MarkW

Now this won't be of any interest to most of you, but for any sparks on here who might be curious... I popped back round to this house after work to look at their earthing issue. Zs at DB (with the earth rod still disconnected) was 3.17 ohms, so they are clearly getting some earthing from the bonded gas and water pipes, or given that it's an old 19th century school house that has been split into two semis possibly some dodgy wiring shared with next door. I reconnected the rusty old 6 mm earthing conductor to the rusty old earth rod and the Zs came down fractionally to 3.08 ohms. So now it's a property that's earthed almost entirely through the service pipes (which isn't allowed) that looks superficially like a TT system. Time didn't allow this evening, but at the weekend I'm going to replace the rusty old earth rod with a shiny new one and run a new 16 mm earthing cable to the board. Before I connect it to the MET I'll measure Ze to see what we get just from the new spike without any earthing from the service pipes.

No less qualified than the last person to work on them! I think the C&G Inspection & Testing certificate probably covers screwing the earthing connector back onto the spike and checking the fault loop impedance, but just in case I balls it up I'll ask our recruitment consultant to keep an eye out for a new lab scientist.

One of my mates bought his house because the garage was perfect for turning into a recording studio, being right at the bottom of the garden with loads of lights and sockets. The bloke who built it didn't get planning permission, and in anticipation of being told to take it down didn't bother going to the trouble and expense of burying the supply cable. Consequently there's a length of SWA running across his lawn that he has to try to push the mover under when he cuts the grass. There's not enough slack in it to be able to bury it properly...

Cheers Rich - if it's over 100 Ohms I'll have a slash on the spike to get it down a bit.

What a complete bellend: how the hell have I managed to post this in Forum Help instead of General? If someone more competent could move it...

One of our staff bought a house a few months ago, and today I took my kids round to see his cats, rabbits, tropical fish and other assorted wildlife. Whilst we were there his wife casually mentioned that they keep getting tingling sensations through metal light switches and other electrical appliances. A quick nose in their distribution board revealed no network-supplied earth (as I expected given that they are in the middle of nowhere), and after a brief poke around outside I located their earth spike: I'm not sure that chives are supposed to be part of the earthing arrangements (I can't find any published impedance values for culinary herbs in my On-site Guide) so I'll be popping back later today with an earth strap and my tester to reconnect their earth and see what measured impedance values we get.

One of the many unpleasant surprises my old man left for us when he topped himself was a mountain of debt, courtesy of the worst sort of loan sharks you can imagine. For months afterwards I'd be home alone as a 15 year old boy, the front door bell would ring and there would be one or two of their collection 'agents' on the doorstep (and for 'agents' read mentally retarded subhuman criminal thugs). But I dealt with it and survived, although it has left me rather less inclined to indulge some delicate little flower who's whining on about how their mental health has been adversely affected by the contents of a letter.

I made some comments on here a while ago about a national education system that avoids 'intimidating' children with red ink or frank criticism being little more than a production line for a steady stream of socially incompetent and emotionally retarded limp-dicks who are completely incapable of coping with the realities of life. I may even have suggested - slightly tongue-in-cheek - that far from wrapping kids in cotton wool at school what was really needed was a return to the good old days of 1970s education where teachers routinely bullied, humiliated and assaulted kids just for the fun of it. Spin forward to today, and I see in the news that campaigners are claiming victory in their battle against 'intimidating' and thuggish' debt letters: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54433621 The example they give of the sort of thing they are complaining about is this: "IF YOU DO NOT TAKE THE ACTION REQUIRED BY THIS NOTICE BEFORE THE DATE SHOWN THEN THE FURTHER ACTION SET OUT BELOW MAY BE TAKEN AGAINST YOU." I wouldn't class that as remotely intimidating or thuggish - merely a straightforward statement of fact printed in a way that you're not likely to miss. But apparently the combination of capital letters and bold type face is just too much for these spineless jellies to cope with, and so the Treasury has stepped in and decided that they need to be mollycoddled even more.

Great suggestion. That's a new tent you owe me...

My wife banned me from reading to the kids because I got so sick and tired of that foul porcine Peppa and that festering rabbit Miffy that I started inventing my own stories. 'Miffy Gets Myxomatosis' was a particular favourite, and over the course of several nights saw her entire leporine clan enduring conjunctivitis, skin lesions and hypothermia before finally succumbing to a series of gooey deaths. My finest work was a Peppa Pig story in which Daddy Pig finds Mummy Pig pegging Mr Bull with a strap-on in a seedy hotel room, and in his fury he batters them both to death with the trouser press. I didn't get to the peroration with that one before she hit me with the book and turfed me out of their room...

Not much call for naphtha in the lab, although that said we do have a little bottle of Swan lighter fluid somewhere for cleaning sticky labels off stuff... We've got a shit-load of methanol and acetonitrile down there though, which we use as carrier solvents for the HPLC. Perhaps I'll half-inch a litre of each and see how they perform.

My least favourite is called 'Pub' because they're often full of 'People', some of whom might try to start a conversation with me. And the one thing I hate more than unfriendly people is friendly people.

Aha! Looks like it's a go-er then. Cheers Stu! Twat.

I've had a Coleman 533 camping stove for years, and have finally got around to thinking about putting something in it other than the stupidly priced Coleman fuel. I have put unleaded petrol in it a time or two, but that's very much a last resort - you have to piss about siphoning it out of the tank, and then it burns with a very sooty flame and stinks! As far as I can tell Coleman fuel is just naphtha, as is U-POL Panel Wipe used by car body shops to wipe down panels prior to spraying. The only real difference seems to be the price: Coleman fuel is around £10 a litre, whereas U-POL is £23 for 5 litres. Has anyone tried it in a camping stove?

I had to go elsewhere in the end because I got fed up with having to sit there listening to his drivel: I'd come out after half an hour in the chair feeling like I'd spent a day stuck in a lift with Beavis and Butthead. His only redeeming feature was that he was that person that they say is always worse off than you. His life was a slowly unfolding train wreck, and every time you saw him he was dealing with another crisis entirely of his own making, like the time had was charged with assault for smacking a traffic wardens across the side of his head and knocking his cap off, or the time he tried to sue the police for attempted murder when they took his car keys outside the pub one New Year's Eve because he was too pissed to drive and he had to walk home in the snow with no coat... on and on it went...

I'm too lazy to do the wanking bit i would have to get a machine to do it for me, and i don't do drugs too tight to buy it a machine you say ..... and how much would you pay for a machine like this, if there was one ? You're not my old hairdresser are you Six? He came up with the iWank - an interface for your iPad that you stick your knob in and that authentically replicates all the sensations of the on-screen action. He wanted to pitch the idea to Dragons Den, but I said he'd need a prototype first so that we could be treated to the sight of Duncan Bannatyne knocking the back out of it on national telly whilst saying "Ahm in.. ahm oot... ahm in... ahm oot..."

Some good ideas there, although he's scared of dogs and terrified of heights! Mind you, window cleaners these days all seem to use those extendable brushes, so I guess he could keep his feet on the ground...

I think that to register with NICEIC I'd either need to have a Qualified Supervisor to work under or to be one myself, and whilst the course I did satisfies the 'competence' requirements for domestic situations I don't have the 'experience' bit. If I recall correctly you need a couple of years experience under your belt to join. Could be wrong though. For someone who wanted a career as an electrician there are probably better ways of going about it, but for me I just wanted a crash course on how to work safely and in accordance with the current regs, and a recognised qualification that made Building Control more likely to say "Yes" when I asked for permission to re-wire my house and replace the consumer unit.

Yup - I'd be happy enough doing electrical work in my own home or in one I'd bought to renovate and sell, but there's no way I'd want to do it in someone else's home, and especially not with them breathing down my neck! And when you add my brother's lamentable interpersonal skills to his Frank Spencer DIY abilities this idea looks like a guaranteed recipe for disaster. The reality is that his money is running out, and as his desperation increases his capacity for logical thought decreases. This latest idea is just him clutching at straws in my opinion, not least because he doesn't seem to have any of the basic information you'd need to work out if this is a viable proposition. He told me that he'd be working on a 15% commission, but 15% of what? What's the average value of a sale? How many fittings could you do in a day? How far will he have to travel to collect stock, and how frequently? This one definitely needs a re-think in my opinion.

Thinking distance: 1 foot Reaction distance: 1.5 feet Stopping distance: 25 miles

Especially when the required skill set is so basic! I said that while the current pandemic is still raging he'd be better off investing in a bottle of Dettol and opening a telephone sanitising business. Of course the success of those outfits back in the 1960s was probably more to do with having an attractive young lady leaning over your desk than to any genuine fear of germs, so he might be onto a loser there as well...

Yup - that domestic installer course I did only cost £1.5k, for which I got four weeks of intensive practical and theory training, a load of useful books, and four City & Guilds qualifications. It's only entry-level stuff, but the way I looked at it is that as my house needs completely re-wiring it gave me the skills to safely do it myself for very considerably less than a professional electrician would charge. I can't see any value whatsoever in spending £2.5k learning how to fit blinds.

A woman gets out of the shower just as the front doorbell rings. "Who is it?" she asks. "I'm just a blind man" comes the reply, so she nips downstairs in the nude and opens the door. "Bloody hell!" the man says. "Look at those tits! Do you want to buy any blinds?" OK, reason for one of the few jokes I can actually remember is that my brother has just come up with what looks to me like an even worse business idea than his last one, which was to get into property development. I thought that was a non-starter for a number of reasons, not least of them being his complete lack of DIY skill. Add into the mix the fact that it's a business area neither of us knows the first thing about and that 15+ years of 'Homes Under the Hammer' has probably produced more wannabe property tycoons than the market can handle, and I thought he'd be better off thinking again. Still, he seemed dead set on it, so I agreed to help him out with the finance side, and got myself a domestic installer qualification so I could do the electrical work and save us a bit of time and money. In the end coronavirus put paid to that idea, and his latest brainwave is to be a fitter for Hillary's Blinds. Apparently this involves him handing over £2.5k for a week-long training course, presumably with a final assessment to demonstrate the correct use of a tape measure and the ability to drill four holes in a straight line and shove a rawl plug in each one. After that he will be retained on a self-employed basis, providing his own transport and covering his own running costs in exchange for a 15% commission. None of this sounds very enticing to me, even after factoring in the prospect of knobbing the occasional bored housewife. But again, this is a business area I know nothing about. Has anyone here had any experience of working for an outfit like this? I don't want to dampen his enthusiasm - especially if it is actually possible to make a good go of it - but from my perspective it looks like a bit of a turkey.

I am having a clear-out of my old bass gear, and have a selection of Boss and MXR pedals in need of new homes. They are all in absolutely mint condition, having led very pampered lives either in a studio setting or on a cosy pedal board. The images are of the actual units, and are the best I could do with the office camera. All the MXR boxes are £100 each (which is £40-60 off the new price, depending on the model) or £500 for all six. The Boss Line Selector is £50 (£35 off the new price). Any questions, just shout!

I know, I know... It was a musicians forum, and a load of demented Scousers went completely mental when I suggested that carrying on as though 'Our Cilla' was one of the family when she clearly loathed Liverpool and its inhabitants, or claiming through tears of synthetic grief that she had 'the voice of an angel' when her singing actually sounded like a live donkey being sawn in half, did nothing to dispel the image of Liverpudlians as happiest when given an opportunity to indulge in a bit of mawkish wailing and keening. Sadly there was no time to explore this fascinating thesis any further before the onset of hostilities, and it quickly became apparent that even launching a hasty (and totally insincere) Operation Scouse Grovel was unlikely to save the day, and after I dropped the term 'Mersey Trout' into the conversation I was promptly banned in a most peremptory manner.