Charlie Nott<P>Many Thanks<P><P>Charlie Nott<P><P><a target=_blank href="http:www.giteshols.com">www.giteshols.com<A><P>

We have a 5 bed main house for us all the year around and 4 gites sleeping 26 persons in total. We have four 3000 litre fosses, which work very well (so far!).

We have similar results to Loiseau. I expect to be using my 2 phone lines (one for phone and one for fax/Internet) and DUN (modem dial up networking) for a little while yet. I'll just have to take an extra sip of wine between requesting a webpage and receiving it. Life could be so much worse! They have committed to a new mobile phone mast to frizz our brains though!

C'est la vie! Your connection speed is quite typical but it has little correlation with how well your ISP can send on your requests and responses to the webpage that you are visiting (like your bank). Even if you upgrade your modem your ISP may be having to deal with so high usage (throughput) rates that your increased connection speed has no effect nas your ISP is so busy. Just a word of caution.

I have also found that some PC's have connection problems. I have fitted the Peabird 56K/V92 PCI internal modem in a number of friends computers and the reliability of the connection and the speed has been excellent. The drivers work well for 98SE up to XP no problem. They are available for about 18 Euros from the company Internity either from their stores or from their website. The nearest store for me is in Trelissac (Perigueux) I use a website http://www.testmyspeed.com/speedtests/international.htm for checking the real download times of a modem and ISP and it is surprising how it varies during the day and weekday and which ISP you are using. Wanadoo and Neuf for instance are dreadfully slow and Tiscali is fast when using these tests on the same PC/modem at the same time of day.

More buy luck than judgement!!

Bon Chance I do hope so as Castorama are soooooo expensive!

Hi Bill I think my last order was June time or maybe a bit earlier.

It would be interesting to know if EDF say that 3 phase is more expensive than single phase. We use a 3 phase supply for our pool house (3 phase pool heater and pump) and also we split the load over our house and gites to try and give an even spread over the 3 phases. This means that no one phase is heavily loaded.

I ordered online and then their export department picked the order up.

I recently ordered a stack of materials from Screwfix which they delivered to me in the Dordogne within a week for a 10 pound charge. The weight of the materials must have been about 50 kg!

We are on 3 phase supply and not charged anything extra. I would be vary of your 2 oil filled radiators as these can guzzle electricity at an alarming rate. We use a wall mounted towel rail from BricoDepot that is rated at 50W. When we changed to tempo our bills dropped from 120 € per month to less than 100 € per month. On the red days we just don't use the dishwasher and washine machine.

Dear Paul With greatest respect I beg to differ. Under the latest release of NFC 15-100 it is recommended to install 2 circuits. One (Rangée inférieure) using a type A RCD and one (Rangée supérieure) using a type AC RCD. I have checked this recently with my Legrand rep and he concurs. I would never recommend anyone to wire sockets in 1.5mm. Surely this is a recipe for trouble, especially as people are using higher and higher power appliances (usually at the same time as they all try and dry their hair!). Therefore I always recommend that people wire to the safest possible standard and not the lowest common denominator. I did do a typo on the size of the MCB and you are right that 20A is recommended.  

This is scary. I am an electrical engineer and to hear recommendations that 1.5mm cable should be used for sockets (Prise de courant) is highly dangerous. Under the Promotelec regime (the best) then a maximum of 5 sockets are allowed (a double socket counts as one), the section is 2.5mm, it must be earthed with 2.5 mm cable and the breaker should be 25A MCB (disjoncteur) or 20A fuse (fusible). Also you must now split the circuits for Washing machines, Dishwashers, cookers, immersion heaters (i.e. anything that could get wet) onto a totally separate fuseboard and use a type A RCD (differentiel) on this circuit and a type AC RCD (differentiel) on your other circuits.

Are you looking for an English Version or a French version?

Try FranceOnecall at www.franceonecall.com If you fancy the North Dordogne instead then give us a call!

There is an online calculator available at http://www.muswell-hill.com/foxandco/pages/calculating_radiator_sizes.htm This gives both a finger in the air calculation for overall boiler size and a more precise calculator. It is designed for a UK house but would be close for a French house considering the winters here!

Deville definitely do a number of ranges with back boilers. We bought our back boiler stove from Villager UK via the local french agent. We chose it as it gave us the correct kilowatts and was aesthetically pleasing. We run it in tandem with our oil fired boiler.

I pay 13 Euro per month (inc TVA) for the second line and 25 Euros per month for unlimitted Internet tiscali access (I think this is now 30 Euros for new subscribers). As I live on the edge of the Bordeaux region with St. Emilion only just over an hour away the wine is usually good wherever we go!!

Satellite broadband is very expensive and has reliability problems. FT seems to be phasing out ISDN2 by increasing the prices (maybe they need the bandwidth at their exchanges to support ADSL!!??). I always question why people need Broadband. Are you likely to stream video or high quality audio? Are you working online to an office system? If not then at the moment, until ADSL does eventually arrive to us poor (or lucky) people in the sticks, take your time, get a second analogue line (PSTN) installed, subscribe to an unlimitted ISP and pour another glass of wine or put the kettle on (depending on the time of day!) when you hit a slow website.

The search facility in XP is very powerful and is available as basic or can be switched to advanced. When in advanced mode it can be configured by the user to look at the file system in a variety of ways. I am glad that you have found your file!  

Are the walls also suffering from damp?

I have found the cheapest by far for buying all plumbing and electrical items, including boilers, is BricoDepot. They are part of the Kingfisher group. They are similar to B&Q Depot/Warehouse stores. Just please ensure that your installation is thoroughly checked before you turn anything on and don't take any chances. We have an oil-fired system that we run in tandem with a Villager wood burner that has a back boiler. This is a fantastic combination as we have access to plenty of wood to burn and cuts our fuel bills down by 60%!!  

What do you need the unibond for as it has many uses and often there is a specialist product on the market that will meet your needs far better?

From what I have read on Portage it should work for most one man operations. You send your client an invoice for the total amount that you wish to bill them when your payment terms say you should. This could be an hourly rate or a fixed price or a milestone payment. The payee for the payment though is not you! The payee is the Portage company. Once the funds are cleared at the Portage they will then pay you the agreed percentage (typically 50%). The net amount that you receive includes their commission and all your taxes already deducted. Also if you have any legitimate expenses (travel and materials) then you supply these to the Portage as well. Some Portage companies seem to pay you what is owing on a monthly basis and some pay you when the cleared funds arrive. If you go to the website mentioned earlier in the forum at the anpe and in the top right hand corner there are 2 links to the federations that the Portages are associated with. They have lists and addresses of their members. Find your nearest ones and call them until you find someone that speaks english (or write to them). I would still find an accountant to ask his advice. Beware the unscrupulous accountant though who may not recommend Portage as it is less work for them!!!! When we moved over here we used PKF in Guersney as they were all dual language and understood both tax systems. I communicated with them by email, phone and fax and never needed to actually met them. I used them heavily the first year and then in subsequent years they have been available on an ad-hoc basis at an hourly rate (usually by sending them an email with the question). One of the directors Charles Parkinson has also written an excellent book Taxation in France a Foreign Perspective which is available from them. I have no relationship with this company except as a satisfied customer. It would be interesting to know how you get on.

In the post this morning I have jsut had this years Tax D'Hab and guess what it is now gone up to 567 Euros. As you say in our first year here we had all expenses and no income. Last year we actually managed an income. I'm still trying to work how the arrived at the figure!