A rant about plumbers
Why is it so hard to get a plumber? Why is it just accepted that you make an appointment for a plumber to come round, then they just don’t turn up? Why did I waste my time leaving work early today?
Seriously, I’m sat here with a crap bathroom and many thousands of pounds sat in my bank account waiting for a plumber to take it off my hands in exchange for fitting a new one. If you are a plumber and want more information then please contact me at jon.evans@pobox.com. I live in Banbury, Oxfordshire.
Update 24/09/2003: the plumber came round on Monday, and if his quote is OK we should be able to get the job done next month sometime. So we might be OK. Plumbers, you can stop the barrage of email now (none received as of this posting…).
Update 06/08/2005: As I’m importing all of my posts from my old site, I thought I’d add a comment to this one. We did end up getting the bathroom done by this plumber, and it cost us over £5,000. The workmanship was utter crap, and I ended up removing every bathroom fitting installed by the plumber and installing it all again myself. Moral: DIY is the way to go.
Air Conditioning
It must be the start of summer here in the UK, because the temperature has hit 26° C for the last couple of days. The downside is that the air conditioning in my car can’t cope with it at all. Last year it seemed fine. My initial diagnosis is leaking heater valves, which mean that engine coolant is always going through the heater matrix even with the valves closed.
I’ve bought a new heater valve unit (photo to follow…) and hopefully I’ll find the time to fit it this weekend.
Comment spam
Ho hum. It seems that in every sphere of life, there is scum. I’ve just spent 1/2 an hour deleting comment spam. Sorry if you read any of it and found it offensive. I’ve changed the site configuration so that you have to register before you can post. Another example of idiots making life difficult for everyone else.
Car now fully re-assembled
How did that manage to take so long? I managed to get it all back together this weekend. First job was to install the siren, which I managed to fit by the bulkhead, secured by one of the bolts for the bonnet latch. Finally I completed wiring up the speakers to my head unit
I routed new speaker cable to each front footwell speaker, and from there another length to each dashboard speaker. I’ve not bothered to connect up the door speakers as one of them has broken anyway. Each footwell speaker is a Rockford Fosgate Punch, installed by the previous owner. The dashboard speakers are the smallest no-name 40WPC speakers I could find when I bought them about a year ago. I recovered all the old crossover networks when I took the old installation out, but I only re-used the filters for the dashboard speakers.
It now sounds pretty good, to my ears anyway!
Progress in the alarm installation
Over the last couple of days I’ve managed to make some progress with the alarm. This afternoon the remote start worked for the first time! There’s something a bit creepy about watching a car start itself with nobody sat in it.
I’ve still got a few things left to wire in:
- Parking lights (they flash when you arm or disarm, and light up when the engine is running)
- The alarm sounder (I also need to find a space for it under the bonnet)
- The door open switches
- The boot and bonnet switches
- The vibration sensor (needs mounting on the bodywork somewhere)
- Boot open solenoid (needs some thought…)
- Probably some other stuff
There is no remote boot release on my car, but I’ve got a spare solenoid that might work… that’s the last job though when the rest of it is installed.
