The grumpy thread

[Split_Pin]

Seems to be working again, offer submitted!

[AnnoyingPentium]

1 hour ago, Split_Pin said:

I'm trying to make an offer on a car.

I'm hoping this is for the car I think it is.

[myglaren]

I have a 'recall' tumble dryer.  They came and did whatever it was they had to do within a week.

Currently not in use, don't use it much anyway but the condensate pump just gurgles.

It is waiting it's turn for fixing, the Bosch washer comes first.  Ordered new inlet solenoid valves two months ago, out of stock.

It has a bit of a rebellious streak.  Often turns on the extra rinses so takes two hours for a 40° wash.

It won't do a 20° or 30° wash, just keeps pausing and has to be restarted.  40° it is then.

[J W Pepper]

10 hours ago, RoverFolkUs said:

Absolutely would never buy a Hotpoint appliance... Ever. (Or whirlpool, indeshit etc) 

When they looked like this, they were ok.. excellent in fact 

`

Years ago things were built to last, now they don't last 5 minutes. My grandparents have just had to replace their freezer and tumble dryer which they had for over at least 25 years each. They also have a electric tyre pump which my grandpa says is from the 60s, still works, compared with another he has, a fairly new one (last 5 years) and it broke after a few years, didn't really get much use.

[horriblemercedes]

9 hours ago, Wibble said:

Yep, totally understand. My parents had an affected fridge but were unaware until I visited to check it out, as I was worried for the same reasons as you. They were never contacted by the manufacturers and hadn’t seen it in the press. 

I’ve been dealing with household insurance claims for over thirty years and negligence is very hard to prove and so rarely a route pursued by insurers, so please don’t be overly worried about that.

As you say, you can’t trust old brand names that previously may have been recognised as quality, as so many now are just old names bought up and the same crap being pedalled off under different brands.

This. I briefly had a job in home insurance when I was much younger. I remember when I started, my uncle got quite nasty about it, telling me that insurers are all snakes just trying to screw innocent people on technicalities.

The answer couldn't have been further from the truth. That just wasn't the attitude at all. If a claim was fair, it was paid. There would be formalities and questions but that's just due diligence really. If a claim was obviously fraudulent it would be investigated and pursued, which seems fair enough.

I can't recall any faulty appliance cases (it's some years ago and I was only there for less than a year) but I really think it's unlikely that anyone there would've been trying to trip a granny up because of a fault with her Hotpoint fridge from Dixons.

 

I've only ever made one insurance claim in my life, but that was dealt with very well (a car drove into the side of my car as I passed a T junction and then drove away). I had a witness. Calmly gave the insurance company all the details I knew and wrote an intelligible email stating it all. I had my money and all was solved within a week or so. 

 

The internet is a great place to read about how evil insurers/petrol station owners/Arabs/lawyers are, but in my experience, most things are done a certain way for a reason. If something seems strange or wrong, the chances are that it's just because you've overlooked the reason it's done that way.

[horriblemercedes]

3 minutes ago, J W Pepper said:

Years ago things were built to last, now they don't last 5 minutes. My grandparents have just had to replace their freezer and tumble dryer which they had for over at least 25 years each. They also have a electric tyre pump which my grandpa says is from the 60s, still works, compared with another he has, a fairly new one (last 5 years) and it broke after a few years, didn't really get much use.

99% of tyre pumps from the 1960s broke decades ago and were thrown away. In 50-60 years, there will be someone with a tyre pump they bought in 2022 that works who will tell everyone that tyre pumps from 2080 are rubbish and everything was built to last back in the 2010s and 2020s.

It has always been this way. It is called survivor bias. The survivors are the evidence we have that the old machines were better, however the ones that remain were the ones that were particularly high quality or better maintained and repaired.

[J W Pepper]

1 minute ago, horriblemercedes said:

99% of tyre pumps from the 1960s broke decades ago and were thrown away. In 50-60 years, there will be someone with a tyre pump they bought in 2022 that works who will tell everyone that tyre pumps from 2080 are rubbish and everything was built to last back in the 2010s and 2020s.

It has always been this way. It is called survivor bias. The survivors are the evidence we have that the old machines were better, however the ones that remain were the ones that were particularly high quality or better maintained and repaired.

I forgot to mention the 1960s pump has hardly been used. That has obviously helped its survival

[Remspoor]

17 hours ago, MikeR said:

we have some woods, parking and wifi  , deer and F all else , but it works , the more u wont , the more u miss , center parks it is not , but I dont  miss the book in and parking

You have more than me when I was a child.

Went to the lakes usually camping. I remember the campsite at Buttermere and the Langdales was usually wet. Went walking up some hill side most days. First vacation away from parents I went to Pontins. Never ever been back to that sort of place UK or abroad.  Hate the seaside too.

[MikeR]

4 minutes ago, Remspoor said:

You have more than me when I was a child.

Went to the lakes usually camping. I remember the campsite at Buttermere and the Langdales was usually wet. Went walking up some hill side most days. First vacation away from parents I went to Pontins. Never ever been back to that sort of place UK or abroad.  Hate the seaside too.

the joys of camping , and the trek in the dark to the delightfull bogs to rid oneself of drinking excess ..... 

I will stick to stumbling around the staic to the on suite now .

[RoverFolkUs]

4 hours ago, J W Pepper said:

Years ago things were built to last, now they don't last 5 minutes. My grandparents have just had to replace their freezer and tumble dryer which they had for over at least 25 years each. They also have a electric tyre pump which my grandpa says is from the 60s, still works, compared with another he has, a fairly new one (last 5 years) and it broke after a few years, didn't really get much use.

I bought an electric tyre pump last month. Used it for the first time today and it started smoking within 5 minutes(!) 

That's right, such great quality it overheated pumping a tyre up from 22psi to 32psi 🤦

It still works, you just can't use it for much more than a few minutes at a time

All tyre pumps are shit, I have a couple of single barrel ones where the gauges have stopped working, a double barrel one with a leaking valve, a "Ring" branded electric one which has stopped reading pressure and now this cheapy one that overheats after a couple of minutes. 

I know the common theme here is buy cheap buy twice but surely working as it should when brand new isn't not too much to ask for!?

[andy18s]

1 hour ago, Remspoor said:

You have more than me when I was a child.

Went to the lakes usually camping. I remember the campsite at Buttermere and the Langdales was usually wet. Went walking up some hill side most days. First vacation away from parents I went to Pontins. Never ever been back to that sort of place UK or abroad.  Hate the seaside too.

It was always Shell Island for us.Once we'd been a few times and found the good spots to pitch in it was great..

Raf Llanbedr was still active so usually a few jets flying in and out,mainly Hawks as Valley is just up the coast.

And being the sensible kids we never went under the fence to jump all over the McConnell Douglas Phantoms that the fire service were practicing on....nope

[MikeR]

went to hospital in the car ( focus)

bastard streets had limited parking everywhere , and the wardens were out checking ...  FFS where is a visiting car supposed to park ,

yet when our neck of the woods gets submerged in summer visitors the idea of residents parking is put down due to cost .....

so parked in a 2 hr max slot and waited for my appt time and then went for the multi story parking  and then got seen by the Drs

paid my 3 quid in the multi story , thats after dropping my change all over the floor and being a "old" guy actually got offered help by security !!

tried getting home , yep every red light at every junction ...and some dozy bone heads wondering what to do on green ..

followed up by our local council closing lanes on the bypass again to cut the grass ,  long Q's  so  did a detour , rather sit there burning off petrol ..

so by the time I got home my 15 notes of petrol was nearly used up by a trip to Liverpool and back !!!!

 

[goosey]

Thought I would be efficient and change the front air springs on the wife’s car, 4 hours later and it’s a fail I need to make a special tool to compress part of the strut top to get the retaining clips in 😢

tomorrow mornings job now, at the moment I’m stuffing my face with a huge trifle 

[Zelandeth]

Why is there some unwritten rule that states that no UK Hotel can ever have sodding working air conditioning?

We've managed to shave a whole 0.5C off since I checked in at like half three.

This ain't a cheap hotel either!

To be fair...nowhere around here is this weekend, so I paid a little extra for somewhere <200 metres from the event and one that claimed to have AC in the rooms...

[Wibble]

22 hours ago, RoverFolkUs said:

Hmm, well Indesit and Hotpoint are owned by whirlpool, and I think they are under the umbrella brand Merloni but don't quote me on that! 

Used to hear of Indesits exploding on the spin cycle, but I suppose there will always be a horror story for everything 

Miele are the dog's danglies, they're bloody heavy though!

Cheap Bosch appliances are shit. If it's a Bosch made in Spain, it'll be shit and nothing to do with Bosch really. Check the label if looking at one in store (do people still do that these days!?) to find out for sure. No experience with Liebherr so can't comment on them, but I do know someone who had a fridge that didn't last very long and I think it was a Liebherr now you mention that brand 

Haven’t had a case yet involving Miele but Bosch 😬

[Dick Cheeseburger]

Why is there an increasing fascination in this country to cover gardens with acres of tarmac and/or plastic grass? They both look shite. 

This company flashed up in my fb feed for some reason and they seem to specialise in covering entire front gardens in the black stuff. This particular project was especially interesting as they appear to have covered a chunk of what I'm assuming to be council owned verge in tarmac too. Surely someone'll knock on the door and tell them to restore the verge to the original layout? 

Why do people do this? Dickheads. 

Edit: I wonder if it's so the house owners can advertise the place with an 'eight car driveway' or some such nonsense. I foresee the pavement being blocked by their overflow parking...

[Dead_E23]

My employer's offices have aircon controllers like that in the meeting rooms.   I suspect there's a trick to them, because one of our super-brainy consultants spent ages fucking with one and the meeting room was at 24C by the time we were done.  The next time, a colleague managed to get the room like an ice box.  This is one of the reasons why I hardly ever go to the office.

[RoverFolkUs]

17 minutes ago, Dick Longbridge said:

Why is there an increasing fascination in this country to cover gardens with acres of tarmac and/or plastic grass? They both look shite. 

This company flashed up in my fb feed for a

some reason and they seem to specialise in covering entire front gardens in the black stuff. This particular project was especially interesting as they appear to have covered a chunk of what I'm assuming to be council owned verge in tarmac too. Surely someone'll knock on the door and tell them to restore the verge to the original layout? 

Why do people do this? Dickheads. 

Edit: I wonder if it's so the house owners can advertise the place with an 'eight car driveway' or some such nonsense. I foresee the pavement being blocked by their overflow parking...

Less maintenance.. a lot of folk seem adverse to using lawnmowers these days as they don't seem to like real grass! So they lay down plastic turf or just tarmac it over

I agree - it looks shit 

[Dead_E23]

But you could park loads of LDV Convoys on it and then it would look BOSS.

[RoverFolkUs]

45 minutes ago, Wibble said:

Haven’t had a case yet involving Miele but Bosch 😬

Bosch are a perceived luxury for some reason, they're no less shit than the rest.. 

Apart from the older ones that were actually made to last, also like the rest

[Metal Guru]

2 hours ago, RoverFolkUs said:

Bosch are a perceived luxury for some reason, they're no less shit than the rest.. 

Apart from the older ones that were actually made to last, also like the rest

The quality of Bosch power tools has definitely declined a lot in the last 20 years. I’m talking domestic quality not the professional range of which I have no experience as they are well out of my price range. I suspect they are probably made to last and the diy stuff made as cheaply as possible in China. Similar thing with Black and Decker / De Walt.

[myglaren]

17 hours ago, RoverFolkUs said:

I bought an electric tyre pump last month. Used it for the first time today and it started smoking within 5 minutes(!) 

That's right, such great quality it overheated pumping a tyre up from 22psi to 32psi 🤦

It still works, you just can't use it for much more than a few minutes at a time

All tyre pumps are shit, I have a couple of single barrel ones where the gauges have stopped working, a double barrel one with a leaking valve, a "Ring" branded electric one which has stopped reading pressure and now this cheapy one that overheats after a couple of minutes. 

I know the common theme here is buy cheap buy twice but surely working as it should when brand new isn't not too much to ask for!?

I bought half a dozen from eBay. Cheap enough, around six quid apiece I think.

All OK except mine that had a defective pressure gauge that showed either zero or forty psi, they replaced it without question.  That was three years ago and all work well.

My grandson bought an 'RAC' one that is a pile of crap.

[myglaren]

8 hours ago, RoverFolkUs said:

Less maintenance.. a lot of folk seem adverse to using lawnmowers these days as they don't seem to like real grass! So they lay down plastic turf or just tarmac it over

I agree - it looks shit 

And is to be banned, allegedly.

The runoff from so many paved/tarmacked drives is becoming a significant factor in flooding.  Where a grassed area would let rainwater filter through slowly, tarmacked surfaces just guide it straight into the drains that are overwhelmed.

[New POD]

Went to Italy for work.  Left house at 3 am on Wednesday. Got home at 7pm Friday.  There were a few high points. But mostly it was painful shit. 

Could have been home by 4:30 pm, but the MD failed to send some one to Birmingham Airport to pick up the "would you mind bringing back 100 parts in your hand luggage" which turned out to be 560 parts and weigh 24 kg.  I'm not sure we should have walked through nothing to declare, but I know the duty will get paid, as it was part of a larger batch of 12000 coming on a lorry. But by that time I wasn't thinking. 

So I had to go into Aston, to drop them off.  Rather than drive straight up the M6 Toll. 

Anyway get home. Wife hasn't been well, she's been putting on a brave face, then my sister in law phones to say she's going to see our son on Sunday.  Can we look after her dog.  This made my wife cry.  Nobody cares about her.  It's not her sister's  place to visit our son, when he's already told us he has too much work on with final exams and getting the house ready for a new baby in November.  Shes had to cancel going out with friends tonight, because she is in too much pain, and do they drop in or ask how she is...I tried to be as patient as possible, but given that on Friday I got up at 4 o'clock UK time and then took two flights, with a 1 hour stop over and then pretty much drove for 4.5 hours, but at 11pm when my head is on the pillow, if you start pouring your heart out, don't be surprised if the sound of your voice sends me to sleep. 

 

 

[RoverFolkUs]

3 hours ago, myglaren said:

I bought half a dozen from eBay. Cheap enough, around six quid apiece I think.

All OK except mine that had a defective pressure gauge that showed either zero or forty psi, they replaced it without question.  That was three years ago and all work well.

My grandson bought an 'RAC' one that is a pile of crap.

I suppose it'll do the job and will save me from pumping tyres up with a conventional pump, but it just means I'll have to wait 10 minutes between each tyre if any need a significant topup

The scale on it is ridiculous, it goes up from 0-150psi I think and there's barely any middle ground from 20-40🤦 so you have to use a separate guage. There's no way it would cope above 40 psi either

Instead of buying all the cheap ones I probably should have just bought one decent one, but there's no guarantee that one of those is going to be any good

[Zelandeth]

Oh fuck off.

Just been told that one of the neighbours we share a fence with have been round hassling us about the knackered fence again.  They're now threatening to get legal proceedings under way.

We have contracted someone to do the work, and paid a deposit to the tune of about £1600 several months ago.  There is literally nothing else we can do at this point.

I've passed the contact details of the contractor on, left a voicemail with them to contact the perturbed neighbour...not really sure what else I can do.

I am so fucking ready to have this place sold and to bugger off somewhere without any neighbours.

I'm supposed to be on holiday this weekend...so of course this comes up halfway through the Saturday.

[reb]

Ffs.

Literally 0 miles. How does that even happen?

[Tickman]

17 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

Oh fuck off.

Just been told that one of the neighbours we share a fence with have been round hassling us about the knackered fence again.  They're now threatening to get legal proceedings under way.

It is partly their boundary. Tell them to crack on with the fence themselves.

[High Jetter]

27 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

We have contracted someone to do the work, and paid a deposit to the tune of about £1600 several months ago.

Wait, what? That sounds like a big deposit, and why isn't it up by now? I am presuming it is your fence and not a shared one.

[fairkens]

Unless stipulated in the deeds there's no legal obligation for you to even have a fence, so tell them to crack on if they want one