New Smart Meters Followed Shortly by New Broadband Provider

CSI_Yorkshire

Gerry1 said:

So you don't bother to insure your house because the risk of fire, flood, storm damage etc is so low?

I insure against things where I think the cost of the insurance is appropriate for the risk it is mitigating against.  I don't, for example, have boiler insurance (because cost outweighs benefit) but I do have car insurance (because the benefit outweighs the cost).

That's precisely how risk assessment works.

Do you keep twelve months of food and water in your house just in case the water main gets cut and all the shops close?

Qyburn

lohr500 said:

Qyburn said:

Our local authority is buying up a stock of satellite phones for exactly this sort of emergency, funded by SSEN. That was just mentioned during a risk and resilience meeting, they didn't go into details but the implication was that these would be made available to the community, not solely for their staff.

Get ready for another £100 on the council tax for everyone who lives in your local authority area then 

A bit of scaremongering I think. As I said, this is funded by SSEN drawn from the £1m allocated to our LA. However to sanity check your maths, if that money came instead from Council Tax alone it would amount to around £8.50 per household.

But back to the point, during the power cuts we often do lose mobile and/or landline comms. I don't remember losing all at once, but at one time we lost all carriers from our nearest mast, and O2 was lost from all other masts in the area. The outages lasted a couple of days after power was restored.

badmemory

It does however seem counterintuitive to teminate something which may provide serious benefits in view of a problem.  But you wouldn't expect any sort of backup in a 3rd world country, so it is what it is.

Gerry1

CSI_Yorkshire said:

Gerry1 said:

So you don't bother to insure your house because the risk of fire, flood, storm damage etc is so low?

Do you keep twelve months of food and water in your house just in case the water main gets cut and all the shops close?

That would obviously be excessive, but I do keep some bottles of tap water in the garage.  The cost is zero, but it could prove literally vital if the hopeless South East Water company does another Wadhurst or if its supply becomes contaminated.

debitcardmayhem

CSI_Yorkshire said:

Gerry1 said:

So you don't bother to insure your house because the risk of fire, flood, storm damage etc is so low?

I insure against things where I think the cost of the insurance is appropriate for the risk it is mitigating against.  I don't, for example, have boiler insurance (because cost outweighs benefit) but I do have car insurance (because the benefit outweighs the cost).

That's precisely how risk assessment works.

Do you keep twelve months of food and water in your house just in case the water main gets cut and all the shops close?

Plus it is a legal requirement , I remember having a friendly argument with a friend who worked in the insurance industry and would not have the point I made about their mis-selling life insurance , surely it should be death insurance, totally off topic I know.