Trev in Cyprus.

[accykeef]

Neoprene pipes have been used with gas for many years - are they just being a bit picky?
You have to act straight away and they can take as long as they like - sounds like typical officialdom.

[trevnhil]

I will not be doing any more work unless they refuse me a Final certificate until I complete these jobs.
But from what I have been told it is now just a matter of time until I receive the final completion certificate.

Trev..

[trevnhil]

It is beginning to noticeably cool down here now. In fact this morning we had our first real rain since last May.

Yesterday when I awoke about 6-30 I could feel the cool air because we still have the patio door open all night, ie 24/7.
So I thought, this would be a good time to test the central heating. To make sure the boiler comes on and that the radiators warm up.
Best to test it before you really need it was my thought.

So I went to the controls in our hallway and pushed the start button. I then went outside to where the boiler is and ........ nothing. No hot exhaust from the chimney, in fact no electronic display on the boiler itself.
I checked that all the electric switches in the control lines were on, and they were. I tried the whole sequence again but with no response.

Then.... I had what I know now to be a brainwave. I turned the thermostat in the hallway up to 30c. Lo and behold the boiler sprung to life. After a few minutes we had hot water in all the towel rails.

The problem was that the inside thermostat was set at the usual 25c and the temperature must have been a little above that hence no life out of the boiler.

It nearly had me beat, I was going to ring the engineer to come out. What a plonker I would have looked

[accykeef]

I had a number of friends years ago who were service engineers, in various fields and they could all tell some amusing tales of customer's stupidity. There were a few occasions when other engineers were just as bad. I went out on quite a few service calls and witnessed some of the silliness myself.

My favourite was going to a Zanussi washing machine. The job was to replace the complicated switch which selects the wash cycles. It had already been previously established that the switch was faulty. We went into the house with the replacement switch and set about dismantling the washer. The large knob on the front was a mystery and no amount of messing would release it. Big Nige, the repair man, had to contact the office to ask about it. We were in luck as one of the senior boffins was in the area and was despatched to us. This miserable old git turned up, tutting at the lack of nouse these young engineers had. He mumbled something about the easiest way was to break it off and without delay, smashed it with a hammer. As the boffin was gloating and looking pleased with himself, big Nige was packing up his tools.
When boffin asked Nige where he was going, he pointed out that the new switch was not supplied with a replacement knob and that boffin would have to explain to the unhappy customer why she would be without a washer for another week.

[trevnhil]

Ha ha, that was amusing. its amazing that the guy never checked about the knob BEFORE he smashed it off.

I had to call an appliance engineer out yesterday. Dad has a free standing electric oven with a gas hob. There was a slight smell of gas in his Kitchen. I checked all the joints on the recently made connections to the back of the cooker and all seemed fine to me. However there was still a slight smell of gas.
The engineer came, a journey of 20 mins and took to hob to bits and dismantled all the control knob mechanisms.
He said there were 'dry' thread joins caused over time. He reassembled them using a jointing compound and all is OK now.

One more worry less, but I still have a shelf full.

Trev..

[trevnhil]

Well it never rains but it pours, seems to be a true saying.

Our little car had become a 'non stater' in a morning, so I took it too our local garage to be fixed.
I had a phone call to say it was ready, so I went to collect it and pay the man.
No problem, all went smoothly until the following day when it would not start again. I took it back to the Garage on Monday but yesterday (Tuesday) was a Bank Holiday and it may be today or tomorrow before it is ready again.

Another job that has been lingering on the sidelines, is to paint our long (20+mts) length of railings. They were new less than 2 years ago but are already showing signs of rust. So, I bought some paint called Rustoleum which is supposed to stop rust spreading / showing

The first and main bit to paint was the half round handrail on the top. I sanded it and cleaned it ready for the paint. I could not start painting until late in the afternoon, because of the sunshine heating the metal up.
But at about four in the afternoon I set to and painted the top rail. It took about an hour and half but it looked good.

Unfortunately during the evening fog and condensation arrived. However I thought nothing about it until the following morning. It just looked as thought it had been painted with Matt Paint..... The moisture had certainly spoilt it.
However yesterday I rubbed it all down and repainted it earlier in the afternoon. It is early morning as I type this, but i have been out to see if it is OK..... It has a film of condensation on but it seems like it dried before that happened.
I just have all the thin uprights and the bottom rail to do now..... it will be like the Forth Road Bridge.

Cheers. Trev..
116

[accykeef]

Sounds like you are having all the fun!
You didn't say what was wrong with the car - battery or had the jiggle pin dropped out of the doofer flange?
I suppose the wide range of temperature is a big problem when it comes to painting because of the condensation falling on hot surfaces. I don't suppose covering the railings is an option really as they stretch right round the estate.

Have you tried using paint pads rather than a brush? - of course you have!

That Forth road bridge idea strikes a chord with me today too. I am creating a database on a remote server of all the UK postcodes (all 2,522,277 of them). They are to be loaded into a database from an uploaded text file, the file is 173Mb and that is on the server. The problem is, it takes 4 minutes to create 10,000 records, so that is 40 minutes to create 100,000 records so the job will take 17 hours to complete - I wish I was painting outside, well not here because it is raining but you get my drift.

[trevnhil]

If there is an end to my Wit. then that is where I am..... At my wits end. My problem,,,, computers.

Here we rely on a computer for watching TV so it is certainly well used each day. over recent month the signal would drop and the TV would Freeze. We complained and had various excuses put to us. Two weeks ago it was happening on one programme every minute. Our supplier's tech guy said they had not had complains from anyone else in the area.
That's when I politely told him that this to me meant the problem was with the equipment in our house.
Eight days ago the owner of the company came and and put a new router in. It took him a little while as he had to 'set it up' ? We were also raised from 6 Mbps to up to 12 Mbps. All worked very well with no breaks in transmission of the various TV signals over the Internet.

BUT..... The wi fi range of the small new 'Alpha' router was rubbish. So I went to the computer shop and got a bigger better TP Link router. They programmed it to the old one and said all I needed to do was go home and plug it in.
Wrong!!! it didn't work.
So I got the computer people to send someone out who came last Friday afternoon. It took him well over an hour to sort it out, and even now it is just Piggy backed onto the smaller router.

The results.... We have a wonderful Wi Fi range of about 100mts. BUT we cannot keep the connection to the UK iplayers via our VPN

I don't knpw if it should be Piggy backed to the small one. I don;t know if the Router is faulty. I don;t now if there is a compatibility problem with the VPN and the iplayers or the router.

I feel a visit to the computer shop is needed early tomorrow..... Grrrrr.

Trev, with no hair.

[accykeef]

Piggy backing routers is not a good idea as the signal has to pass through both. Does it show a low signal level or are you losing the internet connection?

We had a similar problem, over at The Reluctant Hiker's house. They had one of those BT Crap Hub things and the signal was - well, rubbish. I tested it and the range was about 20ft but if it want through a wall, it was down to less than 10ft. Answer was to kick BT into touch and get broadband from Talktalk, their router gave excellent range - problem, sorted.
Here at Keefy towers, we have a Belkin Router and it is excellent although the wifi is only used when the young'uns are here with their iPhones as all the computers in the house are hard wired with network cables, best option if you want reliability.

[trevnhil]

Like I said in my opening in the last post. I am at my wits end.

I will be at the computer shop in the morning, but although they do home visits they are not keen on doing them.

It took the Gut over n hour to set up the new PTLink router and I wondered if there is a conflict somewhere.

The signal is strong from the router.... reading 'excellent' on the grading.
the speed varies depending on how many TV's etc are being run at one time. Usually only two.
It is the drop out when we need to use a VPN for iPlayers that is the problem.

I will report back probably tomorrow.

[accykeef]

Are you using a full blown VPN or is it a home network?
What OS are you using?
For testing - I would hard wire one of the computers to cut out problems with the WiFi.
I hate fixing computer problems, if the things were properly designed, they would just work or get replaced with a new one, just like you do with a vacuum cleaner.

"It took the Gut over n hour to set up the new PTLink router and I wondered if there is a conflict somewhere"
I had a mate who was top notch when it came to fixing stuff, computer related. I used to ring him and he would say, "Easy Job", he would then come round and spend all day doing the easy job.

In my experience, the world of computer hardware is shrouded in mystery and held together with bu11shit!

[trevnhil]

I am using a paid for VPN (top rated) called Private Internet Access. It has been fine until recently and it may not be a problem with them.

We tried Hard wired from the Router to the laptop running the TV programmes and onto the TV. But last week we could see no difference

We are using Windows 7 Google Chrome .

I don't THINK there should be a problem with the Wireless signal. It is only about 7 mts across the same room. On Friday I used my laptop as a wireless test and I walked over 100 mts down the lane outside before losing the TV signal.

I will post what is said or decided tomorrow.

Thanks Trev..

[mpprh]

Might be worth playing with this

brittv.co.uk/

Seems quite good here

[trevnhil]

Hi Peter. thanks for the link. Yes we are using that in place of the iPlayers at the moment. In fact we have have been using it on and off for a few months now.
A couple of disadvantages with them is that they only go back one week.
The other is that you can't play live TV through them unless you sign up for a subscription.
The BBC and ITV iPlayers stream live TV.

I have booked a computer man to call at the end of the week.

Regards. Trev..

[mpprh]

We can get live TV with these www.filmon.com

I can watch BBC1 on my phone ...