviously we use lights more and cook more hot food. I do have the equipment to monitor all of it properly, but it needs to be wired into the consumer unit. While I could do that, it's very much against regulations and I have been trying to get an electrician to come for months. I appreciate these amounts are high, but for context we were buying between 3500l and 4000l of heating oil per year.

The only thing I can see is that all of the other age groups are a range of 10 years vs 18 so it's a bigger population. It is still significantly more prevalent in that age group (I haven't added up exact population numbers, and birth numbers are down a bit, but not that much). The age groups don't really work in terms of exposure opportunities to try and understand the impact of vaccinating.

I would love to see that analysis nationally. It'd make very interesting input for decisions on the societal benefits of vaccinating those who are unlikely to become severely unwell.

^^This You don't need to be into cluster aware failover and similar complexities to benefit from virtualization. If you backup complete machines you can just connect the backup to a different host (another machine you've got that runs something else, even if it compromises performance or an old machine or a bare metal warranty replacement) and you can be up and running in minutes.

Not quite a necro-thread, but revisiting.... Reason for updating now instead of waiting for a full year is that if you're still interested, the grant from April is a lot less generous unless you already have a very efficient house. Partner's mother has just had an estimate for a 1980s 3 bed detached house with oil fired heating and should be eligible for about £9000 RHI payments. Downside is that it's paid in installments over 7 years after you install it rather than an up front grant, but if you can take out a loan, you'd be better off. Our ASHP was installed in June, but it hasn't really been tested until now. We live in exactly the type of house that's cited in some newspapers as totally unsuitable: Victorian, solid walls, windows double glazed, but 20 year old wooden frames, oil fired boiler running at 70°. Relieved to report that the house is warm, which was our biggest concern - in fact we're struggling to get used to it. The installers were adamant that it was a case of designing a suitable system and setting an expectation that it's not just a drop-in replacement for a traditional boiler and so far it seems they're right. More technical stuff only worth reading if you have an interest in ASHPs... At -1° this morning when it was working to raise the inside temperature from 16° to 19° the flow temperature was 40°. That's giving a scop of just over 3 for 12 hours when average temperature has been 0°. Average scop to date is about 4.6. The ASHP can automatically adjust the flow temperature up to 65° (at which point it won't be efficient, but I'm now very confident it will keep the house warm even on very cold days) and there are two built in auxiliary heaters if even that isn't enough. It was an expensive installation, but we had to have an EPC which scored an E and came with recommendations for spending at least 50% more than the ASHP system to save up to 35% of our heating needs and would still have left us needing to replace the broken boiler. You can hear it - it's louder the harder it works, but today standing near it, the oil boiler 2 doors down is louder. We can't hear it inside except in the room it's next to - so again quieter than the old oil boiler. It does need to run all the time as our house loses heat pretty quickly(thermostat set to 19°in the day and 16°at night), but that does mean the house is much more comfortable. We used to run the oil heating for 1.5 hours in the morning and about 6 hours in the evening (on at 4.30 to take the chill off by the time we got home and off at 10.30. Despite that, we're spending less than we would on oil (costs are higher than the estimates, but oil has gone up more than electricity).

Is that because your heating isn't working or because the price increases have made it unaffordable? If it's the latter, you might be able to get some help with the bills: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/energy/energy-supply/get-help-paying-your-bills/grants-and-benefits-to-help-you-pay-your-energy-bills/

I did the figures about 6 months ago and it was a 10 year payback. Down to 7 years now. With ASHP (electric heating) and one EV, likely to be two in less than payback time, I can't get enough panels on my roof to cover my usage so I'm looking at https://rippleenergy.com/ shared ownership windfarm. The return isn't quite as good, but the advantages are that you can start small with monthly payments so you don't need capital to get going, you can take your investment with you if you move house and you can buy as much as you want (subject to their capacity).

I heard a guy from Money Saving Expert interviewed and his recommendation was go to standard variable contact, but then look for deals in February or March, making sure you sign up for something before the price cap limit goes up in April.

Peeler

Sabre [emoji3538]

Any recommendations for cheap HDMI over twisted pair adaptors or do I need to spend a bit of money to get something that works properly? It's for home use and I have a 12m HDMI cable from the projector to a 4 way HDMI switch with a coax digital audio splitter. Even though it's within length limits, I think cable length might be the reason I'm getting intermittent signal loss. Edit: changed HDMI over Ethernet to HDMI over twisted pair. Have didn't five minutes reading and now understand they're different things [emoji3]. I don't need it to run across my network and can easily run a separate cable.

Since vaccines for 40 year olds with no other risk factors were first offered from 30th April, presumably if you're younger than that and had it earlier you must have been in some higher risk group? AFAIK the same criteria are being used for boosters, so you may be eligible... Worth checking?

An instrument I didn't know existed even though it's a main feature on a track I'm very familiar with. Here's the track: Did you spot that the solo instrument can only play a single pitched note? More information here: I found out about its existence in what is one of the best radio programmes/ podcast series I've listened to in ages (Radio 4, Add to Playlist): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0011lq4

Presumably selecting who to invite to tender is part of the tender process that must be fair.... So add a requirement that says "minimise risk of school being sued". [emoji57]

Slippers

It's really bizarre given that they're only picking on Visa when MasterCard charges the same and the still take American Express which is generally by far the most expensive card for retailers. Maybe they give Amazon a special rate.