Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

46

General Car Chat / Re: Intermittent horns on Astra Hs

« on: 14 September 2019, 07:35:05 »

I think there was a recall for this: something about wiring and steering wheel.

47

General Discussion Area / Re: Dog grooming

« on: 22 July 2019, 13:26:14 »

Oops, quite right. Only happened once and that was near Leicester. Mrs V says we pay 25 euros here and no glands.

I suppose if it has to be done then Leicester seems like as good a place as any....

48

General Car Chat / Re: Bimbo Brains

« on: 15 July 2019, 08:44:33 »

I couldn't help noticing how much my wife's pension increased over the last seven years of service. It creeps up slowly to age 60, when she would get an annual pension of £38000 and a lump sum of £49000. Then it jumps up quite dramatically, £44,500@62, £52,600@64 and £68,000@67. The lump sum stays the same as that is part of the, now closed, final salary.

Please explain, Jimmy.

I think its probably a product of a couple of things. Firstly, every year past 60 your OH isn't retired, means its a year "saved" as far as the pension company is concerned.  The pension company will predict she has about 25yrs to live at age 60 (life expectancy 85 is about the going rate for someone age 60 today I think). So, if she stays in work 2 more years they will split the money she would have received in those 2 yrs over the remaining 23 of her assumed life. £38,000 x 2 / 23 = about an extra £3,300 per yr.

Secondly, they're investing that £38,000 x 2 = £76,000  for an extra 2 yrs (plus her £49,000 lump sum that she hasn't drawn down) at say 8% return, there's another £22000 ish to spread over the 23 yrs they'll be paying her £22000 / 23 = circa £900 p.a.

Finally,  she's also contributing for those two years. Assuming she earns £60,000, that means there's an extra £60,000 x 25% x 2 = £30,000 to split over the 23 yrs, giving an extra £1300 per yr.

Adding these gets you to £43,500.

Clearly, I'm still a grand short, so I'm guessing the pension benefits are index linked in some way? If you find out what inflation rate they use for the benefits, it will probably get you to £44,500.

in this case I think the pension company is the teachers pension scheme (STEMO can confirm) so there really isn't a company involved.  Also as it is unfunded they are not " investing" anything. having said that, that's the kind of logic the Government actuary will apply to work out the late retirement factors

49

General Discussion Area / Re: Openreach?

« on: 11 July 2019, 13:27:00 »

well to add to the openreach thread here's yesterdays conversation with the engineer

engineer " hi i'll be there is 20 minutes to pull the cable through the duct"

me " great, we've got the duct here but only one problem"

engineer " what's that?"

me " its in a pile by my gate and not dug in"

engineer " what? thanks for telling me, i'll make some calls"


and guess what, SFA from openreach or BT again.  this is three months of a total farce of trying to get FTTP...  I am absolutely sure they are trying to get me to dig the duct in myself...

50

Omega General Help / Re: Rear Brake Pads pins and rattle springs

« on: 06 June 2019, 18:15:18 »

I bought 107721088 from ECP at end of May.  definitely for solid rear discs.  Interestingly ECP list two types (at least for mine) and the second type is for a Vectra B - don't understand that

51

General Discussion Area / Re: Anyone built a timber garage before?

« on: 20 April 2019, 18:41:26 »

how about steel portal frame and steel sheet cladding.  Pretty cheap and easy to erect.

52

General Discussion Area / Re: New Dewalt cordless drill

« on: 13 April 2019, 17:14:29 »

tbh I've always struggled with dewalt - fee like black and decker to me...  on the cordless front, I cannot beat my titan cordless (yes titan) not managed to break it.  I have a hitachi cordless hammer and the first one expired but the second for £35 quid - bare works fine.  they survived the first house renovation and most of  bungalow build from scratch. 

53

General Discussion Area / Re: any experience with fibre broadband to property?

« on: 04 April 2019, 10:10:58 »

have you inquired about the cost of having a duct pulled in with mole ?

Probably cheap .. up until it digs through something important*


*I know, they "go around" - except in our old house, where they didn't, and punched the new gas & water mains straight through the clay pipe for the poop, and resulted in (eventually!) a collapsed drain and a very soggy, turdy mess of a front lawn; not helped by the neighbours "upstream" flushing nappies, mind.

thankfully if anyone is going to put anything in with a mole plough it will be me.  Trouble is I've got 3 cables and 3 buries pipes to negotiate and I hate hand digging - hate it...

54

General Discussion Area / Re: any experience with fibre broadband to property?

« on: 04 April 2019, 06:51:38 »

What provider?  Openreach supported ISP, or the likes of CityFibre (aren't they now Vodashite?), Gigaclear or Virgin?

I think pretty much all will insist on terminating inside a dry dwelling, and all will do the job up to that point, to varying levels of effort.


I actually use a couple of point to point wifi links to make a virtual ethernet connection between 2 buildings about 150m apart.  The older one, a Buffalo 54g system with yagis must be 20yrs old, and is rock solid, never missed a beat except when it snows (that drops the link), but is constrained by the 54Mb (half duplex, remember) throughput.  At the same site, I have a Ubiquiti AC1200 setup, which is cheap and nasty.  Its desperately unreliable, drops frequently, and needs a 5min "listen" time to resync (to comply with radar laws, being a 5GHz device, plus its in a hostile radar area). TBH, most of the time I just reroute packets to the Buffalo stuff.

The Buffalo was around £1-1.2k back in about 2001ish.  The Ubiquiti was around £300.

I wouldn't have such a link for my incoming connection.

I think openreach are doing the work,  but telent have been wandering around ( its the Coventry solihull Warwickshire upgrade partnership).  the box by the road is dry and secure so I'm not worried there but as the link is unreliable and I think going to make it impossible to voice over fibre at some point, the answer is going to be 2 days on a mini digger.  I'm not gonna pay some numpty from openreach to dig, I'll do it myself and they can throw the duct in!

55

General Discussion Area / Re: any experience with fibre broadband to property?

« on: 03 April 2019, 13:42:36 »

Is said point to point Ethernet thingy capable of operating over the expected temperature and environmental conditions associated with a dodgy brick cab by the road?

I've not studied the Ethernet thingie in detail about temp and environmental conditions.  The brick cab by the road is mine: contains single phase and three phase electricity supply (de-energized) is secure and dry now given I fixed it.  is there something I should be worried about?

Well standard products are rated to a very low IP rating and 0-70degC if your lucky.

Given the location you will need better IP and wider temperature range as a minimum

incredibly useful thanks - I had not studied the products in detail so yes not looked at temperature and IP rate.  i'll do a bit more digging on both but it sounds like, provided I can get suitable kit it is the way to go

56

General Discussion Area / Re: any experience with fibre broadband to property?

« on: 03 April 2019, 13:18:28 »

How does the current phone line get to the house, They will normally mirror that run, although I found they were happy to run the fibre to a different room then the phone cable.

Im my case Phone line was from pole to right side of house. The fibre comes to the same place on the top of the house initially but they routed the fibre to the left side room rather than the right like the phone cable

current phone cable is buried about 9 inches below the surface in a field - I'm not at all fond of that because I want it deeper and that's a lot of digging even with a 1.5 tonner

Is it in a duct?  Fibre is usually blown along ducts so they may well be able to utilise that.

sadly no - no duct used in 1964 when the chucked the cable straight in the ground

57

General Discussion Area / Re: any experience with fibre broadband to property?

« on: 03 April 2019, 13:04:03 »

Is said point to point Ethernet thingy capable of operating over the expected temperature and environmental conditions associated with a dodgy brick cab by the road?

I've not studied the Ethernet thingie in detail about temp and environmental conditions.  The brick cab by the road is mine: contains single phase and three phase electricity supply (de-energized) is secure and dry now given I fixed it.  is there something I should be worried about?

58

General Discussion Area / Re: any experience with fibre broadband to property?

« on: 03 April 2019, 12:58:57 »

How does the current phone line get to the house, They will normally mirror that run, although I found they were happy to run the fibre to a different room then the phone cable.

Im my case Phone line was from pole to right side of house. The fibre comes to the same place on the top of the house initially but they routed the fibre to the left side room rather than the right like the phone cable

current phone cable is buried about 9 inches below the surface in a field - I'm not at all fond of that because I want it deeper and that's a lot of digging even with a 1.5 tonner

59

General Discussion Area / Re: any experience with fibre broadband to property?

« on: 03 April 2019, 11:35:55 »

I thought the fibre went to the Openreach cabinet and then you use the exiting copper wires to get your service?

Not with FTTP - Fibre To The Premises - no. Fibre to your door and inside a Fibre->Ethernet converter.

Personally I'd suck it up and have the fibre run to my door, not the end of the driveway - do you want to be out there in your slippers and undies, rebooting the router when it (inevitably) crashes at 10pm on a rainy winter night?

fair point on the reboot.  I must put that in the au pair's job description.  Its just a real pain digging 140 metres of red clay up... do it in the winter and it claggy, the summer is rock hard...

60

General Discussion Area / any experience with fibre broadband to property?

« on: 03 April 2019, 10:43:26 »

I am supposed to be upgraded due to the current network only supporting about 1mps with a following wind and guess what they are planning on FTTP.  So far we have fibre to the end of the drive so the next challenge is to get it to the house - 150 metres away from the road.  I think the options are

1. dig a duct in: will take me 2 days work and a bit of diesel and a lot of mess plus the risk hitting existing services or hand digging around them ( which I hate)

2. suspend the fibre from a pole - I don't like that because of the cost of the pole and it limits clearance for machines (I need to cover a field)

3. use one of these point to point internet thingies (Ligowave thingie...)  which is a couple of hundred quid and I have a convenient brick build meter cupboard to use near the road where the fibre arrives.

I'm thinking of going for option 3: cos I can fit pretty quickly and it saves a huge amount of disruption. 

Any thoughts from the experts here? 

thanks in advance