Im not yokeing

 

So today my tumble dryer egg's arrived from a company called eco egg, I purchased the unscented version via Amazon because there was no postage as I'm a prime member.

There are many versions of tumble dryer ball brands you can buy, but we have purchased this for 2 reasons.

1. We purchased the laundry egg for the washing machine a few years ago, it washes the clothes almost as well as a leading brand's that we have used and there is less packaging and waste.
2. You can buy some fragrance sticks that fit inside the egg to scent while helping dry the clothes 

The dryer egg claims to save the drying time by up to 28%, it's done by the eggs creating warm air pockets in the damp clothing and will help to try them faster.

First thoughts in the 1st time of using the eggs I found they are rather loud crashing about in the dryer drum with a half load. I will try them more with a bigger load.

Check them out

dryer warranty

 With the new dryer the technology being quite new, I was keen to get extra cover for the dryer as it  cost £450, I don't want to have any big bills with it,  I was going to go with the supplier AO, I went to register the dryer on Hoovers website, so it has its warranty, and found they do extend warranty that you can keep it for the life of the dryer, it is also cheaper than AO offered, I think all the key features offered was the same 

To register your warranty goto

The offers at the time I took out my extended warranty is below 

The new dryer

The new Hoover HLE H9A2TCE-80 heat pump dryer 

Well it was an early start this morning as I received a text saying the new dryer will arrive between 745 and 1145am. 

As requested, I was asked to remove the old dryer and make it easily collectable for the free collection they provided for me, so I took it out of its little space it was in and put it into the back garden for the delivery team to collect.

At 10:45 it arrived, they dropped the new dryer into the conservatory ready for me to fit, they were very polite and helpful and promptly removed the old dryer as they offered over the phone.

Within 20 minutes I had it unpacked, I am installing to collect the water in its internal moisture collector tank, you can set it up so the moisture collected go straight into the waste pipe if you have one close by, all that had to be done was to remove the two blocks in the top of the drum for to protect it in transport, and it is ready to use.

The manual recommends you download the App on your phone, the one you need to download is hOn

The app will guide you through the setup of the Wi-Fi to the dryer, I tried 4 times to connect the new machine as recommended, it kept failing! On further reading upon this app I found it needed to be the low 2.4ghz bandwidth to run it, so ill need to look into setting this up on my router.to see if I can set this up.

1st impressions: 

• compared to my old dryer it the opening is much bigger so makes loading and unloading much easier
• the door only opens to the left, it can't be changed like some, so this causes some loading issues
• the twin filters seem to collect the lint quite well
• lots of options to get to understand 
• the water tank is very easy to use 

January seems to be an expencive month

Well after an expensive start to the month it doesn't seem to have got any better, today the 1st filter has gone brittle and large lumps have broken off.

I searched for the part and all I came up with was company's to contact regarding getting a new door on the 10 plus year old tumble dryer, if it is available, I'm guessing it will take more than a week to get here.

We decided we needed to look at a new tumble dryer was in order, I started to look at some on various websites and as I flicked through I found one that was a lot of money and boasted an energy rating of A+++! 

Wow A+++ rating? I looked at why, the tumble dryer is called a heat pump tumble dryer. I have never heard of this type of tumble dryer before, so with this I got my google's out and researched into it a little.

For years we have had two types of dryer.  Both involve a lot of electricity to heat up the inside of a metal drum and dry the items that tumble around in the drum, and the moisture escapes via a filter to an exhaust or into a condensing system to collect the water. 

both do the job well but not very efficiently, from the energy used and the fact the items inside could be dry but still using lots of electricity while still running on the timer, more modern and expensive ones have a moisture sensor internally to aid in saving on the cost. But lots of heat escapes and is wasted.

In comes the heat pump tumble dryer, from what I understand is it is a back to front air conditioner, it uses the warm air created from the system is used a lot more efficiently to heat the tumble unit and the clothing of the drum to draw the moisture and remove it from the system, the efficiency is a lot better as it contains the heat and moisture internally as opposed to it escaping from the machine like older designed machines.

I was weighing up whether the cost of the machine would be made back? You are looking at a cost of approximately £350 for the machine, but to offset that you would be saving around half the cost of the electricity than the old dryers.

My old dryer on an 80-minute cycle used approximately 70p, the new dryer says it uses approximately 25p their standard cycle, what ever they class as a standard cycle it does not say what the cost per kw hour is at the time of testing the machine and there was no comparison with a standard tumble dryer

but if you look at it I think I should save approximately half the cost per load.

So to compare I was looking at a condenser drier costing £219.99p  and the new dryer I have purchased has cost £239.99p (double the price) so I use the dryer once a day approximately  5 times a week and I hope it will last a minimum of 7 years I work that out at a saving of £637.00p, so I will recover this cost happily.

To add to this, the cost of electricity is about to double in cost in February, so it will definitely save on the day to day electricity cost, only time will tell.

Feeling Flat

Today I had to jumpstart my car again, it has been sat there for 2 weeks not used, so I can't complain about it but with modern cars they measure the voltage of the battery when the engine is running and charge it up as needed to conserve fuel the alternator is switched on and off.

The lower the battery is when fully charged, the more the alternator will run and the more fuel the car will require when the engine is running

if you don't understand what I mean, think of it as a bucket of water under running water and as the bucket gets older it split at the top so to keep the water level at the top  you will need to top the bucket up more frequently, as the bucket ages the split travels slowly down the bucket, and you need to top the bucket up more frequently until the bucket splits and won't hold water.

I tested the battery after I took the car for a long run and tested it after 15 mins of being parked up it slowly dropped from 12.8 volt to 11.9 volt, the car would start and run, but the battery was failing, it would work fine if I wanted to drive it a lot more regularly, but I don't need to,  so off to Halford's I went for a new battery, I picked the heavy-duty one as the car is a big 2.2 diesel engine takes a lot of  power from a battery to start it.

On removing the battery I found it was from 2015, so it's lasted 6 years, I don't think that's bad for a big diesel engine, especially as it doesn't get used much.

On removing the battery retainer, I found one of the bolts to be seized and as soon as I put some force into removing the bolt, the head broke off! This turned into an hour and a half of removing the plastic trim and clips then drilling and tapping the hole from a 6 mm bolt to a bigger m8 bolt and putting the trim all back together again

job done  

A sad day

Today was a sad day indeed, it appears I need to put my hand in my pocket and replace my 7 year old laptop.

I returned last week with footage from my family holiday in Finland, at first I thought it was the software that I use as it's free 1080p. I had sound but no picture, I tried it in Windows Media Player and I still had the same issue.

I googled the fault and found I need a codec to allow me to view the video footage, I tried 4 different ways but in the end I went to Microsoft store and paid for the 79p codec and I could now watch the footage. But no I had the issue where when I pressed play it took forever to load and when playing it kept freezing and skipping.

I spoke to my friend, he felt the cpu and the graphics card were struggling to keep up, He told me to start up the xbox game bar ad look. I found the gpu at around 75% and the cpu 90 and above as well as the ram at 70%

He said adding ram to the laptop may help ease the issue, but when editing and processing video footage it will take an age to do, but we could not upgrade the graphics card or the cpu, so I could try more ram but I may be wasting my money 

At this time, all I can rely on is the person that knows about computers, so I guess it's time to look at replacing the computer.

What to do I like a laptop as it folds away and is portable, the issue with it is there isn't much you can do to upgrade it, so it's not very future-proof. My other issue is now with my children growing up they have some homework on the computer as it is now, so I need to start planning further down the line.

Bay window stains

 From earlier on this year we had a leak from the gutter which we got repaired as soon as possible, but the water was leaking directly over the bay window and in turn was leaking up through the moulded seam and leaked into the roof and stained the sealing of it. 

I let it dry out and painted a few times with bright white emulsion, but the stain kept returning, so I felt it was time to seal it for good 

From Toolstation 

So after the 1st coat and 2 hrs do dry, I can confirm the stain seems to have been covered, and no visible sign has returned fingers crossed 

The paint says it can be painted over with any paint, we will see when i get some more emulsion 

Painting the walls

 While the scaffolding is still up I decided it's an idea to get the front wall painted around the top window and area I won't be able to do while on a ladder, so while it stopped raining it was time to give it a coat of magnolia paint.

I went and got a tub of exterior masonry paint and brushes, got out a wire brush to clean off the loose paint and dirt and started to paint the upper wall, it looks better with the cracks in the cement and the older paint covered over.

You can't see it so well in the picture from last night, but it's looking a lot better this morning in a normal light, ill try and take one if it stops raining 

New Doors and windows

 

Today the company came and installed the new door and windows in the front of the house, the door frame was very insecure, and I was worried the bricks would fall out and injure someone let alone the frame not being very secure, the bay windows let more cold air in round the frames even though I tried to re-seal, but it wasn't much better.

When the old dark wood effect doors and frames were fitted it looked dark in the hall, with the white frames it makes the hallway feel a lot brighter than it was and much nicer.

what do you think?

still lots to get done but we are a step closer to making the house our home!

 

Home Security cameras

 I feel in this day and age you need to do all you can to protect your home as much as you can, from the day we moved in to our house I wanted a security camera, I also wanted one that was wireless that I didn't need to run cables all over the house to power them and to a unit to record the footage, all the wireless types I could find were a cloud storage type of deal and quite expensive.

My friend recently told me about a system I had never head of when I was looking called Eufy, so I looked into them and their capabilities, and they seemed to be what I wanted and a little more, but  for the price I felt still expensive.

A few weeks ago Amazon had an offer on for two cameras and the base about £150.00p, so I decided to buy it. On paper, they sound good

• 16gb memory in the hub
• 1080p camera resolution
• up to 180 days of charge from the camera 
• human recognition
• zone setup 
• easy setup
• app based set up and usage

to set the camera up it was quite easy, you need a smartphone and the app the link below may help you if you get this kit, but I did find it all quite easy 

When the package arrived it arrived as above all you needed was a 5 mm drill bit and drill and a Philips screwdriver to fix the cameras to the wall, it even came with templates to drill the holes for the camera mounts.

The setup of the app and the base and cameras was quite painless and the updating of the firmware on the items was all painless 

The cameras came with approximately 3/4% charge in them according to the app, so I charged one fully and the other I left with its original charge. I will see how they last when in use and update you as it goes.

Fuggly fire starters

 OK I'm a big fan of recycling and repurposing things rather than throwing away and this is a tiny way to reuse things that would otherwise end up in a bin and go unused.

We use these for the log burner and for lighting the BBQ in better weather, and they burn for about 4 minutes, and they work brilliantly. 

I doubt they will be any cheaper than the firelighters you find in the shops, but I think it's better to reuse than to throw it in the bin.

What is in them?

• The base of an old cardboard egg box
• Tumble dryer lint/fluff from when you clean the filter 
• Wax from leftover candles you no longer use 

All you do is cover the area with something non-porous or absorbent as melted wax will mark/stain things,  fill the egg cups to the top with the lint melt the wax however you feel safe and pour the melted wax over the lint and leave the wax to cool then split the cups apart and store for use. 

Note: wax melts around 60 degrees Celsius and can still burn (find a safe way to pour the wax)