Preparing for winter II

kitschy

mardatha wrote: »

I looked up OWL meters and found they are £40 :eek: Are there cheaper ones, what are they called and where would I get one ? Please

You can borrow them for free from some libraries

katieclampet

cold, wet and windy here (manchester), doesnt feel very spring like, sadly:(

katie

Eenymeeny

I was looking a way of muffling the noise a bit. (OS if possible:D) I have a back boiler so pillows up the chimney etc weren't an option. Looks like unless I fancy climbing on the roof and fixing a new cowl I'lll have to put up with it:(
Mardatha weren't the energy companies giving them away at one time? or is that something different? I'm thinking of energy-use monitors?

Athome1

I must be the only poster on here from the Midlands:D
It got windy here from Friday night but no rain even though the skies are very grey and it is (I'll whisper the next bit) still mild. In fact I've got a line of washing out and it's drying well.

I wasn't wishing for bad weather honest:D

mardatha

Yes, wee monitors to see what uses how much. We're with Scottish Power and they never gave me anything. Just bills !

diddly74

Athome1 wrote: »

I must be the only poster on here from the Midlands:D
It got windy here from Friday night but no rain even though the skies are very grey and it is (I'll whisper the next bit) still mild. In fact I've got a line of washing out and it's drying well.

I wasn't wishing for bad weather honest:D

No Chick I am in the Midlands too! Staffordshire to be exact. We live almost on the top of a hill near Cannock Chase and its pretty blowy up here too. Not risked a line of washing because that will certainly make it rain!

I have emptied and took an inventory of my freezer today. Hubby had to come and lift a box out for me and he very kindly took all the ice off the inside of it. Its a very old freezer and probably uses enough electricity to be supplied by a small power station all by itself. His Mum had it and he reckons its about 25 yrs old. But its still going strong and I am loathe to spend £300+ on a new one.

So for the rest of today I shall be meal planning, doing my Uni homework and hopefully making bread and baking. So the whatever the weather today I don't care! lol

Alisonpennypincher

I'm East Mids, and it is blowy here too. Not got any washing out though, like the poster above, that would guarantee rain!

Quite mild out of the wind though, and have the windows open to air the house.

Ballymackeonan

The wind's died down here in Co. Armagh, but the wind was, as my mother used to say "blowing arpeggios down the chimney" for a couple of nights, and I was carrying a torch around with me in case the lights went... It's just raining now, grey and miserable, but I can see from here that some mature trees have come down in the local park. Fortunately, they fell away from the houses, not towards them!

A friend reckons there is always snow here when she goes for a ski-ing holiday, and she'll be away for the last week this month, so watch this space!

Confuzzled

Primrose wrote: »

Asian & other ethnic stores are by far the best places, if you have any near you. The bigger ones tend to sell a lot of the staples, such as flour, rice, lentils, dried beans, etc in bulk, often at prices much cheaper than our national supermarkets. The only thing to beware of is making sure than you're able to use them in a reasonable time-scale. I've sometimes found that bulk bought dried butter beans, for example can go rather hard & stale if kept too long. (I know they're hard to begin with, but I mean "rock hard"). It does helpif you have a good range of menus you can use to get through them fairly quickly. For quicker use, tinned beans of various kinds are always a useful standby.

with any kind of beans when you cook them it's essential that you don't use any salt until they are soft, you can then add salt, bacon etc. salt keeps them from breaking down properly. i don't know if you salted your beans or not but that's something to consider.

i have had really really old beans go hard on me though so if you didn't salt them then that probably was the culprit, mind you i have beans from approved foods that are more than a year out of date and they're still fine

Confuzzled

ooh we had snow twice this morning! huge flakes and a very very grey sky. it's cleared now but i'm def going to force myself to go to the shop soon just in case, i've been deliberately running down my freezer and fridge contents and we've no milk at all, i can't face there being even the remotest possibility of being snowed in with no milk for my tea :rotfl:

hard to think we managed to get through so many cartons of uht milk but i had noticed they were short dated so i figured we'd use those up and i'd restock with some longer dated stuff.

hope everyone else is doing well and for anyone else that also has uht milk stored it might be worth having a look to see the date on them.