Oh come all ye frugalers, joyful in December, oh come ye, oh come yea and chat

[babsmam]

New Fred, hope I've done it right I've never done one before.

Ah girls I went away for one day & we are up to 9 pages already?!!

Lilac, that's how I felt earlier, but you won't be long catching up.

Is a woodburner safe? I read about someone dying from having a bbq in a tent.

Do tepees have flues?.

I've camped in a yurt in the snow (not planned, it was Easter ffs!). We were very cosy but all our food froze during the night!
Our thermostat is in the hall near a radiator so not ideal and I don't think it works anyway, it is among many things in our house that need replacing!

girl yes! Know what you mean. my bff from uni was Essex. Can't not say laaaahhhnnnndahh nah. obviously my terribly well to do hyacinth bucket of a mother despairs and wishes I'd say it properly "Lundun" but I can't.

Dh has returned. And has brought me a candle from jo Malone. Yippee.

He's also retailed me with tails of his adventure. Someone went for dinner with clients, then for drinks, then had shots, then got kicked out of a bar in Covent Garden, then threw up at breakfast this morning, then again on the tube, then had to suffer through a 4 hour audit meeting. Then a flight home. not him though oh no

Someone dh is feeling very sorry for himself.

Em I love your jelly snakes. I did actually laugh out loud at that. :-)

Fluffy no we just have glass fibre insulation (10cm) and then floor boards on top. I moved mountains earlier in the autumn to try to get that problem solved and then couldn't. I think it would probably make more sense to insulate between the rafters that hold the tiles because we actually use our roof as part of the house. It seems that you can get sort of expanding blocks of stuff to push between the rafters and that is probably the best thing for us. I will look into it once I've got the current project done.

Girl See what you mean about the hormones. Normal long life lightbulbs probably okay. Good idea to have a sleep.

Unescorted Yes probably. I'm getting a bit confused by it all. The boiler is now on minimum and the heating on timed to come on twice. I googled and every man and his dog seems to know what the definitely-best-solution is. I've got my loop metre though, so I'll do some tests and find out what actually works.

Haha em!

Pay day today with my small pay rise and bonus I'm £100 up

It took me all night to catch up on the thread! Only kidding I slept too

Spent €3 yesterday on 8 Lindor chocs as a treat. Normally 9 hours driving means I buy lots of crap to eat but brought bananas & water in car & kept it to this.

Ds had a hospital check up & doesn't need to go back for 12 months 😀

Went to IKEA with dh got a free photo frame with my family card.
We ate dinner there costing €20 as opposed to about €35 anywhere else.
Diesel was €50 & €6.20 on tolls

Oops, Em! Hope he has recovered now. What a lovely gift he brought back.
Going to attempt work today although I still feel ropey. Should be NSD unless I decide I need medicinal chocolate...

£200 on black Friday, all done now.
Need to go food shopping £80 ish

Morning everyone!

It's Black Friddddday. I keep having to tell myself not to twitch. And that the universe won't implode if I don't buy something that I vaguely need that has just 10% discount today.

I may do some relaxing Christmas shopping online later though.

Just got my invoice for winter boat storage. wish it had been stolen. It's a pain in the ass

I've got a new scheme for the heating today. I have the boiler setting 1/3 from the bottom, the thermostat set to 12 degrees, with the heating on constant, and I am heating just the living room with an electric convection heater. This is just while we are in building site mode. I'll report back later.

I've twitched and put the heating on downstairs as I am trying to get some Christmas shopping done. Totally buying into Black Friday.

I've spent £250. That's quite a lot of the DC's pressies done. Some hoodies from Hollister, some Doc Martens each, Choccies and some tickets for a comedian.

I've just been looking again at my energy graphs, and I think maybe the problem is that we had the heating on overnight as well as during the day. The graph runs at 20p an hour all night as well as all day. If I assume that about 10 hours of that we were in bed sleeping, then that is £2 of heating that was effectively wasted, every night.

We'd got into the habit of running the heating at night to keep ds warm when he was small but now he's five years old and can sleep under a duvet like the rest of us, we could probably stop doing that.

It would be good if that was the problem, as it would be no inconvenience at all to turn the heating off at night.

This is the graph where we run the heating 24/7.

This is the graph when we just had the heating on for three bursts in the day, albeit in slightly warmer weather. (Perhaps 10 degrees instead of 5 degrees in the previous graph)

I have yet to do the test both ways when the temperature is the same outside.

I am trying not to buy into Black Friday, there is nothing I need but I would like a new dress.. I have bought a new mattress protector but that was just a needed purchase.

Husband pointed out we needed bread, we have two slices left and DS1 will be fed breakfast and lunch at nursery so won't need any. I've just dusted off the bread maker! I didn't want to buy bread till the shop comes on Monday, so this should tide us over and I have enough flour for another loaf. I've used the rapid setting and it doesn't look great tbh. I might try a different setting over the weekend and if I don't love it I'll list it on eBay or Facebook. Takes up a lot of space and this is the first time in over a year I've used it.

The difference in gas usage between the two systems above was nearly £3 a day. Yikes.

Good idea What. What brand is it?

I've had two breadmakers in the past. One worked flawlessly every time and the other made bread that resembled cheese.

This is a Kenneth with a nut dispenser. I don't know if I have ever had a good loaf from it.

There were two things that I was keeping an eye on during Black Friday. One item had been reduced by 10p and the other only offered free delivery for today only.

Also, we recently bought Amazon Prime. I'm going to request a refund because its just not suitable for us.

QuidCo gave me £27 to put back into my bank. But they didn't email me that the funds were available and I didn't get an app notification its a good job I checked the desktop version of the website.

at Jo Malone candle, hope DH someone recovers quickly. Doesn't sound like any of my DH's business trips when he was younger at all, absolutely not silly bugger learnt eventually

Have shocked myself. Actually went Black Friday shopping actual physical in town type shopping. T'is a slightly genteel town though so no bargain hungry hoardes.

Got DH's Christmas present, 2 wool and cashmere sweaters from Jeager for a little over £70, a bag that I want for future travelling rather than need was £59, also from Jeager. I was going to buy it elsewhere but the other shop has £85 bags with 20% off. Mine was £79 with 25% so I'm counting that as a bargain

Also spent £2.99 on Christmas crackers having cancelled the £5 ones from Sainsbo's.

I may look in the perfume shop after my coffee n GF brownie -£4- see if I can complete DD's presents.

I've had the heating on a lot, house is freezing without it and moving from Latin America I am really feeling it this year.

Disclaimer, I would have bought a bag at some point before Easter anyway.

My loop monitor just told me that I could save £350 a year by switching and that the other supplier would give me 3% interest on any over-payment, so I switched. This loop thing is really keeping me on my toes.

Weirdly, after I did my uSwitch change from SSE to OVO, the loop said I could save another £300 by switching back to SSE. It turns out that they have a new cheap 1 year fixed rate deal, so now I am on that.

The joy is that the loop machine did it's uswitch check again and says I am now on the cheapest tariff available. There is no better one. Woohoo!