The Shed

Advice to first time car owners Owning a car is expensive- here’s how to keep the costs down 1 Check the Air, Oil, Fluid and Water times 3, at least once a month. For an old car this may need to be done before every drive, for a 3+ year old car, once a week. […]

Sometimes I want to find an old comment I made on Facebook It’s quite simple really. Login to your Facebook profile page. Click on ‘Activity Log’ which is on the bottom right of your header image, beside ‘Update info’ and the Settings Icon Click on ‘Comments’ in the leftsidebar Use the year and date on […]

Having solar panels on every house roof, pouring  electricity into the grid is wrong. In theory it sounds good. However for it to create a saving for the grid, the power station has to be able to shut a whole generator down, probably at least 20Mw. That takes a while to do and the power […]

I’m often asked for advice by camera buying friends. They’ve just seen an inexpensive DSLR, under $1000, and they’re hooked, because ‘DSLR’ is like some magic word promising high quality photographs. My advice is that a good bridge camera, also called ‘Super Zooms’, like the Panasonic FZ200, with up to 30x zoom, is a far […]

Solutions for Audio Books and CD’s not playing in order. Sometimes audio book files won’t play in order on an MP3 player because they are not numbered at the front of each mp3 filename, OR Audio files have embedded information that we can’t easily see and the MP3 player may be using one of these […]

I am a beer drinker rather than a connoisseur, but drinking 24 different beers every December in my Advent Beer Calendar has developed my palate and helped me appreciate beers and how they’re brewed. Everyone has their individual tastes, here’s mine – My favourite beer would be a pint of English Bitter/Pale Ale poured from […]

Does Speed Kill or does Speed Damage your Wallet? The news stories of ‘stupidity fueled crashes’  brand regular drivers that break the speed limit as deviant criminals. That’s unfair and crazy. Motorists are being fined on safe sections of roads, often straight, sometimes without another car in sight. It’s all wrong. If you hear on […]

Satan, a Rover Sprint 373 Lawnmower, with a Briggs and Stratton ‘Easy Start’ engine  got his name because from NEW he would never start easily – only ONCE did Satan start easily and that was the day I took him back to the shop to complain!! Here’s the misleading advert –   Our previous mower […]

I bought an oven on 6th Jan that was faulty. The manufacturer got a local repair company to fix it. The repairman couldn’t come for 2 weeks!! When he finally arrived all he did was check that what I had described was in fact the problem, EVEN THOUGH HE HAD THE REPLACEMENT PART WITH HIM. […]

In the last month our Air conditioner failed, our Refrigerator failed, our New Oven was faulty and couldn’t be repaired. The Aircon and fridge were just 13 years old. I got a full refund including installation costs for the new oven, which I believe had a design flaw. Sorting all that out seemed almost like […]