Month: January 2025

Could our house go off-grid?

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We’ve had our solar panels for a couple of years now, and, as a thought experiment, I’ve wondered if it would be possible to go ‘off grid‘. This would mean having no connection to the electricity and gas networks, and potentially the water network too.

Now, I’m very much aware that this is a classic example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, and indeed, the short version of this is pretty much, ‘no’ when it comes to electricity and water. Especially if the person reading this is my wife, Christine (love you sweetheart). It is intended to be a thought experiment after all.

Getting off the gas grid

We’ll start with the easiest one – getting off the gas grid. This is actually a long-term of ours, and many homes are now getting disconnected from the gas grid.

When we bought our house, which will have been 10 years ago this summer, it was a very gas-reliant house. There were three gas fires, a gas central heating boiler and water tank, and a gas cooker. We got two of the gas fires out before we’d even moved in, and the remaining one followed when we had the very old gas boiler replaced with a more energy efficient condensing boiler in 2016. Next to go was the gas cooker, when we had the kitchen renovated in 2022, so now we only need gas for heating and hot water.

Now our boiler isn’t quite nine years old, but it’s likely to have a few years left in at least. When it’s due for replacement, our plan is to switch to an air source heat pump, which will be electrically powered. That will mean there’s no need for a gas connection to our home, and we can have it completely removed. As well as meaning that we don’t need to pay the daily gas standing charge, we’ll no longer have pipes carrying an invisible and highly flammable gas running into our home. And it’ll reduce our carbon footprint too.

Off-grid electricity

So that’s the easy one out of the way. Going off grid for electricity, however, is likely to be much harder.

We’ve made a start, at least, with our solar panels. In the summer months, with longer days and more sunlight, we generally generate enough to be self-sufficient. We also have a battery attached to the system, so the solar panels can charge the battery during the day, and then the house can run off the battery overnight.

However, at this time of year, we are very much not self-sufficient. This is especially true as I write this on a very dull Sunday afternoon, where our solar panels are contributing a mere 7 watts of power. That’s about enough to run a couple of LED light bulbs, but certainly not enough for our freezer, for example. We would therefore need other ways of generating electricity on dull days, or at night.

Turbine or not turbine

I’m old enough to remember when Britain was reliant on burning coal for electricity, but last year we shut down our last remaining coal-fired power station. Nowadays, wind power is the most dominant source of energy (you can see a live dashboard here). So, we could consider adding a wind turbine, giving us a second source of energy at home.

Ovo Energy have a useful guide here. Generally speaking, a roof-mounted turbine would be capable of generating 1-2 kW of electricity, which is less than half the peak capacity of our solar system. And that’s based on a lot of assumptions about wind speed that may or may not apply to your property.

As well as the installation cost, we would probably also need planning permission, as our house isn’t detached. We’re therefore looking at around £2000-3000, and it would probably take quite some time to recoup that investment.

Dull days with no wind

So, a solar system backed up with a wind turbine might cover our electricity needs. Unless it’s a dull day and there’s no wind.

I’m in a few Facebook groups for people who use Home Assistant and who have solar and battery systems, and quite a few other members have the Agile Octopus tariff. On this tariff, electricity prices change by the half hour, based on wholesale prices. If it’s forecast to be a particularly sunny and windy day, electricity prices can be very low. Indeed, they occasionally go negative – in other words, Octopus will actually pay you to take electricity out of the grid, rather than the other way round. It’s great for people who have battery systems that can charge from the grid, or who can plan their days to use more electricity at the times when it’s cheap.

Though we are Octopus Energy customers, we’re not on Agile Octopus, because prices can also shoot up on dull days with no wind. Our fixed tariff means we pay 21.10p/kWh, regardless of the weather, but on Agile Octopus, the electricity unit price can go up as high as £1 per kWh. And if you haven’t been able to charge up your home battery by then, it could get very costly.

As an aside, if you’re not already an Octopus Energy customer, here’s my referral link. You get £50 off your bill if you join, and their customer service is better than any other energy company that we’ve been with so far. There’s also an unofficial Home Assistant integration that uses their API.

Therefore, if we were to disconnect from the grid, we would need a third source of electricity. This is where it gets a bit more tricky. The options I have looked up so far include:

  • A wood burning stove, with a thermoelectric generator. However, in my research, I’ve yet to find anywhere in the UK that would sell such a system. And those that I have seen for home use would only be able to generate a few watts – not even enough for our house’s ‘base load’ (fridge, freezer, devices on standby etc). We have a chimney that we could use, but we would also need filters to stop particulate matter getting into the air.
  • Some form of hydro generation using water collected from rainfall on our roof. This would only really work when it rains; although we live in the Pennines where it rains quite a bit, I doubt this would power much more than a couple of light bulbs.
  • Therefore, we would probably have to fall back on a diesel generator, which would be noisy, smelly, and not good for local air quality or the environment.

No Smart Export Guarantee

The other benefit to being on the electricity grid is that you can be paid back for any excess electricity that you export. Even though it’s January, we’ve exported around £1 of electricity this month, and that’s only after our battery has been fully charged. In June last year, we were paid £46 for the electricity we exported, against £36 for the grid energy that we used. So that was a net payment to us that month. Indeed, over the whole of 2024, we were paid £227 for the excess electricity that we exported.

If we’re not on the grid, then we can’t export. So if our battery is full, that electricity is essentially being wasted. Of course, if I was serious about going off-grid, then I would probably invest in another battery to prevent this from happening, but then that’s another expense.

What about water?

Going off the water grid would be the most difficult. Although ironically, we’ve been inadvertently off the water grid four times so far this month, due to supply issues. I have an active complaint with Yorkshire Water about that, but let’s imagine that I want to willingly disconnect from the water grid for a moment.

Clearly, we would need some other way of getting clean water into the house. Rainwater is the most obvious, but we would then need somewhere to store it. In 2023, I read The Climate Change Garden (sponsored link) by Sally Morgan and Kim Stoddart, and the book shows you how you can store water in tanks underneath your garden to cope with water shortages. During the 2022 heatwave, we had a hosepipe ban for several months, and so I’m considering whether to get a water butt to store rain water for use in the garden. You may be eligible for a subsidised water butt from Save Water Save Money – you’ll need to pop in your postcode to see if your water company participates.

But even a butt, or huge tanks under our lawn, are unlikely to be sufficient. We would ideally need to have access to a constant flow of running water, such as a stream. And we would need the means to filter the water so that it’s fit for drinking.

And what about sewage? We don’t have a particularly big garden and so we probably wouldn’t have room for a septic tank, or any other means of storing and/or treating waste.

Gibson Mill at Hardcastle Crags, which is off-grid.

A case study: Gibson Mill

Up above Hebden Bridge is Hardcastle Crags, a National Trust property which is home to Gibson Mill. The Mill is off-grid, because of its remote location – it’s about a mile away from the nearest electricity cables, for example. So, electricity is instead generated on site, using solar panels and a hydro-electric generator. Mills were typically built next to watercourses and Gibson Mill is no exception, being served by Hebden Beck. Whilst this would have driven a waterwheel in years gone by, nowadays it drives a turbine to produce electricity. The solar panels have recently been replaced with newer, more efficient models, and there are huge batteries to store energy.

We last went back in 2023, and despite having more than one way of generating electricity on site, there was still a diesel generator at the back that was needed to top-up the electricity supply. Even then, they were unable to serve hot food in the café as a result of not having sufficient power.

Gibson Mill also has no connection to the sewerage system, so its toilets are composting toilets. Below the toilets are huge vats filled with worms, who digest our waste for us. It’s feasible at this scale because it’s a tourist attraction, and the alternative of laying pipes would be more expensive.

Conclusion – staying mostly on-grid

So, in summary: going totally off-grid would be difficult, although coming off the gas grid is achievable and something that we want to do eventually. We don’t live in a very remote area, and so going off-grid with electricity and/or water wouldn’t really make sense. Even if we could find the means to generate our own electricity, the upfront costs of installing the required equipment would probably outweigh the potential savings.

Playlist of the month: Electro Swing

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A screenshot of my electro swing playlist on Spotify

We’re getting to the end of the January, so it’s time for another playlist of the month. This month I’m focussing on one specific niche genre: electro swing. Imagine swing and jazz music, but overlaid with a modern dance beat. It’s fun music and easy to dance to. Here’s a 10 track sampler playlist – as usual, you can listen along on Spotify.

  • “Inspector Gadget” by Madam Misfit. I had to get a Madam Misfit track in somewhere, as she’s one of my favourite artists. Alas, she’s not at this year’s Sci-Fi Weekender as it clashes with a Steampunk festival in America. This song covers the theme tune to the Inspector Gadget TV series, with additional verses written by Ms Misfit.
  • “Horny” by Pisk. This is a cover of the late 1990s song by Mousse T vs Hot ‘n’ Juicy (“I sent a message through the internet but it rejected).
  • “Still In Love With You” by Electro Velvet. Probably the most commercially successful electro swing song, on account of it being the 2015 UK Eurovision entry. Alas, the rest of Europe weren’t so keen, and it scored 5 points overall and we came 24th out of 27 countries.
  • “Take A Chance” by Odd Chap featuring Sarah Myers. Odd Chap is one of the most well-known artists in the electro swing subculture, and this song features songs by Sarah Myers who is actually Madam Misfit in another guise.
  • “Headless Horseman” by Kid Kasino. Halloween themed songs seem to be a big thing in electro swing, so whilst it may be January and October, it would be remiss for me not to include this.
  • “Black Betty” by Caravan Palace. Yes, it’s an electro swing cover of the Ram Jam classic.
  • “Hit and Run” by The Electric Swing Circus
  • “Dizzy” by Balduin
  • “Midnight” by Swingrowers
  • “Chaos Parade” by Riff Kitchen

Radiator reflectors

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A photo of a radiator in our bathroom, with a radiator reflector next to it.

The recent cold snap, and corresponding increase in our heating bill, has meant that I’ve looked at using radiator reflectors at home. These are panels, made of reflective material, which go behind your radiators and reflect heat back into the room.

Unless you’re lucky enough to have under-floor heating, if you have central heating then your heat will most likely come from radiators hung on your walls. The heat from these radiators literally radiates out in all directions, which means that some of this heat will be going into the walls behind your radiator. Radiator reflectors redirect that heat back into your room, increasing the efficiency of the radiator.

Radiator reflectors are especially useful for radiators on external walls, as otherwise you’re potentially allowing heat to escape outside the home. Our house is around 100 years old, and we’ve been told that we can’t have cavity wall insulation, so heat loss is an issue for us.

Choosing radiator reflectors

The radiator reflectors that I bought are Radi Save from Must Have Ideas. Instead of individual panels, you get one five metre long strip of material, which you then cut down to size. Thankfully, the four radiators that I wanted to add reflectors to added up to 5.1m, so one pack was adequate; if I was to do the whole house, then two would have probably been sufficient. Each five metre pack normally costs £20, but they’re on offer for £15 each at present, plus postage.

The material is easily cut with regular scissors – you just need to measure the radiator’s width, knock maybe an inch off each end, and cut it to size. You also need to measure and cut out holes so that it can slide around the brackets. Then, just drop it in place behind the radiator, assuming your nine-year-old hasn’t filled the back of the radiator with various dropped toys. You can then attach them to the wall with double-sided tape, if you wish; I haven’t yet, as it gives us the option of storing them over summer when the radiators are off.

The market leader seems to be Radflek (sponsored link) – they will sell you panels and a kit to hang them from the radiator brackets. A pack of two panels costs £20, so they’re a little more expensive than Radi Save. However, as you would expect, there are many other radiator reflectors on sale from Amazon, including similar products to Radi Save.

Do they work?

As I write this, I have installed our radiator reflectors on two radiators – one in our bathroom, and the other in our dining room. Our bathroom radiator is small, and behind a door, and this is where we’ve seen the most benefit. The room doesn’t feel as cold as before, and there’s been less of an issue with condensation on the window since I fitted the radiator reflectors.

Also, I believe the previous owners of the house used to have a gas fire in the bathroom, where the radiator is now, however the old flue from the gas fire remains. As such, some of the heat from the radiator was being channelled out of the house through the flue. The radiator reflector seems to be preventing this now, which is great – indeed, the back of the reflector, facing the wall, was almost cold even when the radiator was on.

So yes, it feels like they’re working. I can’t back this up with my own solid data, but most product pages selling radiator reflectors seem to include images taken from thermal imaging cameras to show that they work.

Do they save money?

£15 for four radiators doesn’t seem like much, but it’s still an investment. Whether you will save money by using radiator reflectors will most likely depend on whether you have thermostatic radiator valves (TRV). These are valves on your radiator that open and close in response to how warm your radiator is; once your room is warm enough, the valves will close up and will reduce the flow of hot water into the radiator. As mentioned, radiator reflectors help by increasing the efficiency of the radiator, theoretically meaning that the radiator will warm up faster, and so that the TRV can close up sooner.

We have standard TRVs on our radiators, but it’s possible to get smart TRVs. These can be set to a specific temperature, using an app, and, if they’re from the same brand as your thermostat, can control your boiler or heat pump too. If not, then it’s possible to rig something up with Home Assistant.

If you don’t have TRVs, that doesn’t mean that you won’t save money – certainly, if you add a reflector to the radiator in the room where your thermostat is, you should still save some money. But hopefully you’ll find that your rooms are at least warmer than they were before, without burning more gas.

Can’t I just use kitchen foil?

I’ve long been aware of the suggestion that you just put some kitchen foil behind your radiators, rather than buying dedicated radiator reflectors. According to this web page, kitchen foil may work, but it isn’t likely to be as effective. It’s delicate, so tears easily, and isn’t as insulative as proper radiator reflectors.

Neurodiversity

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Today, I’m writing about neurodiversity, as I’m reasonably confident that all three members of our household, including me, are neurodivergent.

Of the three of us, only our nine-year-old has a formal diagnosis of a neurodiverse condition, and is on the waiting list for assessment for another. But in recent years, it’s become quite clear to me that I probably have ADHD, and Christine is also likely to be neurodiverse too.

The term ‘neurodiversity’ is relatively new, having been coined in my lifetime (1998) and new enough not to be in the spellchecker dictionary that I’m using whilst writing this. Nor is ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘neurodivergence’; indeed ‘neurodivergent’ is the only one that doesn’t have a red wiggly line under it. It’s a broad term that encompasses various developmental conditions including (but not limited to) autism, ADHD and dyslexia. Many neurodivergent people prefer to talk about being ‘neurodivergent’ because it’s not a negative term; ADHD in particular features the words ‘deficit’ and ‘disorder’, whereas many ADHDers just see themselves as different. Someone who doesn’t identify as, or has not been diagnosed as neurodivergent could describe themselves as ‘neurotypical’ – again, it’s a relatively neutral term.

I’m going to respect Christine and our nine-year-old’s privacy by only focussing on my neurodiversity in this blog post.

ADHD

So, I’m reasonably sure that I have ADHD. If you were a reader of this blog over twenty years ago, you would’ve seen that I would post new entries multiple times a day. Now, this was in the age before micro-blogging – i.e. Twitter – was a thing, but clearly, I had lots of things to say and I needed to say them there and then. Most of these blog posts are long gone now, and probably won’t return as I don’t actually think anyone would want to read them now.

But there were also periods were blogging just wasn’t stimulating my reward pathways. If you go through the archives, I’ve tried to ensure that there are blog posts from every month going back to 2009. But there are also big gaps. Obviously the biggest is between 2018 and 2022, when I gave up blogging, but there was also a gap of several months earlier in 2018, and I apparently wrote nothing in November 2017 either.

Over 2024 I mostly managed to keep to my schedule of posting something every other day, but I managed to miss a week in June. I make no secret that I write blog posts in advance, and indeed this was written last Sunday just after the snow post. Partly that’s because I work full-time, and blogging isn’t my job, but also because I tend to write a series of posts in one go when I have my ‘hyperfocus’ periods. And for times when I lack inspiration, I have a fallback list of topics to write about saved in Simplenote. Indeed, this topic has been sat there for many months now, waiting for me to be in the headspace to write about it.

You can also tell when my interest in topics changes. I haven’t written a blog post about Home Assistant in two months. That doesn’t mean I’m not still using it, but it’s not the thing I’m hyper-focussed on right now.

Distraction and task avoidance

It’s probably fair to say I’m easily distracted. I empathise with Dug the talking dog from the Pixar film Up, who is regularly distracted by squirrels. Not least because I too am often distracted by squirrels in our garden at home. But it’s also things like email and chat notifications. I’m often the first one to respond to a message on Teams, for example. Which is good in some ways – I like being helpful – but not great when I need to focus on a task. I got a lot of tasks done on the 3rd January, as many other colleagues were on leave that day and so I had minimal distractions to manage.

Speaking of tasks – another way my ADHD manifests itself is task avoidance. For example, as I write this, I have a receipt for a pre-ordered item sat on my desk from two months ago. It’s there, because the item never arrived, and all I need to do is phone or email the company to follow it up. I have not done this.

And it’s also why I don’t have a formal ADHD diagnosis. Going about getting one means arranging an appointment with your GP to get a referral, and I’ve been meaning to do it for literally a couple of years now. But nope, no appointment, and therefore no further to getting a diagnosis. Which, in itself, could take years – demand for ADHD assessments has rocketed since the pandemic. I believe that part of the reason for this was that pandemic removed a lot of structure from peoples’ lives, but also because ADHD is massively under-diagnosed. There’s a line in one of the books I’ve read recently (I’ll talk about the book in a bit) where someone states that (paraphrasing) ‘ADHD is just used as a way of explaining away disruptive behaviour in middle-class young boys’. There’s a lot wrong with that statement, but indeed, lots of women, and especially people of colour with ADHD are only getting diagnoses in adulthood, because of attitudes like this one. I’d be willing to bet that there are sizeable numbers of people – and again, especially people of colour – in the criminal justice system with undiagnosed ADHD because they haven’t had the necessary support in life.

Other examples of task avoidance? We never managed to arrange an eighth birthday party for our nine-year-old last year. My passport is being renewed within a few weeks of its expiry, and beyond the point where I could travel with it if I had to. And I recently finished and sent out a report for a meeting about 90 seconds before the meeting was due to start.

Remembering and losing things

To date, I’ve only permanently lost one mobile phone, which was back in my first year of university. At the time, I described it as ‘stolen’, which it was, but I suspect I lost it and then someone stole it. I have, however, left a phone behind in a taxi – I had to ring my own phone and then pay the taxi driver to bring it to me. And I occasionally have to use Apple’s Find My device tool to get it to beep loudly if I’ve misplaced it at home.

With regards to my wallet and keys, I’ve managed not to lose these recently but only because I had to force myself into a habit of only leaving them in a particular place. Meanwhile, I’ve decided to give up on ‘true wireless’ headphones that sit in a charging box, because I’ve managed to lose two of the charging boxes. Big chonky over-head Bluetooth headphones are harder to lose.

On more than one occasion, I have caught the wrong train and ended up somewhere I didn’t want to be. The most recent time was only last summer, and meant we were late for a childcare pickup. I put these occasions down to being distracted by something which meant I hadn’t checked where the train was going before boarding.

Calendar apps are a lifesaver – any appointments go in there straight-away, with reminders set up. If you give me a piece of paper with a date and time of an appointment on it, that has to go in my phone immediately, as otherwise it’ll end up in a coat pocket to be seen again months later and probably after the event. Similarly, we’ve been in arrears on our nine-year-old’s school lunch payments because I’ve forgotten to pay that week, and only done it when I’ve been notified that we’re in arrears.

Oh, and when it comes to cleaning, we pay someone to clean our house once a week. We’re fortunate that we can afford this, but it makes such a difference. Being as we are two neurodivergent adults with full-time jobs, cleaning is something that we struggle to find the time and motivation for.

Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria

It’s not currently a medically recognised diagnosis, but I understand that many ADHDers have rejection sensitivity dysphoria as well. Whilst I tend to be okay at accepting rejection itself, with me it’s more a fear of potential rejection. This manifests as an irrational feeling that I’m constantly being judged, and that I’m going to get into trouble for not working hard enough.

There is overlap with Social Anxiety Disorder, and whilst I’ve historically had anxiety about public speaking (or even calling people on the phone) I’m mostly over this now.

Dirty Laundry and Small Talk

What prompted me to actually get on and write about my neurodiversity was listening to two books by Richard Pink and Roxanne Pink (née Roxanne Emery), a couple who are apparently big on ADHD Tiktok. Roxanne has ADHD, but didn’t get a diagnosis until her mid-thirties, and she talks candidly about her experiences both pre- and post-diagnosis. Suffice to say, my ADHD has thankfully not manifested itself to the same extent as hers, but I can relate to many of her experiences. Especially the bit about not feeling like you’ve been given a manual for how to be a grown-up. Let’s just say I use the word ‘adulting’ a lot when I actually get on top of doing admin at home.

Their first book, Dirty Laundy (sponsored link) was originally self-published, before later being picked up by Penguin. The follow-up is Small Talk (sponsored link), about the lies people with ADHD tell themselves and how to reframe them more positively. What I like about the books is that both Richard and Rox contribute, and talk both from the perspective of someone with ADHD, and someone who is in a relationship with an ADHDer. I found them both useful, both from the perspective of my own ADHD and also being a compassionate and caring parent to our nine-year-old. That being said, I recommended Dirty Laundry to a friend with an actual ADHD diagnosis, and she couldn’t get on with it, so your experience may vary.

To diagnose or not diagnose

So, I identify as someone with ADHD, in that I find that I have similar struggles to people who have been diagnosed with ADHD, and I find that many of the coping mechanisms that people with ADHD use also work for me. But I don’t have a formal diagnosis myself. As mentioned above, part of this is, ironically, because of task avoidance, but also the timelines. If I wanted a diagnosis on the NHS, I’m likely to have to wait years for it. As mentioned, there’s been a huge increase in referrals for adult ADHD assessments, and NHS services are struggling to cope. I could go private, but that would cost money – especially if I decided I wanted to go ahead with treating my ADHD with medication, as I would have to pay for private prescriptions.

A middle ground is seeking a referral from my GP to a private provider under Right to Choose, which friends have used – some have used Psychiatry UK and others ADHD360 with mixed results. Even then, as I write this, Psychiatry UK are stating that you may have to wait around 15 months for a diagnosis, and ADHD360 have an 18 week target. I may go down this route but I need to chat with others; a friend with ADHD set up a group chat with the intention of maybe starting a podcast, but, unsurprisingly, in a group of people with ADHD, we’ve yet to actually plan anything.

If you’ve read this far, then I hope being open about my experiences helps you. If nothing else, I hope it makes it clear that, whilst I might look like someone who has it all together, I’m ‘adulting’ by using a variety of coping mechanisms.

A trip to the Company Shop

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A screenshot of the home page of the Company Shop web site

Shortly before Christmas, I popped in to the Company Shop in Bradford, and picked up a basket of groceries for only £8.

Company Shop is a surplus supermarket, and sells discounted groceries sourced from excess stock from other supermarkets. Inside, you’ll see some branded products, and also own-label products from the likes of Ocado, Lidl, Tesco and Asda. Stock ends up at the Company Shop either because mainstream supermarkets have over-ordered, or because they have large quantities of stock which is very close to its use by date.

Consequently, what’s on offer can vary widely from day to day. Most fresh produce tends to be short-dated, so ideally things that need to be cooked and/or eaten the same day. So it’s handy to pop in on a day when you can be open-minded about what to cook for dinner that day. However, it’s not a supermarket where you can rely on a fixed shopping list. For example, there was plenty of cheese on sale when I went, but it was small blocks of fancy cheese with added fruit and not plain cheddar for cooking with.

Other reasons why stock makes it to the Company Shop include:

  • The packaging is slightly damaged, so expect to see plenty of dented cans of things. If that doesn’t bother you, then you can pick up some real bargains.
  • Products from failed, missed or returned deliveries.

Some food is sold frozen, and there are also homewares on offer as well as food.

Locations

There are currently 13 Company Shop outlets across England and Scotland. The majority of these are across the north of England and the midlands, as, like Greggs Outlets, they’re concentrated in areas with low incomes. There isn’t a Company Shop in London, for example, and the only store in the south is in Southampton. Back in November, a Metro reporter went to the Southampton store and wrote about her experience.

Company Shop membership

As with Mordor and Costco, one does not simply walk into the Company Shop. You need to be a member, and, like Costco, there are eligibility requirements. I was able to join through my employer, and many public sector and charity workers should be eligible. You can also join if you are in receipt of certain means-tested benefits, such as Universal Credit. The whole ethos of Company Shop is about widening access to groceries to those from low incomes, so unlike Costco, membership is free.

Members can bring a limited number of family and friends along with them, and can share their membership with up to two other people who do not necessarily need to meet the eligibility criteria.

On my visit, I picked up two boxes of my usual breakfast cereal, two litres of long-life lactose free milk (good until April), some onions, oranges and potatoes, some short-dated crisps and some dishwasher rinse aid. Like I said, all that came to around £8 – indeed, the crisps were 10p for a bag of six.

Whilst we’re a fairly high income household, I’m sure we’ll drop in to the Company Shop every now and again when we’re in the area with the car. We picked up some genuine bargains there, and, most importantly, all the food got used. And that’s better than it all going to waste.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook

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The cover of the Sad Bastard Cookbook

According to a bit of pseudoscience commissioned twenty years ago by a now defunct satellite holiday channel, today is ‘Blue Monday‘ and therefore the most depressing day of the year. It’s also depressing this year specifically for another reason. With this in mind, today’s blog post is about the Sad Bastard Cookbook, which has recipes for when you need to eat but don’t have the spoons to cook something.

If you want to buy the Sad Bastard Cookbook as an actual, physical paperback, here’s the link to buy it on Amazon (sponsored link). But you don’t need to pay for it – there’s an official free PDF download.

Low effort recipes

The whole idea of the Sad Bastard Cookbook is that the recipes require minimal effort, and generally use ingredients that don’t go out of date at short notice. As an example, the first three sections focus on instant noodles (ramen), starting with simply boiling water for the ramen and then eating them. Many recipes also have a ‘bottom-tier’, ‘mid-tier’ and ‘God-tier’, depending on how you’re feeling and what extra ingredients you have. One of these is ‘kinda like Pad Thai’, which uses rice noodles, peanut butter and sweet chilli sauce, and “tastes kinda like you’d imagine Pad Thai sauce would taste if you’ve never had Pad Thai before”.

Other recipes include ‘pasta in a rice cooker’ and ‘can of soup’.

Core ingredients

Here’s the bit of the book that is probably most useful – the ‘Core ingredients to keep in your kitchen’ section. There are lots of good suggestions for basic and long-life ingredients to buy, and keep on hand for times when you don’t feel like cooking but need to eat something. Even if you’re the sort of person who can usually cook something delicious, no matter how you’re feeling, it’s a really useful list of what to have on hand. I wish that past me had this for times when I’ve lived on my own, as it would’ve given me some fallback ideas for meals.

Like I said, the book is available as a free PDF – even if your mental health is fine, I strongly recommend reading it. You’ll pick up some useful hints for times when you’re late home and tired, or realise that you’re hungry at 10pm on a Sunday when the shops are all shut.

Two years of solar

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A screenshot of the Solax iOS app showing our solar panel usage and estimated savings.

We’ve now had our solar panels for two years, so it’s probably time to review how much money they have saved us, and how close we are to getting a return on investment.

We have a SolaX system, which includes twelve 400 Watt solar panels, an inverter and battery. I’m using SolaX’s app to estimate how much money this saves us, based on the electricity unit prices from the grid, and also the amount that we get paid for exporting surplus electricity under the Smart Export Guarantee.

I’ve included a screenshot taken a couple of weeks ago. We only saved around five pence that day, as the solar panels spent most of the day under a thick blanket of snow. But you can see that, in total, we’ve saved around £1600 in two years.

I should note, however, that whilst this averages out at £800 per year, last year we actually saved closer to £900. Alas, 2024 was a less sunny year, on the whole, and so our solar panels couldn’t work as hard.

The total cost of the system was around £11,000, so after two years, we’ve recouped 14% of our outlay. Had 2024 been as sunny as 2023, then this would have been closed to 16%. Assuming that we have more years like 2023, then we should break even in around 10 years time. That’s a long way away, but we’ll still be paying the mortgage on the house then, and we have no plans to move.

Since we had our solar panels fitted, prices have dropped significantly, and so a comparable system to ours would probably cost closer to £9000. You could argue that we should have waited a little longer to get our system installed, but back in 2023, energy prices were at an all-time high. Still, it does mean that the economics of getting solar panels fitted now is even better than it was.

Most of the money that we used to pay for the solar panels was either savings, or money gifted to us by my parents. However, we did borrow around £4000 to cover the rest of the cost, and still have some of that to pay off. Provided that we don’t have any more major expenses (I’m glaring at our car as I write this), we should have this paid off this coming spring.

Bradford 2025 – UK City of Culture

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A photo of some large illuminated letters spelling out 'Bradford 2025' in green, outside Bradford City Hall

Every four years, a different UK city is designated a City of Culture for the year. And this year, it’s Bradford, the city where I work and used to live.

This isn’t Bradford’s first rodeo. Back when we were still an EU nation, it was decided that a British city would be the European Capital of Culture in 2008. Bradford put in a bid, but wasn’t shortlisted. Ultimately, Liverpool won the bid, but the success of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture resulted in the creation of the UK City of Culture designation, to take place every four years. Derry/Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, won the first designation in 2013, followed by Hull in 2017, Coventry in 2021, and now Bradford in 2025.

Now, I’m biased; I spent eight years living in Bradford and still work there, and indeed my employer is a major Bradford 2025 partner. But I was genuinely delighted when it was announced that the Bradford bid had been successful. When the bid was being prepared, way back in 2019, it was claimed that Bradford has the youngest population of any city in Europe, with 29% of people aged 19 or under. Bradford is also well known for being very multi-cultural, with a large population of British Asians. And there are a number of interesting cultural places in Bradford, including the Theatre in the Mill, Kala Sangam, Impressions Gallery and Cartwright Hall. Bradford itself became the first UNESCO City of Film.

The Bradford 2025 bid includes the wider Bradford district as well, so there’s the Saltaire UNESCO World Heritage Site and Salts Mill, and Haworth, long-associated with the Brontë sisters.

There’s already a long list of events planned throughout 2025. These include the re-opening of the National Science & Media Museum, which has undergone a year-long refurbishment. Bradford 2025 kicked off with Rise, an outdoor event which attracted around 10,000 people on both nights, hosted by Bradford-born illusionist Steven Frayne (who previously went by the name Dynamo).

It’s not just the Media Museum that’s had a refit. If it’s your first time visiting Bradford city centre in a while, you’ll find that much of 2024 was spent pedestrianising many of the streets, making it a much more pleasant place to walk through. Whilst there is some work still to complete, it looks much nicer and the extra trees and shrubs are welcome.

When Hull was City of Culture in 2017, it resulted in the creation of almost 800 jobs in the city, and regeneration of some run down areas by the docks. I hope that Bradford 2025 will be similarly transformational.

23rd blogiversary

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Good grief, has it really been 23 years since my first blog post? Apparently so.

Whilst I took a break between 2018 and 2022, that’s a very big commitment to something. Certainly, many, many hours have gone into writing blog posts over the years, and many more hours in maintaining a web site to host them on. I’ve always self-hosted my blog, even in the very early days when I wrote blog posts using Blogger. Last year’s blogiversary post goes into more detail about the technical side of things.

Thinking back to when I was turning 23, I was starting full-time work and about to move in with my then-girlfriend Hari. I was still renting a house, didn’t drive, wasn’t married and didn’t have children, but was still an independent adult. And, no-one likes you when you’re twenty three.

Considering that the blog was something that I started on a whim aged 17, whilst living with my parents and preparing for my A-level exams, part of me is genuinely surprised I’ve kept it for so long.

Snow longer welcome

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A photo of a snowy scene, taken from our house

I can’t remember a time that there’s been snow on the ground for eight days straight. It’s certainly not happened in my adult life; it may have happened when I was much younger, perhaps in the late 1980s or early 1990s. But the heavy snow that we had last Sunday has stuck around for over a week now, thanks to low temperatures that have prevented it all from melting.

I’m writing this yesterday (Sunday 11th January) and it’s probable that most of the snow will start to melt today (Monday). Yesterday (Sunday), the temperatures reached a ‘dizzying high’ of 4° C (39° F), which is the warmest it’s been all week. Meanwhile, night-time temperatures have apparently dropped as low as -10° C (14° F).

Suffice to say, it’s been an interesting week. The school that our nine-year-old attends announced it would be closed on Monday. As it’s the 21st century, thankfully this wasn’t a case of listening to local radio, but a message via the parents’ app just after 7am. Also, as it’s the 21st century and in the years following a pandemic, us parents were provided with the schoolwork that our kids would be doing if they were in school. I booked last minute annual leave with my (thankfully) understanding employer, and we got to work. Thankfully, most of it was Maths, and so not something I struggle with.

Tuesday was a return to relative normality as the school re-opened, but many other local schools remained closed throughout last week (some are still closed today, as in Monday). I even made it into the office on Tuesday, as the trains were running with almost no delays. However, many of my colleagues didn’t, and those of us that did were advised to head home mid-afternoon. We’ve then spent the rest of the week working remotely. I am very pleased that we have this option.

A photo of our In Home Display, showing £64.03 spent on gas this week.

Temperatures should continue to rise, and so whilst there will probably still be snow on the ground this morning, at least we won’t also have ice to contend with. And I’m hoping our heating bills will come down too; as per the photo above, we had spent over £64 on gas this week alone. Some of this is because we were home more, but also because of how cold it was outside.

So, here’s looking forward to some warmer weather. The snow has been fun for a while, but it has outstayed its welcome.