The cost of living... what can we do?

I will always be proud that I worked for 40 years plus, some I know have never seen a wage packet.

 

To someone who becomes out of work through no fault of their own it is degrading, you are treated almost like you have done something wrong and are being punished, for most hardworking people just being made redundant and the worry that creates is enough stress.

The ones they should be hassling just seem to be given a free ride.

 

Last time I was unemployed I didn't sign on as the previous time, as @pete said was degrading, also not a lot of use with job hunting. I just signed up with a couple of local agencies said I'd take anything and ended up washing cars at a garage a few days later, then 6 months at a trifle factory after which I found permanent employment again.

 

I actually found a couple of jobs via the grapevine until I found one I liked.
All they wanted me to do was train for this and train for something else when I had a trade that I had worked at for over 40 yrs.
They were, I thought, very unhelpful and actually not that well up on occupations and jobs in general.

 

I was one such youngster from a disadvantaged background. My life started off in a very working class neighborhood but when things when pear shaped for my family when all the local industries got privatised and did mass lay offs, we ended up in the nastiest council estate where not only most people didn't want to work, there was no work locally anyway because we were miles away from the nearest significant town.

I saw many in my age group choose a life of crime, and I'll be honest, I seriously considered that route myself. There were plenty of times when I thought, these lads have everything, and I have nothing, they are having fun, I'm reading books and practicing my computer skills and applying for every job, training scheme or college course I can. But I also saw the other lads getting nicked by the police and going in and out of jail. And they'd get beat up a lot, which apparently happens if you constantly ruin the lives of others.

I persevered. I am grateful to two people in particular. The head of the school of maths and computing at the uni, who was sufficiently impressed by my pure determination to bend every rule to get me on a course I was neither qualified for not could afford, and my first boss who set out to give someone like me a chance.

I've had a decent career ever since.

 

True story. A very clever optical coating physicist worked beside me. he wanted some tooling made up for an experiment he was about to carry out. He went to see the machine shop senior toolmaker who explained it involved milling and turning so he would do the turning first as the lathe of choice was free. The physicist asked him if he could not do a bit of one and then a bit of the other until the job was complete, "as he wanted both bits finished at the same time". You could hear the toolmaker from the other side of the car park.

 

My gas boiler is about 34 years old totally uneconomical.
It never goes wrong ,I service it myself every year ,there is virtually nothing to go wrong.

We were quoted £ 6000 by British Gas to replace it with a modern one ,which seemed expensive but I suppose in the grand scheme of things that’s it.
To do this they would have to change the system completely,meaning they would have to rip bits of the house apart and put new pipe work in places you wouldn’t believe.
Mrs Roders was having palpitations .
So we turned them down thinking there must be another way ,as yet to be determined.
British Gas phoned me and said if we dropped the price by£250 would we change our mind,
I replied that if they dropped the price by£2500 I still wouldn’t be interested .
One bonus of our old system when it heats the water up first thing it also warms the bathroom radiator ,so warm towels first thing.

If only they could exchange like for like that would be perfect but that can’t happen any more.


A project for next year me thinks.

 

We were quoted around the 6k mark for central heating replacement too. We had a number of quotes along the same lines.

We heat the house with very modern far infrared panels. They're very efficient. I still need to come up with a modern solution for hot water though. That's currently still reliant on an immersion heater. There are better more modern options. I just need to figure out which is best for our circumstances.

Throughout this whole 'cost of living crisis', the one thing that's done my head in is the media is still focused on the ancient concept of central heating. In the 1980s, possibly earlier, someone said, I know, let's make a contained fire inside the house and use it to heat water and pump it through a network of pipes to fill up so massive steel rectangular tanks in every room, and we can even regulate it by putting a mechanical thermostat on a wall somewhere nowhere near where you spend most time, and have this system heat places that don't need heating, and we'll put the rectangular steel tanks right under the windows so the rising warm air immediately comes into contact with the coldest surface in each room.

I took a different approach. I said, let's heat each room to its individual requirements, and have all the heat generated where it is needed and not passed through several metres of pipework. No need to worry about gas leaks, carbon monoxide, or water leaks from the heating, no radiators to bleed, no need to wait half a day for the heat to come through, and if we ever decide to redesign any of the rooms, it's a simple DIY job to move the panels.

 

I think central heating as an idea came along well before the 80s, I went to a school that was built around the turn of the century and it was heated via radiators containing hot water, big old cast iron ones.

They were advertising a wall heater on the TV today, probably not the best of its type but it was on about using radiant heat.
The ad sounded Australian and it said instant heat, even if used outside, just like walking out into the sun on a warm day.

The thing that came to mind was, yes we have all sat in the sun on a warm day and it feels warm, but if the air is cold you get a cold back.
Early spring days when the air can be quite cold but the sun is warm.

 

I wonder if it was the same technology as I use. It's not really clever. It just heats a metal surface to a very specific temperature. There's very little thermal mass so it heats quickly and radiates the heat out.

I get that it's not for everyone. My point is that the default seems to be that you have to have central heating, and it has to run off a gas boiler, unless you fork out thousands for a heat pump but that's still central heating. There is very little discussion about other alternatives. At least that's true if you ignore the factually incorrect news articles that are doing the rounds, with headlines like 'this 30 quid device heats the room for just 7 pence per hour' (a real story, about a nasty halogen heater. It was 1.7kw so would actually cost about 57 pence per hour to run but the story sells because most people don't know how to calculate running costs).

 

It wasn't one of those little things that you plug in.
It had about 3 or 4 levels of heating.

 

Instant Heater

This was it, not sure if they are any good.