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Spent most of yesterday afternoon/evening on my knees in the attic, putting down loft boards. Jen spent most of the time notching and cutting down boards, in the dark, in the back garden. This morning I'm aching, a bit scratchy and know that I'm still not finished! There's still about an hour's work left to do to fit, saw and screw down the final few boards but most of it is done.

I used Square Screws throughout which were a godsend. I didn't round off one screw no matter how many times I screwed the same screw in and back out again. Great investment.

I'm not usually one for posting warnings about potential scams but I had a close miss today. I walked into B&Q at lunchtime and some old guy dressed in orange asked me if I wanted decking. Fortunately, I got the first punch in and that was the end of that. Those less suspecting might not be so lucky.

I'm going to get an Electrisave Usage Meter from Amazon as it's £15.00 cheaper than from the Electrisave UK site.

Adam got himself an Electrisave over Christmas. It clips around the main electricity cable coming out of the meter and transmits usage information wirelessly to a desktop unit that you can move around the house. He reckons that with a bit of investigation work he's going to knock over 50% off his electricity bill as a result of knowing what costs what. The biggest culprit is devices on standby. A treadmill in the garage that looked turned off was costing 2p an hour on standby. Doesn't sound much but that's 48p per day which multiplied by 365 is £175.20 per year! That more that paid for the unit (about £65) and saved lots of greenhouse gas ;)

Got woken up by the house alarm at 1:30 this morning. The internal battery had given up the ghost and the system decided that I really really needed to know about it!! This has happened before so I knew that the quieter of the two internal sounders would go off approximately once an hour until the battery was replaced. Last time this happened I tried taking the battery out and popping the fuse to the panel only to find that the internal screamer siren has its own backup battery!

I've recently upgraded the batteries in the UPS unit in my office and therefore know that the batteries in the UPS looked similar to the battery in the alarm panel. So I whipped one of the batteries out of the UPS, held my breath and took the front panel off the alarm unit. Off went the screamer siren! A quick look at the voltage and amperage on the battery showed that they were the same so I connected it up, closed the panel and put my fingers in my ears. I should have crossed them too!! It fixed the problem (the second time - I hadn't pushed the connectors far enough home the first time!) but it's only postponing the issue. This weekend I'm going to perform an engineering reset on the panel so that I know what the engineering code is. That should make life a lot easier in the future.. oh and a lot quieter!!

Fitted an electronic immersion heater timer and thought it would be a good idea to turn off all the electricity. Alarms started going off left right and centre! The house alarm system started complaining as did the UPS in my office. Decided to turn it back on and just isolate the immersion heater circuit, testing the switch end before touching anything just in case.

Why am I fitting a timer onto my immersion tank? During the summer the upstairs part of my house is far too hot, something that I suspect is due to the hot water pipes running under the landing floor. The plan is to use the electric immersion instead of the gas boiler during the summer months. My main concern is that the power shower can drain the immersion tank quickly. I'm hoping that the immersion warms the whole tank..