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'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.

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!

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.