Fozzie

She loves a lot of Asia for its nature/culture. Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Japan being the big ones. But she's never done Japan, and that's the biggest on the list. I reckon I'm weirder, one of my holiday ideas is to leave me somewhere with a chunk of money that would normally have paid for fancy hotels, like Vietnam, or Alaska for example. And then I find a bike and ride cross country, even if it's a tiny 125. I've not got a big enough breaks in my work schedule to allow that though as it would be a good 3-4 weeks. And it's not everyones idea of a holiday.

I mentioned elsewhere, I won an award at work. Which came with a prize. This month I'm now up an extra £1250. Which after it is taxed to hell, will go towards a holiday to Japan in the Spring. My girlfriend has booked it all as it's her dream destination, and she turns 30 while out there. So I'll need to be upping my game for a present. It was that, or afford to put the heating on for 2 hours.

It's almost like a haze that you can see through easy enough, but it's always just *there*. However yesterday when I had to get to site, I turned it on and within 2 minutes, a thick 1-2mm of ice was defrosted. That said, I do think a tactical bottle of tepid water would do the job fine. Had it for 3 years so thinking of changing in the year year. Always annoys me that they heat the windshield, but didn't run a trace heat line down the screen wash pipe. You defrost your windscreen, drive for a few minutes and go to wash the now salt covered screen and nothing. I'm running a really strong mix of screenwash, but it never seems to stop the nozzles icing up.

-6 Where I am currently. Got to drive in about an hour, and the ice on my windshield is a few mm thick. Thank god for Fords heated windshields. It spends all year disrupting your field of vision, but comes good 5-10 times a year

Good afternoon! Unexpected happenings today. Just finishing work for the day, and was pulled into a meeting for the upper management. CEO did a talk, mostly about moving to a hydrogen future, and then they started announcing awards for stand out staff. Covers all employees in the UK and Europe, so was surprised to see a co-worker in the runners up section for one category, and even more surprised when I outright won the next one. Apparently I'm intuitive and pragmatic, with an eye for finding better ways... Not sure who thinks that or why they voted for me, but I won't dissuade them from their delusions On a brighter note, only 9 days until the days start getting longer again... I don't like the dark.

It's given me an idea for a prank. Motion sensor based sounders are already popular with all sorts. Fit one with a magnet, programme it so it comes on after a delay from when it first senses movement, and it get increasingly louder from something you can't hear, to a horrible screech. Attached to the rear of an electric car, and facing away, it will be some time before someone hears it as they tend to have robust sound proofing. They can't be fined for it, wasn't their car emitting the noise, and not their device. And if it caught on as a popular prank, the scheme would have to be scrapped... Or they'd come down like a ton of bricks on those caught fitting the devices... Nothing ventured, nothing gained

A decent idea for tight urban roads in residential areas. I do worry that this tech is just one sad sap away from "we should be driving responsibly at all times" and uses said reason to itch their authoritarian tendencies however... I can just see it now "The Cat and fiddle may have average speed cameras, but these can be worked around, and we want to dissuade speeding for its entire run for peoples safety. These noise cameras help with that". Which broadly translated is "people are having fun and I don't like it".

Hollywood is living in such a bizarre bubble at the minute, the word "modernise" just seems to be a code word for "insert an overt political and social agenda message over the top of it". My guess is the riders will be Mary Sue's, the story weak, the bikes electric, and I won't be watching.

Glad to hear you got good treatment, and your recovery is in good order! I had the reverse experience to you back in Feb. Left for 3 days before my appendix was removed, my GP went absolutely insane over it. But this was during the tail end of covid, so hopefully just them being overwhelmed.

Not just motorway charges, any fast charger is around the same price. And most supermarkets have 1.5-3 hr car park charges so you could end up sat around on the slower stuff for a long time, and risk parking tickets. If you can't have a charger at home (which will be a substantial problem for many lease holds), you're consigned to using them. London is possibly the only exception, as many of the lamp posts down there have chargers built into them. They are very slow, at around 2kW but you only pay 25-30p per kWh. I'm in Manchester, which has done its very best to match London in price but leave out the infrastructure. LiFEPO4 batteries are great as a grid solution for storing surplus renewable power. But we don't have that surplus yet, and it will likely be 2035 at the earliest by the time we do. I think it could slide to 2050 as we are racing to replace gas systems with heat pumps, which adds significantly more load onto the network. But equally, these are where the biggest carbon savings are, not personal motoring.

So far, their values are holding very solidly. Kia's more than a few years old are selling at nearly as new prices. Old air cooled batteries could degrade quickly, like in the old Nissan leaf. Newer batteries are liquid cooled, and rated for 3000 cycles to 80%, which in theory is hundreds of thousands of miles. There has been a sharp drop of 10% in the first 50k or so noted by some long term testing, but it appears to stabilise and creep down from here. So worth noting, whatever you buy, assume it will lose 10% in the first few years of ownership. For me it's the inconvenience of not having a charger at home, and bad fast charging availability nearby. Which even with it would leave me sat around for a couple of hours a week. EV cars can only claim 9p per mile business mileage, yet cost 15-20p per mile due to motorway chargers being 60-80p per kWh and the best EV's only really capable of 3-4 miles per kWh. I'd be running it at a loss. Then factor in the car allowance I can get in return for owning my own car, I'd be over £200 down after costs if I went the company car route. Just seemed senseless. Fortunately they were pretty understandable, I went cap in hand and made my case, explained it wasn't for me. And looks like it's enough in advance there's no fees.

Good afternoon It's been a weird week. I put in an order for a company car after a recent promotion, a Cupra Born. It's an EV car based on the VW ID3. Delivery was going to be June 2023, and I've just cancelled it. Can't justify it for a number of reasons, chief among which are being forced to use public chargers as I can't get one at home, which is more costly than petrol. And I get a car allowance in lieu of it which is significant, could blow the engine in my car every 2 years and still be in the black. Going to wait for the inevitable 2nd or 3rd generation of EV batteries.

Get better soon @fastbob! :cheers: Dieting before the Christmas season... Ooof

Update on the scammers management company. They replied saying it was a connecting pipe to all flats, so any issues must be dealt with by ourselves. I replied again asking me to show that demarcation, as the one I have access to says that it ends at the cavity where this pipe resides with the caveat that the flats had to ensure their pipes are connected properly. The landlord from the bottom floor flat visited, and we had a good chat. His background is in construction. He reported it and told the management company to access their soil pipe, as he remembered my temporary fix from last time. So was surprised to hear they'd come to me pointing fingers. Going to be an awkward meeting next month when they have to sit down with both of us in the room...

A lot of the issue around size as it stands is due to things like the electrolyte and the materials, which are limiting energy density and increasing overall size. Petrol currently sits at around 100 times the power density of a lithium-ion battery pound for pound, so we are a long way off having dangerous power densities. The nuclear diamond battery will be the thing to change that I suspect, if it can be commercialised. I reckon that chargers in their current form are not going to be around for long. The biggest are up to 350kW, but I believe it's at 400V, which is low voltage. I suspect future tech will see the voltage go up, to keep current and cable size the same. It will just become more important in how they are insulated, and the batteries will likely need safety interlocks to cut the voltage down by varying how many are in series. Aluminium air batteries were a good option for replaceable batteries. Fully recyclable, light, and one roughly the size of your average lead acid battery would have seen a regular saloon travel 3-400 miles. The counter arguments I heard were basically the CO2 impact of recycling them, the very likely high rate of theft, and needing someone to do the swap and need training for the various vehicles out on the road (*no one* standardises, at least at first)

As they are, no. Battery powered bikes are a bad move. They are heavy, have poor power density, and take ages to charge. However, people comparing them in the wrong way. You need to look at them in terms of their evolution. If I was to compare an EV bike to a petrol bike from the 1920's for example, I'd probably have the EV. As while I like tinkering with my bikes... I don't like it enough for the amount of regular maintenance I'd have to be doing. Battery tech is moving quickly, and lithium will be useful as cheap batteries in the future. But there's development of batteries at the moment that will send things to the next level, a new lithium glass battery looks to have 6 times the power density. So we could triple the range of existing EV bikes and halve the weight at the same time. Larger transport may even turn to nuclear batteries, which sound dangerous, but it emits alpha particles which don't interact with us. When that stuff arrives, and we can tweak inverter and motor tech to produce sounds reminiscent of something from Star Trek, I'll be game.

My management company... 3 years back, I bought a run down flat in a pricey area. Thinking that I could do it up, pay down the mortgage, have great capital to make buying a house easier. And anything wrong to the building, the management company has to fix it. Before I moved in, there was a water leak and the flats below (I'm top of 3 floors) got damage. Came from a bad fitting of the kitchen drain pipe to the buildings main drain. About a year into living here, the leak starts again, but only in the bottom floor flat. I'm friendly with the neighbours so check their connections, and mine. Direct access to the main pipe is impossible, it is in an enclosed wall running inside the cavity of the building. You'd have to remove/cut out an entire portion of peoples kitchens to access it directly, it's a bad design. I did manage to get a hold of my pipe and found the main pipe moved with it, when I pushed and pulled a little, it made a loud distant *Thunk* and the leak stopped. If anything it felt like the entire assembly dropped an inch. We had a tremor in the area so thought maybe a T-section had come loose. There was some dampness that I could see, which dried up, so I said the issue was fixed. And told the management company to keep a note of it, and possibly look to replace it with an externally run pipe. It returned a few weeks ago, again only in the bottom floor flat, not long after I bought a new washing machine. But when I checked, my connections are dry, and there's no dampness to suggest the main pipe has an issue. The lady in the bottom floor flat told the landlord, who told the management company, and I got letters saying "fix it, or we will and charge you". I replied saying I'd checked my connections, which were sound, and they'd have to arrange at their own expense an investigation into their pipe, which I'd both warned them about being possibly damaged, and not my responsibility. It was ignored and nasty letter number 2 arrives, saying they've confirmed (no one visited) it was my flat leaking, and I'd be on the hook for the cost. Access to the main pipe is impossible without heavy amount of strip out. So I knew they were lying. I went to my garage, fetched the borescope camera and fed it through the hole in the wall my drain pipe passes through to meet the main pipe. All connections bone dry, area around it is bone dry, looking down the cavity, I now see the pipe clearly, and boy is it on the piss. I'd bet a connection further down has now gone. I replied with pictures, and kept it short, asking for proof of how they confirmed it, and that I felt they had tried to extort me. Had I been someone vulnerable, or elderly, that could have gone a different route. And I would see them at the owners meeting next month to discuss next steps. No reply. Funny that.

I'm assuming OP won't be silly enough to try and lie if this is a fair cop! I'm trying to work out what was said to the police officer to make them say they didn't have the right insurance. As I had a couple of weird encounters in London where it felt like they were trying to find a way to get me for something, so wondered if it was the same thing. The most irritating, was an officer saying he pulled me as he thought my exhaust looked like a race only type, it was marked for road use, so no problems. He then measured my chain slack and lectured me on how I don't take care of my bike, and I interrupted him to point at the sticker on the swingarm showing my suggested slack, and that I was in the limit, and that earned me a 10 minute lecture on why he was actually right, and Honda was wrong.

Did you tell the officer you were heading back from, or to work? If so, the onus of proof is on you to prove you either have the correct insurance, or were there on non-business terms (visiting a work friend etc). If none of this was mentioned, and he's just derived it from spotting a uniform under your bike gear or something like that, the onus of proof is on the police officer. As otherwise, they could say you were speeding without the speed gun etc. The police in London are... Different... To the rest of the UK. I'm assuming they see a lot more bad behaviour on bikes. So I maybe biased in this case, as I've had about 4 bikes given an extensive inspection roadside, that would make the AA blush. On a 125, I was accused of being a learner. I showed my license and he said it "could be your brothers". I showed my work ID, confirming my details, and he set about checking my tyres, chain slack, and what made this so irritating every time it happened (on about 3 subsequent bikes), was the amount of cars with chopped exhausts, illegal tints, rust covered by duct tape that drove by.

Hahaa! Dumb EV car owners! ... *Tries to cancel Cupra Born order*

Usually between 70-80C. One of the sites I'm working at requires 80 degrees. The heat pump is a cascade system, it's an air source heat pump that feeds the primary side of the water source heat pump, maintaining 35 degree inlet temperature so the water source pump set can produce 80 degree at the outlet. (83 actual, but 80 on the other side of the plate heat exchanger) The manufacturers are all like "It can achieve a COP of 3". And 3kW's of heat for every 1kW of electricity sounds great until you realise it can only manage that with an ambient outside temperature of over 20 degrees (closer to 25). In winter, the air source pump has to work overtime, and it's oversize to operate in temperatures as low as -5. But I calculated the COP could reduce to 1.3 in the darkest parts of winter, or 130% efficiency when you have your highest heat demand. It's carbon efficient... But cost efficient?

More surprised this was in Ireland and not London. The risks some of them seem to take on the regular down there used to leave me shutting my eyes for a few seconds. I seemed to always open them to a parallel universe where the madmen pulled it off

Morning! Sat in meetings this morning, with not a lot to say as it's all the commercial guff. In short, hospitals have just learnt what removing gas boilers and replacing them with heat pumps is going to do to their electricity bill. You would have thought it was obvious when I've been trying to get around not increasing the sites main incomer. This kit is going to leave them on a knife edge, they put so much as half a dozen EV chargers in and they'll blackout the site

Very light sentence as well... No responsibility to pay back anything. The issue with benefits is that it's become very political to discuss. Any disparagement or support can lead to assumptions that you're some hardcore left/right wing fruitcake. Which makes openly discussing it, and finding solutions to problems difficult. My gf has family in the Isle of Wight, and she's often complaining about some of her friends there. Who never really worked, got pregnant, had 2 or 3 kids, and end up with a house, car, and have no desire to ever work. And I wish I could say it's just one, but it seems to be half her friend group down there. It bothers me as we are both feeling overworked, all with the ambition of house, a couple of kids, and enough left over to do the odd holiday. As far as I can see, this isn't an abuse of the system, which makes me think the system is broken. And needs a better brain than mine to figure it out.

Today has been expensive, washing machine blew up! It started making a racket a month back, and it's a sealed drum/motor/bearing set so replacement just isn't economical. I voted on replacing it sooner than later, girlfriend thought I was overly worried and it would easily last until the November cyber Monday sales. Should have bet some money on it, would have softened the blow