Down tools

As we prepare for an influx of relatives this weekend on account of a first birthday party, I've taken the drastic step of tidying away the tools, screws and general mess from the bathroom and hallway.

It's not that the work is finished (still....) but that it's harder to cover up for the fact in it's taking so long when the walk from the bedroom to the shower in the morning is a bit like playing Indiana Jones.

Anyway, we're nearly there. The remaining jobs are:

• sort out the ceiling, which is the original artex supplemented with a splattering of tile adhesive
• get the grout off the floor, which stuck to the non-polished tiles....doh
• fit the extractor fan
• fit mirror, toilet roll holder etc
• perhaps fit a new cupboard to make more storage space.

Have I forgotten anything? 

I took the old bath to the tip today. It went into the landfill skip. I felt so guilty. I'd tried leaving on the drive (no one stole it, although they took the sink) and advertising on freecycle (no replies).

What else can you do with an old acrylic/fibreglass bath?

Nearly there

I didn't do any work on the bathroom tonight. Instead, I seem to be addicted to failblog.org. I sit here laughing at page after page of people getting things wrong in the stupidest ways possible. 

I suppose the fact that I could be finished with this long overdue project in a few evenings,  if only I could face getting the tile cutter out again to do that one last bit of tiling, is something of a FAIL.

Darkness

Today was the first day of the year when I actually had to get up when it was still dark. On the upside, I suppose I'm making efficient use of the available daylight. But I didn't mind the darkness because I used the new shower for the first time!

Why wait so long after fitting it? Because there seems to be a shortage of shower curtain rails. Would you believe it!

I looked in B&Q - the only suitable one (i.e with brackets, rather then the weak-looking friction-fit job) was £60, which was more than I wanted to pay and it didn't look that good anyway because it looked like the curtain would fall off the hooks. I looked in Screwfix, they had exactly the same one as B&Q at £25. (Yes less than half the price - B&Q is so expensive for such things) but were out of stock. In fact they had no stock available for any that I liked. Even ebay had nothing, for once. 

Finally I found one on the internet, which arrived yesterday and was fitted immediately.

Also last night, I tackled the problem in the sink. After being away for a couple of days on a trip, it was not a pleasant job. Wearing latex gloves I tackled the smelly mess.

The problem was of my own making (in two senses of the word). Having been bitten once trying to reuse an old waste trap, I made sure that I bought a new one for the sink. Knowing that space was tight, I bought a nice tidy compact trap.

However, last week, when fitting the front of the sink unit is on, it became clear that there would not be enough room even for this trap: the semi recessed sink sits so that the waste hole is so close to the front of the unit. So I tempted fate and put the old trap on the sink, which was a simple U-bend in the form of a P-trap.

Of course, it was a bad idea.

When I fitted it, it dripped slightly, so I ended up over tightening it onto the waste. This, in itself caused no problems, but when I want to remove it, of course it was stuck tight. Turning harder (which is pretty hard because you cannot really get a spanner to it once the sink is fitted into the unit) just managed to unseat the waste unit itself.

In fact, the trap was stuck so tight that I had to resort to a saw to remove it. 90 minutes later and I had the waste and trap out. 10 minutes after that I had the waste re-seated and sealed, and a new P-trap fitted.

With a sigh of relief, I soaked the few tools that I had used in bleach - I really don't want any chance of a repeat of the events of last weekend.

Sinking issues

I learned two things over the weekend. 

1. At 3am Sunday morning, I learned that the toilet is close enough to the sink to provide a possible solution to simultaneously dealing with both symptoms of Gastroenteritis.

2. At 3:15am Sunday morning, I learned that the possible solution above isn't actually a very good one.

The sink is now out of order.

Apart from the illness delaying work, it's quite a setback to the bathroom progress because it looks like I'll have to remove the sink again.

Shower!

Well, the shower manufacturer don't really want to know that they've got the labels on the pipes wrong. They even suggested that it would be hard to prove that I hadn't swapped the labels round after. A very sympathetic guy from customer support suggested that I ask my customer if they would mind if I fit it upside down...I said that I don't think that the idea would go down well.

For reference, here is the unit with the stickers the wrong way round.

Midas 200 with wrong labels

I decided to tackle the problem from the hallway, rather than taking down any tiles.

Here is the quite neat "before" shot.

And here it is "after", not looking nearly so good.

Pipes the right way round.

The little U in the hot pipe is because the pipe is quite rigidly fixed at the bottom and I didn't want the expansion to stress the also-rigid, push-fit shower fitting. I'm not sure how effective it will be, but it's probably quite effective at reducing the flow rate in the shower.

Soldering those pipes was tricky: the plastic shower fitting is fixed to the wall (screwed from the front, under the tiles). The pipes are rigidly fixed somewhere (especially the hot). So you have to assemble the pipes and solder in-situ, it would be impossible to solder and then insert them into the shower fitting. It looks like I didn't melt the plastic, somehow.

And here's the end result - it actually works. If only I had a shower curtain....

Shower!

Incidentally, someone stole the old sink, radiator and a broken toastie machine from outside my house on Monday. Now all I need to do is get rid of the old bath.

Back to front ARGH aka Public service.

You may recall the effort spent plumbing the shower fitting in the wall. You may also recall the effort tiling it. The finish is now complete, grouted and sealed. It looks great.

Unfortunately....well, see below.

From: Ian Broster
To: Aqualisa Technical Support
Date: Saturday 19 September 2009

I have just fitted a Midas 200 - but it 
does not adjust temperature correctly.

I have double checked that the inlet pipes 
match the makings on the tap (i.e. the left
one closest to the output pipe is cold).

Please can you confirm that the markings on
the shower unit are correct?

Regards
Ian

And the reply

From: Aqualisa Technical Support
To: Ian Broster
Date: Monday 21st September

Dear Ian Broster,

Thank you for your e-mail.
This does sound as though the stickers on 
the valve may be on the wrong way around, 
if you look at the front of the valve with 
the outlet on the bottom left, the hot 
connection should then enter in the rear 
on the left as you look at it.

...

There have been so many opportunities to get this right! When I first did the plumbing, I noticed that the pipes were the other way round to the old shower, a different model from the same company. So, I did a quick check.

I searched in the documentation and installation guide for confirmation, but it only refers to the "markings" on the valve. It does not say which is the right way!

I even searched the internet to see if anyone else could confirm which way round, but I could not find anything relevant.

So, thinking 'how can anyone get two really important stickers the wrong way on a production line!' I went ahead. Damn.

So, in case any one else happens to have this shower, and are not sure which way round they go...then now you know.

In Hot Water

With the cold weather approaching, there is a certain pressure to get the heated towel rail fitted. It's not that we need cosy warm towels that urgently, but that when I moved the radiator pipes, I didn't bother to refill the central heating system again, thinking that I'd save some time (and inhibitor solution) by leaving it turned off until the hot towel rail was properly fitted. This means that we have had no heating. During the summer months, of course, we didn't notice.

Anyway, after spending a long time drilling a few holes in the tiles (and probably ruining a nice masonry drill bit in the process - how can it take 10 minutes a hole to drill through 9mm of rather fragile ceramic?), we have a nice new heated towel rail (and a cosy warm house too).

I never thought I would liken drilling breeze block to drilling into soft cheese until I tried drilling through a breeze block wall with tiles in front of it; the contrast is spectacular. With some irony, the next day some new proper tile drill bits arrived for me in the post. I'm sure that they turn my tiles into cheese too.

Almost Done Tiling

It's been a long time since the last update. Since then I've been tiling. And that's about it. Tiling for weekends and every evening for over 2 weeks. I have fitted over 300kg of tiles to the walls (I really hope they're strong enough).

Perhaps I'm just not a fast tiler. Perhaps I can blame it on the huge tiles. Perhaps I can claim that I had to buy a few extra tools (which is certainly true).

In any case, I really have almost done tiling. It only remains to tile around the extractor fan (I'm waiting for a 110mm diamond hole saw to arrive) and a tiny bit of boxing to make and tile.

I've grumbled about large tiles but now that I'm at the end, it doesn't seem so bad. The large tiles generate quite a lot of wastage, however. There were 35kg of offcuts, 12%, counting only the bits that I bothered to save (the larger bits that might conceivably be used somewhere else).

I only broke one tile (actually, not broke it as much as somehow cutting it in mirror image).

The one upside of the large tiles is that the grouting was easy, completed in only a few hours. It's looking good. Finally. Pictures will come when the tiling no longer almost done.

Still Tiling

Yes, the tiling is going very slowly. Did I mention how awkward it is to work with huge tiles?

I'm averaging about 5 tiles in an evening (3 hours) at the moment, mostly because each tile needs to be cut into so many pieces.

Anyway, here are some photos.

Around the bath

You'll notice around the bath, there is a row about 10cm high. This is perhaps unusual, the typical advice being to make the row above the bath just less than a full tile. Again, this a the problem of large tiles. It is important to get the border at the right height (not too close to the sill, not hitting the sink, etc.) and the large tiles don't leave much room for manoeuvre. There were no options that hit all requirements, but the best option was having a thin row above the bath.

Here's a bit of carefully constructed boxing that's about 70% of the size of the previous boxing but holds the same pipes.

Boxing

And finally, an example of an awkward tile, yet to do, that needs to be cut around the door.

Tiling Around the door.

Despite an appeal on facebook, I failed to find someone with a 110-120mm diamond hole saw to lend me so that I can cut the extractor fan vent. Although they're not expensive for a tool (about £10-£15), as I'm only going to drill one hole with it, it's an expensive hole! Once the rest of the bathroom is in a better state, I'm going try a tungsten carbide jigsaw blade instead.

Slow motion

I expected the tiling to go slow, and it is. I've only covered half of the bathroom after a full day at it.

One issue is the large tiles we chose. Almost every tile needs some unusual cut doing to it whereas with small tiles, most cuts are just straight breaks and any odd corner ones are fast to cut because they're small anyway.

I have had some successful tiling however. The holes for the shower outlet look good and it will be easy to get a watertight seal there.

Show outlet

The next issue will be tiling round the extractor fan. I feel the need for a new tool here.

Extractor fan

P.S I notice from the logs that there are quite a few people regularly reading this blog. I once tried to work out who was following it, feel free to add a comment from time to time, whoever you are.

Visible progress

There is visible progress today - I've started tiling! The end is in sight...

Wall tiles

Unfortunately, my tile cutter is too small for the big tiles we bought. After failing to hire one for a week because all(?) the hire shops in York are closed on Saturdays, I've ordered a new one from ebay at 1/3 of the price of B&Q.

Here are the nicely drilled floor tiles fitted. These hole cutters are brilliant.

Drilled Floor tiles

Finally, the sink didn't come with any clips to hold it to the worktop. I queried this with the supplier, who asked the manufacturer. Apparently the silicone sealant is meant to be enough to hold it in place. However, it's semi-recessed, so half of it overhangs the edge; if you fill it with water and lean on it, will it be secure? I don't believe it. So I'll have to be inventive and make some sort of clip....

Balancing act

And of course, the stupid bath waste is still leaking...I've added more silicone..again.

Making holes

I didn't do much tonight in the bathroom: just primed the walls ready for tiling. 

And re-sealed the bath waste again. If this doesn't work I will have to buy a new waste, this one is not appropriate since it requires a good seal against the underside of the bath, which is not smooth. It really is not a good thing to try and make a seal against a rough surface.  

However, I did play with a new diamond hole saw with excellent results!

Round holes:

Yesterday, Robin commented that you can never get a spanner anywhere near the nuts under a bath once the bath has been "tiled in". This is true and is what I was thinking when I brought all the pipes out to the side of the bath within reach. If you want to change the taps, for example, at a later date, then the only awkward nuts to tighten are the back-plate nuts for the tap; all of the water pipe connections are either in reach, or can be done before putting the taps onto the bath.

Accessible Pipes:

Functional

I didn't write anything last night because it took too long to fit a new trap to the bath. You'd think that changing a trap would be easy. But of course not. Somehow, removing the old trap I must have pulled a bit too hard on the waste of the bath. When I fitted the new trap, the seal had gone. 

So out came the bath completely so that I could remove the waste, clean up the silicone and reseal. On that note, the design of the bath waste is rubbish. It needs to make a seal against the bottom of the bath, which is a rough surface made of fibreglass. So the only way to get it watertight seems to be to use lots of silicone. And if that doesn't work, just repeat.

Anyway, after too long, we have a nice, small, watertight trap on the bath. If only I'd done that in the first place then I wouldn't have wasted an evening taking the bath out again.

Also, this one is a slimline one that doesn't need a hole in the floor to accommodate it. If only I'd done that in the first place then I wouldn't have had to cut a hole in the floor, which presumably is now a great place to have a leak.

New trap:

Today, however, was finally a productive evening!

I took the opportunity of the children being happily entertained to use the remaining daylight to cut the worktop for the sink. This was not as easy as you might imagine. Without instructions or a template, I guessed and marked and measured twice and marked and measured twice and marked and measured twice and still got it wrong. (But intentionally, it was the right way sort of wrong, so that was OK.)

So the sink is fitted and tested.  It isn't, however, attached to anything except pipes. I can't see any easy way to attach it to anything; there were no clips, extra bits or even instructions.

And fitting the replacement loo that the nice people at Maddisons delivered was easy. It didn't leak...

So now it's functional. We have a working bath, toilet and sink. 

Functional:

The main remaining jobs are basically (not necessarily in this order):

• tile the walls (slow and awkward)
• build some boxing around the pipes (awkward)
• attach the sink to the unit and the unit to the wall (easy, if I can find some kind of clips)
• attach the toilet to the wall and floor (easy)
• fit the towel rail/radiator (easy as long as my guess for where to put the pipes was about right)
• finish tiling the floor (I have new toys to cut the pipe holes, ebay is great!)
• shower fitting (apparently, it's "easy fit")
• finishing touches (erm)

It might be finished by Christmas then.

Tiling preparation

This evening we prepared the walls for tiling - mostly removing old adhesive.

Actually Karen did most of that. I mostly did some thinking (and removing the toilet, which will be replaced tomorrow by the nice guys at the bathroom supplier). There are just lots of unknowns to think about.

• What height to have the border/trim so that we don't get tiny bits of tiles to cut around the bath/sink/window.
• The tile adhesive gives strict instructions about using the right sort of primer...is all this really necessary for previously plastered walls (even if the old adhesive didn't really stick well).
• The border/trim is porous. Do I have to seal? Before installing? Before grouting? With what?

At least I've decided on the height and drawn a nice horizontal line rather higher than I expected about half way up the wall.

Going nowhere fast

It was a disappointing few hours this evening.

I thought I would assemble the sink/vanity unit. But...there's a cupboard missing and there's no point cutting the worktop to size until I know exactly how big the cupboard is.

Empty space:

I thought I would adjust the legs of the bath properly. But...the idea of reusing the old trap wasn't a good one, and it's leaking. So the bath needs to come out again.

Old trap:

I thought I would test to see if the toilet is still leaking. It is. Despite putting silicone around the gasket. After 20 minutes of prodding, poking, shining bright lights down the holes, I hit upon the idea of blowing down the screw hole to see if the water is actually entering the screw hole through an invisible fracture in the basin. The toilet is indeed faulty - water can get from the inlet to the bowl to the screw hole. 

Leaky toilet:

I know that I could probably "fix it" by filling the screw hole with silicone when I put the screw in. Had the cupboard not been missing I probably would have done so. However, a general lack of progress tonight puts me in the mood to ask the supplier to replace it.

Finally, in an attempt to not have had a completely wasted night, I leveled the patch in the wall and attached the door (ready for a visitor tomorrow night who might value some privacy while she doesn't have a bath and doesn't use the toilet or sink.

Wall:

Door:

Bathroom - day three

Today I had an extra pair of hands; in a few hours we had almost tiled the floor, almost patched the wall where the shower is to go and almost fitted the loo.

1. Almost fitted the loo: needs to be a few inches to the left, with a new waste pipe, but if only I could stop it dripping when it flushes! There's a gasket between the cistern and bowl that just doesn't hold the water back.

Perhaps I'm fitting it wrongly. The toilet comes with very brief fitting instructions. However, I was surprised to find that the toilet seat comes with a 36 page user guide.

2. Almost a floor: time to invest in some new tools. Perhaps a diamond hole saw?

3. Almost patched the wall: close, but not quite flat.

I also discovered that the bath waste leaks. It's not one of the connections that I made, but the pre-assembled connection from the overflow to the waste. Some silicone will help I hope.

Bathroom - day two

It was not a busy day, with a lie-in (late start) and watching Slum Dog Millionaire in the evening instead of working. There was, however, some of progress on the bathroom.

After finishing the floor (screwing it down and some waterproofing), it took me too long to realize that the installation guide for the bath was wrong. The baseboard for the bath (a fundamental, structural part) was not a separate item, as per diagram, but was actually built-in to the fibreglass itself.  

Before fitting the bath, it thought that I would try to fit the shower, while I had good access. The shower came with an "easy-fit" option. I should have taken that with a pinch of salt. "Easy fit" unless you are replacing an old shower, with one pipe coming from above, and the other below, and with the hot and cold the other way round to the old shower.

After a few hours, and accidentally cracking the plasterboard on the other side of the wall, I have the shower plumbed in (at least the back end of it - I suppose that the next step is the "easy fit" bit) and a great hole in the wall to plaster over. I did manage to re-use two of the copper pipes from under the old sink.

And then the joy of flexible tap connectors that are just not quite flexible enough, so you have to extend the copper pipe in odd directions just to get the flexible tap connectors to fit. 

It all seemed OK though, and I finally had a bath tonight. We were only without bath/shower for one day. Not so bad after all.

Bathroom - day one

If there was a reason for putting off replacing our bathroom, it was because I didn't know how long it would take.  I know that I could manage with a building site for a bathroom (I could use the shower at work), but I'm not sure how we'd bath the kids if it wasn't warm enough for a padding pool. It probably wouldn't be warm enough if it took until November anyway. 

I know how there are always unexpected things that crop up, don't go to plan, or just take a long time.

So, with after a certain amount of peer pressure...we ordered, made a plan and I started.

A plan was carefully crafted to minimize the amount of time that the bath/shower would be out of action. So, I removed the sink and the lino floor. I didn't take a photo when I started, but I did take a photo at this point.

And that's the point I realised that the plan would have to the thrown out. The floor was rotten under the WC and would need replacing. (So I couldn't simply add 6mm plywood reinforcement over the 18mm chipboard, I would have to go to the backup plan and replace the floorboards with 18mm plywood, which would be more work but better because the floor would be lower).

As for the backup plan? The joist that I had planned to replace the boards up to, wasn't where I thought it was. It was under the bath. So, any opportunity to keep the bath in place until just about everything else was finished was gone.

So the bath came out, and so did the floor.

Some new pipes - moving the radiator.

And a new floor, with new pipes in the right place for the towel rail and sink.

All creatures great and small, and then there are wasps

I'm told (and Wikipedia says so too) that wasps are an important part of the biological cycle. Specifically, "Wasps are critically important in natural biocontrol. Almost every pest insect species has at least one wasp species that is a predator or parasite upon it. Parasitic wasps are also increasingly used in agricultural pest control as they have little impact on crops. Wasps also constitute an important part of the food chain.

However, I do find them to be the most intolerable of all the common forms of life that are found in the garden, county, city, park. Well, everywhere. There's just no escape. At this time of the year, you can't eat anything outside without at least one buzzing around.

I thought that we were OK living out in the countryside; for the past two years at least we have had relatively few. It was far worse in the city where there are lots of rubbish bins and other soft targets. 

However, this year we've been hit as well. Last week there were a dozen or so buzzing round the wheelie bin, which contained little more than dirty nappies. They somehow got inside too. Yesterday, there were at least fifty around our compost bin.

Later in the evening, I did turn the compost so that any food scraps in it were buried deep within, rather than being near the top. That certainly helped with the composting as well as wasp reduction; there were none near it today.

In looking for reasons (other then reminding me to turn the compost from time to time) to justify to myself why these things deserve a second chance at survival if they come near me, I search the internet and discover that there are many different kind of wasps.  The family Vespidae includes over 5000 different species of wasps. I'm sure you only see one or two kinds though, probably the familar looking Vespula vulgaris, the common wasp

I came across this forum question that says that wasps are good for getting rid of carcasses, and the BBC's article explaining how Teesiders should love wasps because they are good at recycling (erm..making nests out of chewed up wood).

I'm not convinced.

As I look into my garden tonight, I see lots of bees, hoverflies and other flying things all eagerly visiting all the flowers. They are so interested in the flowers don't even notice when I walk past. I'm glad they are enjoying them and I'm glad to help the dwindling bee population.

A solitary wasp floating near the bin (now empty) makes a wasp-line for me as I pass, I'm sure it's looking for a fight, stinger at the ready... If I had been suitably armed, that wasp would have not survived the night. Lucky for him, I was not.

Wasps: room 101.

Much Better Way

Today at work I almost started only one small task, although I achieved a great deal more.

All I had to do was do a bit of budgeting and financial planning - cash flow, profit, the usual thing. After consistently failing to get the numbers to add up (literally) for most of the morning, I decided that our over-evolved financial planning spreadsheet was just not up to the job and could be done in a MBW¹.

The problem with TOW² is that as soon as you try to tie financial transactions that occur on different dates together (for example, you invoice in May, so you show a profit in May, but you get half cash in July and the rest in September, before paying the VAT to HMRC in November) you easily generate spaghetti links all over your spreadsheet. This is just error-prone, particularly when things change (you don't get the order until June so you invoice in June instead....which formulae do you change?...).

So after some thought, I ended up with a much better Openoffice spreadsheet-based financial forecast that actually works. It's based on the same principles as typical accounting packages - basically nominal codes and double entry bookkeeping and so on. It's got clear inputs, outputs, bits you can edit, and bits that you should not.

Not only does this mean that there are far fewer ways to break it, but it ties much closer to the accounting software that we use for the real accounts. It's faster to use, will save me lots of time in the future and it probably also gets the numbers to add up too.

So, today I did great things!

And tomorrow, I'll actually do the budgets.

^1.Much Better Way.

^2.The Old Way.

Binless Wifi

The "departure" area of the Eurostar at St Pancreas appears to have no rubbush bins, but does have free internet access.

Tube

Someone put a video of me on You Tube.

Fame at last.

Mystery of Modern Houses

Where, in a typical modern build house, do you keep your:

• vacuum cleaner
• washing basket
• towels (the ones you are using in the bathroom)
• recycling bin(s)
• 2nd car (either yours, or a visitor)
• server room

?

Space Age Security

We all know that using a password like "password" isn't very sensible if you want to stop people guessing your online banking passwords. Actually the very fact that "password" is too guessable indicates that we don't all know it...but anyway, I was most surprised to find a web site that insisted that passwords:

• Consist of at least 8 characters
• Contain at least 1 uppercase character (A, B, C)
• Contain at least 1 lowercase character (a, b, c)
• Contain at least 1 numeral (1, 2, 3)
• Contain at least 1 symbol (` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + - = { } | [ ] \ : " ; ' < > ? , . /)
• You password can't contain:
• Spaces or non-English characters
  

So, now we all know how to make a super-strong password like "Passw0rd."

Another website insisted that as well as a password, you have to fill in information that only you can possibly know (but that's another story..) i.e. the name of your first and last school as additional security questions.

Even with such easy questions, it took me less than 20 minutes to get myself locked out of the site. ..how did I manage to not know the name of my last school 20 minutes after typing it in?

The kind gentleman on the telephone in their "Reset my password" department obviously had visibility of my log-in attempts and only when he politely informed me that "Please note that the security questions are space sensitive" did the penny finally drop.

The answer was simple. When you first enter your security questions in, you type them in a normal text field where you see what you are typing. However, when you log in and you are asked to type them to confirm your identity, they appear in a "password" text box, and the characters you type are replaced by asterisks. 

As you know, super-strong passwords cannot contain spaces and when I type the name of my school into a password box, my brain automatically skips the spaces between the words. It does this for at least 3 consecutive tries, plus a further 3 times after clicking on the "Lost my password" button.

Normal Service Resumed

After a short break from both posting here and air travel, I'm back in the emergency exit seat again. I should have taken the train to Paris last week.

In other news, I am so pleased that I took a TomTom with me!

My planned 30 minute taxi ride from the station to the airport was shattered by the discovery that a suburb of Paris was lacking in taxis. According to TomTom, the 30 minute drive was only a 40 minute walk..so I gave it a try. TomTom took me on a pleasant walk through the countryside, up hills, round a lake through the woods. In smart shoes and trousers, mud was no object and I arrived safely at the hotel, although hot, sweaty and muddy. Yes, it seems that TomTom knows all the muddy footpaths in Paris!

Marketing

When did "Excel" become a synomym for "spreadsheet"?

Walking away

We've all read the books about how you must go into a negotiation knowing your walk away position. However, I find that it is rare to fail to reach an agreement, so you never really need your walk away position.

Today I discovered that there is something satisfying about walking away from a negotiation.

I was looking for a new pair of shoes. In the first shoe shop I found (Clarks), I found a nice pair of shoes at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, they don't have the right size for my foot. (This is no great surprise, I don't have a large sock.)

They do however have my size in this very similar pair at £70. They were indeed comfortable. I had aimed to get something under £50. In the current economic climate I decided to see if they would be tempted to reduce the price to get the sale.

You aren't meant to reveal your walk away position, but the salesman's generous offer of (shocked face) "we don't do discounts" didn't quite do it for me.

So I walked away, wearing my old, worn out shoes and a smug smile on my face. I'm sure there's some irony here.

The shop round the corner had an almost identical shoe for £20 less, which did me fine.

Grumpy Science

Are bus drivers grumpy? After a spate of particularly grumpy drivers a few weeks ago, I decided to do some science.

Hypothesis: most bus drivers are grumpy.

We'll need to know what grumpy means though.

Definition of Grumpy

Exhibits one or more of:

Facial expression is one of general displeasure

Makes a negative comment

Emits grunting sounds in a negative manner

Does not acknowledge the passenger except for dealing with ticket

Eye contact limited to glaring or frowning

Complains about something

Definition of Cheerful

Exhibits one or more of:

Smiles or has generally positive facial expression

Makes smalltalk, excluding where it consists mainly of grumbles or complaints

Emits a positive comment

Eye contact, excluding glaring or frowning at passenger

On each bus journey I take, I'll record whether the bus driver is grumpy or cheerful when I board the bus.

The results will appear in another post.

Powerless

Today we (most of the east side of York apparently) had a power cut for about 2 seconds.

What mayhem this caused!

At work, most office computers and a server rebooted, some work was lost, a quite important file was corrupted. And we all had to stop for 10 minutes to discuss technical reasons why the building's forced ventilation fans didn't restart immediately after the power cut.

At home, I've only got to reset the time on nearly all the clocks in our house (binary clock, cooker etc.) and turn on a few things that have soft power switches.

We are far too reliant on a stable 240V AC supply. Can you imagine what would happen if we had to go without electricity for any serious amount of time? We probably wouldn't be rubbing sticks together for energy, we'd be working out the details of installing a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to keep the PCs running.

Office Move

We moved to a bigger, shinier office today. The move went smoothly (and I didn't have to organize this one). The new office is really rather nice and spacious. And still tidy.

We now have more than twice as much window, which is really nice. There's a nice leafy view, but unfortunately one more obstacle to really feeling like we are playing in the green fields: none of this vast expanse of daylight actually opens to allow the scent of spring into the office. Doh!

Plumbing sanity

If there is one thing that is essential when designing something intended to hold water (like a sink or a toilet cistern), it is that the holes in it (plug hole, and where the flush comes out) must be able to be sealed...right?

Typically, a seal is made by squashing a bit of rubber tight against a flat surface. 

So, why is it that:

 1. My new sink's hole for the drain does not have the top and the bottom of the hole parallel? That is, you put the drain in but and the nut + washer at the back are at an angle to the surface they are meant to make a seal with!

 2. My new toilet cistern does not have the base of the cistern at right angles to the back of the cistern....so that the flush mechanism fits wonky. If you make a good seal, the flush mechanism cannot align with the button on the lid of the cistern, or if you want the flush to align with the buttons, then you cannot have a good seal.

If these simple design details were right, then the fitting the appliances would have taken a fraction of the time it's taking me now. Surely, everyone who buys these items will have the same problem.

After a couple of false starts, the sink was not too bad: plenty of silicone instead of relying the rubber washer did the trick...but the WC is still a work-in-progress. I suspect that since I prefer the fail-safe (no leaks) over functionality (being able to flush),  I'll end up with something can can only do single-flush, not dual flush.

Do real plumbers have these issues...come on, what's the trick?

Gremlins

Watch out! The gremlins are about..

They've already beheaded our compiler (by making it eat its own stack), caused the simple software update that was meant to fix the compiler to break network file handling, and made my web browser crash.

Otherwise, it's an ordinary day.

Gushing Water and Another Mystery Solved

I woke up this morning at 2:30am to the sound of a header tank in the loft quietly refilling. I don't know how that woke me up, but it did.

Part 1 - the gushing water

Coming to my senses, I realised that no header tank has any business to be refilling in the middle of the night when no one is using any water. Earlier that evening, I had removed the toilet, radiator and other water-related things from the WC, so I thought it prudent to take a look downstairs.

During the night, one of the (disconnected) thermostatic radiator valves had started to leak water; which was now gushing all over the place where the floor would have been, if I had not removed the floor earlier that evening too. So now it was just gushing fairly harmlessly onto the concrete sub-floor.

I checked that the thermostatic radiator was set to "0" (off) and then managed to tighten the thermostat a bit tighter onto the valve which stopped the water. So, I let the water system fill up again, ran the pump for a bit and bled the radiators, before checking that there was no further leaking and returning to bed.

Just as I was falling asleep again, could I hear a header tank filling up...?

Part 2 - A mystery solved

Some time ago, I fitted thermostatic radiator valves to our radiators. They are easy to fit and apparently save you money. However, they came with an extra bit. You can choose whether to screw the thermostat onto the valve, or you can choose a normal non-thermostatic "tap", like the old valve that I was removing.

At the time I didn't understand why I would want this extra bit - the whole point of the product was that it was thermostatic. I kept the bits anyway (I'm like that).

Perhaps it was the fact that I was now shivering in my dressing gown and slippers, standing on a soaking sub-floor that was at outside temperature in January that made everything finally fall into place.

What is that  extra bit for? It's for when you don't want the thermostatic radiator valve to be thermostatic, of course! For example if there is no radiator connected to it and it's freezing cold because there's neither floor nor heating. On a thermostatic valve, "0" does not mean "off", it just means "very cold". So when the temperature really gets very cold, it turns the valve on.

So, I grabbed the non-thermostatic extra bit, stopped the water with my thumb while I switched it over, and of course it turned the valve off properly. I  let the water system fill up again again, ran the pump for a bit again and bled the radiators again, before checking that there was no further leaking and returning to bed again.

And the moral of the story?

You can bleed radiators in the middle of the night without waking up the household.

Moist Maker

If you ever saw the friends episode with Ross' sandwich and thought it sounded nice, I can confirm that it is in fact excellent, especially if warmed slightly in the microwave. Yum.