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Yes, these are really good. You can set them either to come on when the light does, or when the humidity level raises.

In my old place I had it set to come on when the humidity level raises, and it transformed what was previously a not very nice downstairs shower room.

If you're buying the full set from merlin (levers and callipers), you shouldn't need to buy any extra parts like that.

There's now an "easy install system" whereby if you don't need to cut the hose you literally take a cap off, shove it in the hole, and then do up the flare nut on the lever. The nut in the set you linked to is a flare nut for where the hose goes into the lever. The olive is pre-installed in the lever and the flare nut.

Even if you do need to cut the hose, the brake set I bought around February had extra barbs in it.

Check out the installation manual for brake set you are buying, it will describe the process.

No, it's a different product called "WETNFIX". I've used them in a similar situation after buying them on sale out of curiosity and they've worked fine. In the described scenario I'd probably use a couple of them, as it sounds like the hole in the plaster is big.

If that doesn't work or you really want to go belt and braces, what I'd do here is take it all off, clean out the hole with a dry brush and then a wet one to really get rid of the dust. Then fill it up with a very thick mix of a good powdered filler like toupret. Make sure you really overfill it and pack it in. Then let it go off, if it shrinks at all do a second pass.

Then sand, redecorate, and then drill a hole into the lintel deep enough that the full plug you plan to use will sit completely in the lintel. Drill the plaster marginally bigger than the first hole using a non hammer drill. Use a long screw to hammer a plug back and make sure it is in the lintel completely. Then use a long screw to fix.

That should be really solid with no chance of movement or future crumbling.

Yeah it's really good news. I've never owned anything by stages, but more brands making power meter surely has to be a good thing.

With the experience and financial power of giant behind them they should be safe now. I'm no business guru and I don't know why the company failed, but it's encouraging that giant saw enough good in the company to buy it.

I'm pretty sure that Giant bicycles bought Stages fairly recently. With that behind them, personally I wouldn't worry too much about buying a Stages NDS unit.

You definitely want something other than just plasterboard to mount to.

Get a strong magnet into action to see if you can find existing studs behind the plasterboard to mount to. If you can then that's easiest.

If not, you could cut a hole, put some sort of wood behind the plasterboard, fix it in place, and then fix the curtains into the wood you've added. Then patch up your hole.

If you don't want to make and patch holes then yes indeed you could just fix some wood on the outside of the plasterboard using several plasterboard fixings. Then fix curtains into the wood.

I wouldn't have thought the wood would even need to be particularly beefy. If you were building this from scratch today, you'd probably just put OSB behind the plasterboard.

Oh wow. There is some really lovely and really niche stuff listed on their website. What a place!

Iso Grifo, it says it on the back.

Kidding, I spotted one in Monaco years back and only remember because I had to look it up then. Pretty rare, I think. I wouldn't have thought there are many in the UK. Was it just parked up in London? I definitely wouldn't leave it in the rain if it was mine!

I watched the Amazon Maitlis documentary and wouldn't really recommend it if you know what happened in the interview.

There was a small bit of interesting detail from Maitlis about the run up to the interview.

The rest of the interesting detail is what happens within the royal family. However you then realise that no one from the royal family was involved and so clearly all of that is the made up bits that have caused them to have a huge disclaimer about being dramatised at the beginning.

Absolutely brilliant!

We have one we picked up from the Aldi middle aisle a few years ago for £30 as I recall. Strongly recommended. It works well, and is really good for sticking in your suitcase when travelling with stuff you would otherwise iron.

It is clearly not the same thing as a full iron on something like a formal shirt. You won't get sharp creases, but you will get wrinkles out. I'm sure you already knew that, but wanted to make sure I set expectations.

Genuine question, I promise, but why is she expected to meet world leaders and attend state banquets?

That all seems really old school to me. Might she not be happier just doing her own thing in the clothes she already owned rather than being forced to go along to events because of her job?

I fairly regularly have work events and business travel that I'm expected to do. My wife is invited to relatively few of these things. If she was invited and felt she really wanted to buy new clothes for the event, she'd buy something out of our own money. I'd never even think about asking to expense that, which feels to me like the equivalent.

I accept that it's quite different because I'm clearly not PM or in any way important. My point is why should his wife have all these obligations placed on her? I think that's where we should be pushing as a root cause, rather than worrying about what she should wear and who should pay.

This reply wins at forum.

Amex really are the best for rewards. Next best credit card at the moment is the Amazon Barclaycard one if you do a decent bit of shopping at Amazon. Otherwise it's the Santander edge credit card.

If you're open to a debit card, the Chase one is really good for rewards. Nearly as good as an Amex. Otherwise I have a Santander Edge current account and get some okay rewards on that. 3 quid a month account fee but you earn 1% back for all spending on groceries, household bills, and travel costs.

Honestly I think it's down to personal preference. I use 2 monitors that are the exact same, but 1 landscape, and 1 portrait. I have tried bottom alignment, top alignment, and center alignment, and I marginally prefer center. I think I'd be fine with any of them if I had to, though.

Best practice, of course is to make sure that your main screen is centred at eye level so you're not straining your neck needing to look up or down for long times.

Yes, but then you've got the cost of installation that's gonna take a huge time to pay if the running cost is just similar to gas.

I'd posted a HeatGeek quote I recently got in the heat pump thread. It was 20k once the grant is taken off, and would save me an approximate 8 quid a month. The main reason for this is it being an old house with solid brick walls, being relatively large, and some of the existing pipework being microbore.

In situations like this, heat pumps still don't make sense IMO. In a newer place with cavity walls and insulation, absolutely it'll make sense.

I am with Hugo on this. Rotating child seat makes it sooo much easier to get them in and out, no matter the age. Also definitely helps with the strain of lifting them in for me.

Yeah, and this is why I always do my own servicing within reason. Too many experiences over the years of being unhappy afterwards at how much I've ended up paying for things.

Another pet peeve of mine on invoice like that is how they charge the labour. There should be an hourly rate and then they charge you for how many hours were taken. Instead on your invoice there's 75 quid for the oil service, and 113 quid for the other bits. I always hate getting an invoice like that.

Are they genuinely good in the winter? I've only recently bought a set for summer wheel duties. On the occasion that I've gone over some water on the road during climbs, I've then got a load of wheelspin. This has happened probably 5 times now. This has made me worry about their wet weather grip.

By contrast my wheels with Continental 4 seasons tyres is always so sure footed. Last week I pulled onto a mossy stone pavement, came to a stop, and almost fell right over as it was so slippy. Those tyres have really impressed me with their grip.

Apology needed. My memory was defective on this. I've checked with her and you and @MTB-Idle are right, the proceeds are not ringfenced as I incorrectly said.

What I was confusing this with is that in 2012 they made a commitment to replace all homes sold via right to buy 1:1. In theory great, but she says in reality there are 2 problems. 1. They didn't meet the commitment, and 2. It isn't a like for like replacement. As such, you could replace a 5 bed house with a studio flat and you've adhered to the rules.

I'll wind my neck back in on right to buy. In theory good, but I'll agree that in practice it is deeply flawed.

My wife works in housing in the civil service. Apparently there are plenty of bedrooms for the population (e.g. old people still living in the family home and not downsized, or relatively wealthy people with more bedrooms than they strictly need), so there's a train of thought on adding incentives to encourage downsizing.

However, according to her there is still a big shortage in housing, both private and state owned.

According to her, right to buy is counter intuitively a good policy. First it helps break the cycle of poverty within a family who now have an asset. Second, it relieved the local authority of a usually ageing property needing a decent amount of maintenance. The money the local authority gains from the sale is then ringfenced and can only be used to build new social housing.

I think supply and demand is only part of the problem. Again, I'm not the expert myself, but many experts feel like successive governments have followed economic policies that jack up house prices in order to gain popularity. However, for anyone other than an investor or someone downsizing or moving to a cheaper location, house prices growth isn't actually a good thing. If you sell a 4 bed home in my part of Derbyshire for 500k and want to move to a similar property in a similar location, you still need 500k. It doesn't matter what you bought it for and how long ago.

Finally, movement of people is emotionally difficult for many. I have moved away from where I grew up because it's unaffordable to own the type of house I would like, I happen to love riding bikes up hills, and I can work remotely. As such the edge of the Peak District makes sense for me. However I see many of my family and friends fairly understandably not wanting to move away from where they grew up, or working in an industry based in a specific geographic location. Rightly or wrongly, these people don't want to move somewhere else, and so you end up with the issues we see in SE England.

So what do we do about the housing crisis then? Or would you argue there isn't one?

London is very different, but in Derbyshire where I now live they really struggle to sell new builds at full price. Most end up sold at 10 - 30% off, and then sold on again 3 years for slightly less than the buyer paid. It seems to take around 5 years for them to come back to the value they were originally marketed for.

Fancy, or cheap but decent?

Honestly you could do worse than staying in the YHA at Castleton. You can get a private room with private bathroom. I believe they also have private glamping pods that depending on the time of year should be nice.

A friend has stayed here and said it was good.

Well quite. I'm no expert on housing, but I believe there are many other ways to convince homebuilders to build in the UK that aren't allowing them to cut safety critical corners. It's a pretty profitable activity in the UK at the minute without needing further incentives, IMO. However, I know homebuilders often buy land and then sit on it for many years to wait for house prices to go up. You could ban that practice, or simply fine them for buying land and not completing the first homes within a period of time.

It seems to have been the David Cameron era war on red tape and regulations that was a big part of the problem. New cladding and insulation products were coming onto the market that were cheaper and simpler to install, but had potential fire risks. As such we needed regulation to address that potential risk. However, in order to add 1 piece of regulation they would have had to find 2 other pieces of regulation to get rid of. As such, they just didn't add regulation for this. Instead they told home builders to use their own judgement to arrive at a system that they thought was safe.

I'm sure David Cameron would say "well it was obvious to anyone with a brain that this rule of mine shouldn't include safety critical regulation like fire safety in buildings". However, according to testimony from multiple people in the housing department of the civil service, Eric Pickles was an absolute stickler for abiding by this rule.

Umm what? If your business is building homes and you decide to build multiple developments, you should have a system that insulates you from the risk you have knowingly taken on by making the decision to build multiple at the same time?

This makes no sense to me. If you don't want the risk of building multiple developments you can just build them 1 by 1.

This system just feels designed to encourage risk taking behaviours.