Year: 2015

Hey, Rug Doctor, give us the magic words!

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A photo of the Rug Doctor machine

On Wednesday, we will finally give back the keys to the flat that we’ve rented for the past four-and-a-half years. As with most tenancy agreements, we’re required to give the flat back in a clean, tidy state, and so we spent most of Saturday cleaning.

Whilst we had vacuumed the carpets… occasionally in that time, at no point had they been properly cleaned since we moved in. So, we hired a carpet cleaning machine.

Hiring a Rug Doctor

Our local Tesco allows you to rent Rug Doctor machines: £23 for 24 hours, or £29 for 48 hours. You have to book in advance, although the night before is fine, and you can do it online or by phone. The rental charge is paid upfront, and in return for your fee you get an email with a code and locker number at the location selected.

When you go to pick up the machine, you find the Rug Doctor display, open the locker with the code given, and collect the machine, a handheld tool for stairs and corners, and an instruction book. You also need to buy the detergent at this point which you pay for at the checkouts; it’s £10 for a bottle that does 1-2 rooms, £15 for a bottle that does 3-4 rooms, and a larger £20 bottle.

Using the Rug Doctor

The Rug Doctor - before and after

The Rug Doctor machine is quite heavy and bulky, and although it’s quite easier to move on flat surfaces, good luck getting it up stairs. However, it does the job well – you can see the difference in the photo (the light-coloured bits have been treated). It works by spraying the detergent, mixed with water, on the carpet and then brushing it. It also incorporates a vacuum to suck up the dirt. You end up with a tank full of dirty water to flush away.

It’s quite quick – you can probably do most rooms in about 20 minutes, although we found that our carpets needed two treatments as they were particularly mucky. And you will need a lot of warm water – the Rug Doctor machine requires regular top-ups and we probably went through at least 20 litres of water.

Because we had the machine for 24 hours, we also had time yesterday to clean some of the carpets in the new house. These were cleaned in the summer by the previous owner before we moved in, but they’ve ended up mucky thanks to all of the disruptive renovation work we’ve had done since. Although the carpets have been vacuumed several times, I was surprised just how much muck came out after just a few months. As an asthmatic, I’m supposed to minimise my exposure to dust and yet there was still plenty in the carpets that our vacuum cleaner couldn’t remove.

Being able to get the machine from a local supermarket was really helpful, as supermarkets tend to be open long hours and at weekends. Our local hire centre, for example, is only open until 5pm (no good for us as we’re not home by then) and is shut at weekends, so we’d have to rent their machines for longer. Although we rented ours from Tesco, it looks like they’re available at some Asda supermarkets as well.

I was impressed by the Rug Doctor – it was quick, and the results were great. Hopefully the landlord will agree when we give the keys back this week.

For those who don’t get the reference in this blog post’s title, have a YouTube video.

A weekend in London

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A photo of the Union Flag flying in front of Tower Bridge in London

This weekend, Christine and I went to London to visit friends, and tick off a few places off our London to-do list. It’s quite a long list, as there’s lots to do in London and we only get to visit once or twice a year. Indeed, this was my first visit since February last year, although Christine managed a brief overnight trip last month for work.

I took quite a few photos, but as my computer at home is still boxed up (and likely to be until the weekend at the earliest) I’m only uploading a select few at this stage, and editing them using Aviary, the photo editor built-in to Flickr. It’s not as good as the tools I have on my Mac, but it’ll do for now. I will be posting about the things that we did over the next week or so.

It will probably be the last major trip we do this year. Christine is now entering her last trimester of pregnancy and so she is becoming less mobile as time goes on. Whilst she managed okay in London, I don’t think she will be able to do many big days out in future, so this was something of a ‘last hurrah’ for us before the baby is due early next year.

All in all, we had a good weekend, and it was nice to see our friends again.

Recycling

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Metal sheep

Now that we live in a house, rather than a block of flats, Christine and I are back to regular collections of waste in recycling. In the flats, we had access to a bin store where we could dump rubbish at any time, and this was collected by the council at regular intervals. For a time, we also had recycling bins for glass, paper, metals and plastics, although these were removed. Sadly our fellow residents were not so good at sorting their waste and our local council took the bins away due to contamination with non-recyclables. In the meantime I had to take our recyclables to our local supermarket to dispose of.

For waste from our house, our local council collects our wheelie bin every two weeks. Historically all councils have collected waste weekly but many have switched to fortnightly collections – a controversial stance that central government were opposed to. However, we still have a weekly recycling collection; in other words, one week only recyclable will be collected, and the next week all waste will be collected.

This suits us quite well, as a lot of our waste can be recycled. We’ve got into the habit of separating our waste before we dispose of it and so it only takes a few minutes each week to put these into the relevant bags or boxes and put them out for collection. As well as metals, paper, glass and plastic bottles, our council will collect food waste and textiles each week.

Separating food waste from regular waste, to me, is really important. Food waste can usually be composted, and it’s the main cause of bad smells and flies in regular waste, so it’s good that this can be collected weekly. We get a small caddy for the kitchen, and then a larger box to put out to collect, along with a series of green biodegradable bags.

Whilst we’re just a household of two people, for now at least, because we can recycle most of our waste, we manage not to fill our wheelie bin, even after two weeks. And, as an extra incentive, our local council offers entries to a monthly prize draw to those who put out their recycling every week, via a sticker with a QR code on our recycling box.

Recycling and sustainability are key at my workplace as well and we’re actively encouraged to recycle as much as possible, rather than simply chucking things in the bin. To this end, all offices have recycling bins within easy reach; you just have to think for an extra moment about which bin is appropriate for any given item.

It’s with this in mind that I read this piece on recycling in the New York Times. It makes some interesting points, but is very much focussed on the situation in the US, and not here in the UK. The US is a much bigger nation with more landmass available for landfill sites, and no tax on landfill. Here in the UK, we’re a significantly smaller island with a much higher population density, and more opposition to landfill sites which are more likely to be in someone’s back yard. Consequently, we have landfill tax to make recycling more attractive and cost-effective than simply dumping waste in big holes in the ground.

I’m happy to do my bit to reduce our household’s waste and footprint, and I’m pleased that my local council gives me this opportunity.

Mac-less

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On Sunday last week, I packed my Mac up ready to move to our new house. 10 days on and it’s still packed up.

The main reason is that my computer desk will be in the dining room and we haven’t painted all of the walls in there yet. I’d rather not unpack my computer until the painting is done so that I don’t damage it, but it’s going to be a week or two before we’re at that stage. So, in the meantime, my computer stays in its box.

What surprised me is how well I’ve been able to manage without it. Normally my Mac is on all the time, and although I put it to sleep when I’m out, I usually use it every day before and after work. But I’ve been mostly coping fine with my iPad and iPhone instead.

95% of what I do on my Mac, I can do on my iOS devices. The main things I use a computer for are social media, reading feeds and articles, email, a bit of photo editing and playing World of Warcraft. Most of these things can be done on my iPad or iPhone as easily as they can on my computer.

Obviously I haven’t been able to play World of Warcraft in that time, and I’ve had to put off editing photos for now. Writing blog posts is possible on my iPad but it’s not as easy as on a proper computer. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how replaceable my Mac has ended up being.

We also haven’t unpacked the TV for similar reasons. Watching Saturday’s episode of Doctor Who on my iPad wasn’t as great as it would’ve been on a proper TV, but it was acceptable.

Eventually we’ll have all of the painting done and we can go back to having a TV and desktop computer and be a normal household again, and I’m looking forward to it. But it’s not been nearly as disruptive as I’d expected it to be.

Fitbit Charge review

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A photo of a Fitbit Charge. It's on my wrist and shows the time as 19:16

I’ve bought myself a fitness tracker – a Fitbit Charge (sponsored link).

My primary reason for buying one was that I needed a new watch strap for my basic Skagen watch. Instead of buying a strap I decided to just get a new watch, as the Fitbit wasn’t much more expensive at the time and it can function as a watch, amongst other things.

There are lots of fitness trackers out there but I went with a Fitbit for a couple of reasons:

  1. Price – I was able to get one for a good price on Amazon at the time
  2. Recommendation – my manager at work has a Fitbit Charge (having previously owned a Fitbit Flex) and she recommended it to me
  3. Third-party integration – Fitbit integrates with Runkeeper, which I use for tracking exercises and walks, and with IFTTT
  4. User reviews – the Amazon reviews of the Fitbit Charge tended to be better then other trackers such as the Jawbone Up or Misfit ranges

I’ve had the Fitbit for 10 days now, which happened to include the time period when we were moving house, and so I clocked up a lot of steps and stair climbs initially. It’s set for five basic daily targets: 10,000 steps, 8.05 kilometres distance walked (that’s five miles in old money), 2,937 calories burned, 30 minutes of activity and 10 floors climbed. I upped the floor climbs to 20 as I was often hitting 10 floors before lunchtime, but I’ve kept the rest at the defaults.

I’ve exceeded 10,000 steps on some days (and 15,000 on a couple) but on other days I’ve missed the target by some way. This is despite my normal daily commute consisting of around 45 minutes of walking, split into four blocks. I was surprised at this, but it’s useful to know that I need to get more exercise during the day. I managed over 80 floors climbed one day as well, although this seems to be because the Fitbit Charge is interpreting some of the steep hill climbs in our area as stairs. Something to bear in mind if you live in a steep-sided valley like I do.

Fitbit app

You can track your progress using the Fitbit mobile phone app, which synchronises with your device via Bluetooth. By default it does this regularly throughout the day but you can turn this down if needed. The all-day sync mode does have an effect on your phone’s battery life, but it’s not too significant, in my experience.

If you have friends with Fitbit devices, then you can also view their progress. The ‘Friends’ view in the app shows the total number of steps taken over 7 days. At the moment, I’m on 54,374 – this is less than the 70,000 that I’m aiming for but puts me fourth out of seven, and only two of my friends have hit this target. You can also take part in challenges – most steps in a day, week or weekend, and also specific goals like stairs climbed. It’s a good motivational tool, although it does result in the app sending notifications when you’re close to overtaking someone, or vice versa, which gets annoying after a while. Thankfully, these can be turned off.

My main reason for purchasing the Fitbit Charge was that it also tells the time. The time doesn’t show on the screen all of the time, but can be illuminated by double-tapping the screen, pressing the button on the side of the screen, or lifting your wrist towards you. It’ll also show your key targets – steps taken, stairs climbed, calories burnt and distance walked, which you can scroll through by pressing the button.

The Fitbit’s battery life is reasonably good – a full charge should last between 7 and 10 days, depending on usage. It charges via a USB cable, but with a custom port on the back of the device. You can’t wear the device whilst it’s charging.

The Fitbit Charge comes in four colours and two sizes. I accidentally bought the small one, which is a bit too small for me but alleviated by an additional strap that I bought separately. Some of the Amazon reviewers had found that their Fitbits fell off easily and so I had bought an extra strap anyway. If you have medium-sized arms, I would recommend the large size though.

Overall, I’m impressed with the Fitbit. It seems to count steps quite accurately, despite being worn on the wrist, and performs well. It’s also good at motivating me to take the stairs rather than lifts, and to get out and walk more to maintain my targets.

Making a house a home (part VI)

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A photo of our dining room

Well, we did it – we’ve finally moved into our new home, at long last. About 99.5% of our possessions are here with us too, with just a handful of things still in our flat. We moved the bulky items last Sunday and so we have been living in the house for the past week.

We also now have a laminate floor in the kitchen, dining room, hallway and living room, which was fitted on Monday. It looks great, and is a huge improvement over the old carpet that was down when we moved in.

We’re now at the stage where we can finally get coloured paint on the walls. So far, just the one wall in the dining room has been painted, and we’ll be doing the same with the living room. These are the walls where the radiators will go, and as it’s now October and beginning to get cold, we’d like to get the radiators back on the walls as soon as we can.

Finally, we’ve given notice to end our tenancy agreement on the flat, so we’ve been focussing on getting that clean. The contract expires in a couple of weeks. It’ll be nice to only have to pay bills for one house.

Making a house a home (part V)

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A photo of a hole in the floor that has been filled with mortar. It's in a corner surrounded by skirting boards

We’re making some more progress with the house (here’s the previous update). The big news is that we will, finally, be moving in next weekend.

This is partly because all of the main jobs are done, but also because we’re basically broke. Trying to run two houses for four months has been very expensive, and the longer we stay in the rented flat, the more money we’re throwing away. In hindsight, the £2000 or so that we’ve spent on rent in that time could have been better spent on getting professionals in to move things on a bit quicker, but never mind.

The main bit of work that I have done is filling in holes in the dining room floor. Unlike other rooms in the house, the dining room has a solid floor, but there was a channel along the back wall which originally housed a gas pipe. That’s been removed, as after we took out two of the gas fires it became redundant, but it left a long gap between the floor and the skirting board, and quite a deep hole in one corner. I’ve filled it all in with mortar; this was the first time I’ve ever done such a job and actually I’m quite impressed with the result. The photo was taken just after I had put it down, but now that it’s dried and I’ve sanded down the rough edges, it looks just like the rest of the floor.

However, it won’t be there for much long as we are having laminate floor laid over the top next week. This will be after we’ve moved in so we’ll have to limit how much stuff we have downstairs.

Having a car has meant we’ve been able to take more of our belongings over and we’ve probably moved at least a third of the contents of our flat now. The big stuff remains, until the weekend when we’ll (hopefully) have some help shifting things.

It’ll good to finally be able to live in the house after all this time.

George Egg – Anarchist Cook

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Photos of the recipe cards from George Egg's Anarchist Cook show.

Last week, as part of the British Science Festival, we went to see George Egg perform his show ‘Anarchist Cook’ at The Studio theatre in Bradford. George Egg is a touring stand-up comedian who consequently spends a lot of time in budget hotels. As he finishes his comedy gigs in the late evenings, it’s often difficult to find any decent food available (apart from pizza and kebab shops).

So, the show is based on the premise of: what can you cook in an average hotel room, using only the equipment that’s there?

This is, of course, bearing in mind that you don’t usually get a cooker, oven or any cooking utensils in an average hotel room. Instead, George Egg cooks a three course meal in just over an hour, using an iron, a kettle, a pillow case, some of the complementary salt and pepper sachets, some foraged plants from hotel reception, and a Gideon Bible.

The starter includes crostini toasted on the iron, ricotta that had been strained through a pillow case using UHT milk sachets (209 sachets to be exact), and a salad with leaves from a spider plant (which until now I didn’t know was edible). For the main course, he steamed sea bass in the travel kettle, and desert was pancakes, again cooked on the iron.

These were just three of the recipes that George has come up with, and he mentions others in his show. This includes curing your own salami sausages (requires a hotel room with removal ceiling tiles and being able to request the same room a few weeks later), and making bread using a complimentary wine bottle as a rolling pin and the countertop in the bathroom.

It was a good show, clocking in at around an hour long, and the audience were invited to try the food at the end. Alas, by the time we’d made it out, it had all been eaten – the show was free, funded by the science festival’s sponsors, and so it was a full house. We did, however, buy the recipe cards – although we’ll probably use more conventional cooking utensils to make them.

The Anarchist Cook show has recently run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and George Egg is due to reprise it at a couple of dates in Wales next month. Hopefully he’ll be able to tour it elsewhere soon as it’s a good show to watch – it’s both entertaining, and educational. If not, he also has plenty of stand-up dates coming up as well.

Disclosure: I work for the University of Bradford who were this year’s host of the British Science Festival.

How to: get cheaper car insurance

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Alas, the car I've bought insurance for is not this Rolls Royce

Having bought a car at the weekend, I also needed to arrange car insurance. The law in Britain now requires all cars that are used on public roads to have a valid insurance policy; if you don’t, then you must park the car off-road and submit a SORN. If your car is found on a public road, parked or moving, then you can be fined. So I needed to have a policy in place before I would be able to drive the car away.

Like many things, buying car insurance can be simple and quick, but if you’re prepared to put some effort in, you can bring your premiums down significantly. I can wholeheartedly recommend the advice on MoneySavingExpert.com which gives some tips on how to reduce your premiums by tweaking the information you provide. I would advise you to read the whole article, but here are the things I tried that worked for me.

1. Trying multiple price comparison web sites

It’s hard to avoid the various price comparison web sites that advertise nowadays. Whether it’s the one with the meerkats, talking robots or annoying opera singer, these sites are well-advertised. They work by taking your details, and obtaining quotes from a range of insurers on your behalf, which are then ranked to show you the cheapest. The sites make their money from the referral fees that insurers pay when you take up a policy. Considering how much these sites advertise, they must make a lot of money from these referral fees.

It’s worth trying multiple sites, as different sites work with different insurers. I got different results from each. You can also usually get cashback if you click through to a price comparison web site from a cashback site like Quidco (referral link) or Topcashback (referral link). I got about £2 from them, just for getting a quote.

2. Go direct to insurance companies

Once I’d found the cheapest insurer – and the three comparison sites I tried all gave the same company – I also tried to get a cheaper quote by visiting their site directly. Again, going via a cashback site may net you cashback as well. Remember those referral fees? Cashback sites pay those to you.

It’s also worth checking Aviva and Direct Line, who do not advertise their policies on price comparison web sites. As it happens, both gave me unaffordable quotes that were nearly double the cheapest that I could find, but, worth a try.

3. Tweak your job description

I have a rather unique job title of ‘Student Recruitment and Data Officer’, which isn’t on the selection lists that insurers ask for. Originally I put it through as ‘Recruitment Consultant’ working in state education, but I found changing it to ‘Administrative Officer’ in the university sector lowered my premiums significantly (by about 20% in my case). As long as the title still accurately reflects your job role, you should be fine.

4. Add another driver

As Christine hasn’t passed her test yet, it was going to just be me on the car’s insurance policy. However, we found that adding another family member to the policy, as a secondary driver, reduced my quote by another 10%. To be effective, this must be someone that would realistically be likely to drive the car, and who has a good driving record with no penalty points or recent insurance claims. Adding an irresponsible or inexperienced second driver may increase premiums, but it’s worth trying.

5. Include some business use

If you think adding another driver is a bizarre way to reduce your premiums, here’s one that seemed even weirder. I will need to drive for work from time to time (I reckoned no more than 1000 miles per year) and so I included this in the policy. This means that I won’t need to arrange a hire car, so my employer also saves money too. After getting quotes with this included, I tried taking it out and stating that the car would only be for ‘leisure’ use (no commuting and no work-related activities). That actually pushed the premiums up by about 10%, so I put it back in.

Plus the things that I didn’t try

I didn’t try everything. I could have got an even cheaper policy if I had opted in to a ‘black box’ insurance policy. This involves the fitting of a recording device to your car that monitors your location and how you drive – and if you drive safely, you’ll save money. InsureTheBox is one of the better known firms that offers this (a friend works for them), but it’s available from a variety of insurers.

Sometimes, opting for third-party insurance can be cheaper, but it covers less than fully comprehensive insurance which could leave you out of pocket in the event of an accident. And, again bizarrely, sometimes comprehensive cover is cheaper than third-party because of risk factors.

And if you have another type of policy with an insurance firm (say home or travel insurance), some insurers may give you a discount if you take out more than one policy from the same firm. Our home insurance was arranged via a broker when we got our mortgage so I wasn’t able to approach them for a car insurance quote on this occasion.

In the end

As it happened, the cheapest quote I got was via Confused.com, for Diamond insurance – a company that historically only covered female drivers. Both are owned by Admiral Group, incidentally. Overall, the policy ended up being about £200/year cheaper than when I started, which isn’t bad for a couple of hours spent entering information into various web sites. Insurance for new drivers is always expensive and I’m hoping that, should I continue to drive like Captain Slow, my premiums should come down in future years.

A car. An actual car.

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A photo of my Nissan Note

Well, I now own a car. After having passed my driving test last month, and with an imminent house move and a little one on the way, we decided that we really needed to get a car sooner rather than later.

Fortunately my parents kindly gifted us most of the money that we needed, so we were able to buy a decent-sized second hand car. After trawling the listings for local dealerships on Auto Trader, we found a local dealership with a good range of cars within our budget. We then narrowed this down to two cars, at the same price, which we took on test drives.

The first was a Hyundai i30, which was good car, and slightly newer with better equipment, but it didn’t drive so well and didn’t have as much internal space. So, we went for a 2008 Nissan Note.

It’s got a 1.4 litre petrol engine (which is fine for us) and a manual gearbox – I’m indifferent when it comes to manual or automatic but both Christine and I are/were learning in a manual car. The boot is big and there’s also plenty of legroom in the back, plus there are Isofix fixings for a child seat. It’s very much a family car, and whilst it may not be very cool or trendy, it should be very practical for us.

I’ve had a bit of time to drive it but the big test will be in a few weeks when we drive down to Staffordshire for a family wedding. I say ‘we’ – it’ll be me driving there and back as Christine still hasn’t sat her theory test yet, never mind her practical test. I may try to arrange a motorway driving lesson with my instructor before then.

After putting up with not having a car for so many years, it feels very weird to finally own one. We’ve managed to make do with public transport, but I am very much looking forward to not having to pay over the odds for taxi fares, or complicated bus and train journeys that take twice as long as driving would.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about car insurance.