Category Archives: Home & Garden

Hive Discount Code – British Gas

Discount Codes, Home & Garden, Lifestyles, Technology,

So British Gas have a fantastic system called Hive which enables you to control your heating system from your phone (or the thermostat). Usually this costs £250 for the product including installation but if you are looking for a Hive discount code then we have one here.

Hive Discount Voucher – Black Friday Week 2018

If you thought last year’s deal was good then this year it has got even better. If you want to get the Hive heating and hot water system (including professional installation if required) – you can get the whole deal for £148.99 including installation or £108.99 without the installation included (i.e. you install it yourself or get someone to install it for you). Grab the discount price here.

Hive Discount Voucher – Black Friday Week 2017

This year sees the best price so far for getting the Hive system (including professional installation if required) – you can get the whole deal for £159.99 including installation or £119.99 without the installation included (i.e. you install it yourself or get someone to install it for you). Grab the discount price here.

Hive Discount 4 – Black Friday 2016

So there is another great discount on the Hive heating control system for Black Friday 2016 and this time you can get the heating and hot water system for only £124.99 – I think this may be the lowest price so far – but obviously this price will not last long – get the discount price here.

HIVE DISCOUNT 3 – March 2016


Currently you can get the Hive version 2 system for heating and hot water with installation for the discount price of £185.78 – click the image on the left for more info.

HIVE DISCOUNT 2

Currently (February 2016) Amazon have a discount on the full Hive heating system including installation – reducing the price of £250 (which is the current price on the British Gas site) to £203.58.

We do not know how long this Hive discount price will last for but it seems that there are occasional discounts being given for the Hive system on Amazon so click through on the link below to show the currently available price.

HIVE DISCOUNT 1

OK so this Hive discount code only applies for Black Friday – 27 November 2015. If we come across any other codes then we will add them here. Currently you can get a £70 discount on the Hive heating control system from British Gas and believe it or not it is being sold on Amazon for Black Friday.

Here is the link to the reduced price Hive system. Even with the discount it shows the full price below but click through on 27th November and you will get the discounted price of £179. If you click on the link after the discount period is passed it may not work or it may just come up with the standard price:

 

With Hive you can use an app on your smartphone to change your heating while you are out. You can also have different settings during the day so that you are in total control of your heating system. It also has a setting for automatic frost protection so that you can leave your heating on the lowest possible setting without the danger of burst pipes while you are away.

This Hive discount code offers a significant saving on the installation of the system and it could pay for itself in energy savings in a couple of years.

How Do You Clean Paving Slabs?

Home & Garden, Lifestyles, Property

How Do You Clean Paving Slabs?

So last year I bought a property that needed a lot of work doing on it. I did most of the work inside the house and a bit of work on the garden. One of the big problems of the garden was the fact that there were a lot of paving slabs out there and most of them were covered in algae.

I thought it would be very costly (and not really necessary) to replace all of the paving slabs with new ones so I decided to try and find a way to clean them up. Over a few weeks I tried different methods to try and get rid of the algae and general staining that the paving slabs had accumulated over the years.

Things I Tried

Scrubbing with a hard broom and patio cleaner did give some results but not as much as I wanted. It was also a lot of hard work!
Scrubbing with a hard broom and patio cleaner did give some results but not as much as I wanted. It was also a lot of hard work!

I bought some liquid patio cleaner that you mix with water and used this with a stiff yard brush to try and get rid of the algae. Although this did help a bit and the paving slabs did get a bit cleaner they were still nowhere near where I wanted them to be. Added to this it was really hard work to scrub all of the paving slabs since I had so many!

The second thing that I tried was bleach. When I had searched for remedies for cleaning paving stones this was one thing that came up quite a lot. I was a bit hesitant as it did not seem very environmentally friendly to use bleach but I gave it a go, watered down, also with a stiff brush. Again I did get some limited results but still nothing major that I was happy with. Some people advised to use neat bleach but I didn’t really think that this would be a good thing to use in the garden, particularly as I had quite a lot to do.

The Best Thing to Clean Paving Slabs

So, as I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do next, my friend said that she would lend me her pressure washer. I had thought about using one but I wasn’t sure that I would get any better results that using the cleaners that were specially made for this job and a large amount of elbow grease!

Boy was I wrong. The moment I started cleaning with the pressure washer the slabs started to come up clean, almost like new! It took me about 5 minutes to clean each paving slab but the results were really incredible. It almost looks like I have replaced the patio.

Using the pressure washer brought the paving slabs almost back to new.
Using the pressure washer brought the paving slabs almost back to new.

The pressure washer works off your water supply and a clicklock hose attachment. Ideally you will need an outside tap but if you can fix the attachment on a kitchen tap then you should be able to get this to work. Turn the water on once the hose is attached and then plug the washer on and turn it on. It will make quite a bit of noise while it is working. A pressure washer usually has a couple of settings as to how the water comes out, I chose the most concentrated jet to do my slabs as this seemed to give the best results.

However, one thing you need to be aware of is that if you have any lose mortar in between the slabs there is a danger of this getting blown out by the jetwash. Also, wear old clothes as you can get sprayed with wet earth if there is mud between the paving stones.

Anyway, check out the pictures and the video and you will see what an amazing transformation can be made by using a pressure washer to clean your paving slabs.

You can buy pressure washers in local hardware stores or else there are a lot of options available on Amazon – US and UK:

 
 

How Do I Back Up My Computer?

Computers & Electronics, Home & Garden, Internet, Technology,

I think a lot of people live in a world where they know the chances of their computer crashing are significant and yet they still put off backing up their data. I think in most cases this is due to their lack of knowledge of how easy it can be to back up your data. I know people who occasionally add the files in their documents folder onto a CD or thumb drive but it is not very frequent and chances are if their laptop or PC were to fail they would lose data for sure.

I myself have had no less than 1 PC and 2 Laptops die on me completely, without a hope of recovery, in the last 3 years. The first laptop died due to someone else trying to fix something by removing the operating system and not being able to replace it. I stupidly had not backed up my data before allowing them to do this, my bad. The 2nd one, the PC, died a few months later, it was a few years old and I had started slowly copying the data over but had not finished backing up before it went. Lucky for me I had a friend who, with a lot of effort, managed to rescue the data from both machines. So if you are wondering how do I back up my computer then I’ll tell you the easy way that I do it (although there are other ways but for someone who doesn’t want to delve into lots of settings this one is simple),

Set Up An Easy Plug and Play Back Up

And so it came that said friend decided that I needed an easy back up facility and bought me a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Drive with I think 500 Gb of space. Now I am sure that there are other easy plug and go back up drives available but as I have used this one I wanted to share my experience with it. Basically it has software installed that you can just run and once you have that installed, every time you plug the drive in afterwards it will automatically detect and new or changed files and back them up to the drive.

That is as simple as it is – plug it in and it will back up for you. For someone like me, who never quite gets round to doing a manual backup, it is a godsend. And that was shown to be the case when my 3rd computer, a laptop that was only about 18 months old, also died. Lucky for me that just the day before I had plugged in the backup (I had actually plugged it in to look for a file from one of my old computers that was stored on it but of course as I did that it backed up too).

So really, for less than 100 dollars (on Amazon anyway) you can have a very easy back up system that is suitable for any technophobe to use and really is the simplest back up out there as far as I am concerned. Don’t leave it until it is too late – it is not always possible to recover data from dead computers or can be expensive so save yourself the worry and trouble by getting a back up now.

You can check out the GoFlex drive on Amazon US and the equivalent in the UK below:

 

The Easiest Dessert Ever!

Food & Drink, Home & Garden, Lifestyles, Recreation,

This really is the quickest and best tasting dessert in my humble opinion! Anyone can make it and look like a great cook.

Really quick, easy and tasty dessert!

I made up this recipe a short while ago when I wanted to do some individual desserts for the adults at my son’s birthday party. It had to be something quick and easy as I had loads of other stuff to prepare and I was running short of time! What I came up with was not only simple but also really tasty, easy to make in small or large quantities but also made use of the old baby food jars I had saved for just such an occasion!

dessert-ingredientsYou can also make this dessert in ramekins, old creme brulee dishes (you know the glass ones that you sometimes get when you buy them) or just in any small bowls you might have. You could probably do a large one in a flan dish too but I haven’t tried that yet.

What you need:

  • butter (optional)
  • digestive biscuits
  • yoghurt
  • squirty cream

Quantities obviously depend on how many you are going to make but you need about a small knob of butter, 1 digestive biscuit  and about 4 large teaspoons of yoghurt per serving, plus a squirt of cream.

How to make it – well there are 2 ways, the quick way and the really quick way!

digestives and butterWell the really quick way is to crumble a digestive biscuit up into the pot you are going to serve it in. The slightly less quick way is to put a small knob of butter in the microwave for 10 seconds and mix the crumbled digestive into that. if you are making a batch, melt about an ounce of butter in the microwave or on the hob and add half a packet of crushed digestives to that. Put the biscuit mixture into the bottom of the dish and press it down. If you have used butter you may want to put this in the fridge for an hour but you don’t have to as it tastes just as good if you don’t. 🙂

yeo lemon curdNext step is to choose your yogurt – basically any flavour will do but may favourite to use for this is Yeo Valley Lemon Curd Yoghurt – it makes the end result taste similar to a lemon meringue pie. But really, any flavour will do as the end result is just like a cheesecake too.

biscuits and yoghurtAdd your yoghurt into your pot – if you are using the baby food jars then add until it’s just over half full so that you can still put the lid on for transportation if required.

baby-food-jar-dessertThen just squirt some cream on top and it’s done! The beauty of using the baby food jars is that you can see the layers of the dessert through the sides, and of course you can transport a bulk load in a box if you have all the lids too. If you want to do this as a desert at a dinner party then use ramekins or small glass pots to look even better.

Great use of old baby food jars for a dessert
Use baby food jars with lids for easy transportation if you are taking these desserts to another venue.

How Much is the Average House in England?

Home & Garden, Property

With average house prices increasing at a steady rate, the average price of a house was just over £195,000 this week (June 2015). But what exactly can you get for £195,000 and what is an average house? We checked out various areas to see what the price of an average house could buy…

houseEast Anglia – prices varied quite a bit depending on if you were looking in towns or coastal areas and also how far away from London you looked. £195,000 in East Anglia could buy you a 2 bedroom flat in Norwich City centre, a 4 bedroom townhouse in Peterborough, a 3 bedroom refurbished bungalow in Whittlesey or a 3 bedroom semi in Stowmarket. So £195,000 could actually give you a reasonable choice of properties in this area.

North East – £195,000 could buy you a 3 bedroom detached house in Nether Edge Sheffield, a 3 bedroom semi in Howden, East Yorkshire or a 2 bedroom apartment in Leeds City Centre. So prices are a little bit similar to East Anglia but you will also find quite a few spots where you can find much cheaper property.

North West – for £195,000 you could buy a 4 bedroom detached house in Fleetwood, near Blackpool, a 3 bedroom semi in Nantwich, Cheshire or a 2 bedroom apartment in Manchester City Centre.

Midlands – in the Midlands you could buy a 2 bedroom semi in Stratford-upon-Avon, a 4 bedroom townhouse in Kettering, a 3 bedroom detached in Oldbury, West Midlands or a 2 bedroom flat in Nottingham.

London – Interestingly when I started this research I thought that I would have nothing to put in the London section! However, you can buy property in London for £195,000 and the selection includes – a garage in Knightsbridge (OK not exactly a habitable property!), and a selection of 1,2 bedroom and studio flats around the outskirts of London including Greenwich, Catford, Wanstead, Wembley and Walthamstow. The majority of property avaiable at this price was in the east and south east of London so if you are looking to buy in London on a small budget those might be better areas to focus on. The map bel;ow shows the distribution of properties between £190-200k in the London area available in June 2015.

London Property £190-200k June 2015
London Property £190-200k June 2015

South West – the South West also covers quite a wide area so a big variety of prices but £195k can still get you some good property. You could buy a 2 bedroom terraced house in Plymouth, a 3 bedroom town house in Taunton, a 1 bedroom apartment in Newquay,  or a 3 bedroom semi detached in Paignton.

South East – In the South East, once again as you would expect in a London commuter belt, there is a bit less choice for your £195k. You could buy a 1 bedroom flat in Redhill, a 3 bedroom end of terrace in Deal, Kent, a 2 bedroom park home in Hailsham, East Sussex or a 2 bedroom flat in Eastbourne.

So, looking at the research, £195k would in fact buy you a pretty average home (if we call a 3 bed semi an average home) over the majority of England. It is only really once you get to London and the South East that you won’t get anywhere near as much for your money for £195k and you will be looking for flats in London and flats or terraced houses in the South East (if you are lucky!).