XLeblanc

Hi, Did you ever get your wood planed. I have a Robland D630 thicknesser. If it helps I could put it through for you. It will plane 300mm thick by 630mm across so it should be fine. I am near Azerables. Cheers

Thanks for the information above, very helpful. So what sort of money ball park would it cost to get someone like you to manage the installation of the tank install the pipework to the boiler, brazed offcourse, Fit the boiler, DDS valve and get the test done by the inspector. Would a plumber take on such a job or would they only be interested in a full installation job? Lastly where are you based? Cheers

"Note in particular that the copper gas supply, due to the pressure must be brasure forte, soft solder is not acceptable" My comment was in relation to the above statment. I would not expect that the tank pressure would be available inside the house. Why are most things more expensive in France? Things were more expensive before the fall in the value of the pound never mind now.

Thanks all for the replies. It is mentioned above that the regulations should be followed and copper pipe work from the tank should be brazed due to the pressures involved. Am I to assume from that. That the pressure reduction / regulation is achieved at the boiler itself so that you then have High pressure gas inside your house? Normally (in the UK) gas boilers rely on only 21mbar of pressure to operate as that is what the pre-meter regulator reduces the mains supply to prior to entry to your house. Is there any obvious reason that I could be missing that a vaillant condensing boiler in the UK is £1000 whilst in France it could be €3000 or more depending on the particular Highwayman you buy it from. Or am I missing something fundemental? I do not mind paying for a service or product so long as I feel I am not being ripped off and sadly during our five years living in France nearly everything I have bought or artisans who have done work for me have left me feeling this way. Is it just me? I have worked on intrumentation and analysers fitted to pipework on and offshore which has fed straight into the UK gas network Pipes that have supplied a high percentage of gas for the whole of the UK, St Fergus gas Terminal, Theddlethprpe Gas terminal and Bacton . This pipework contained gas at pressures not many domestic plumbers would have come across. The regulations and competance levels involved in this type of work far exceed for obvious reasons the regulation of Corgi in the uk and whoever regulates such installations in France. So I do know a little about gas, it's properties and it's dangers. Cheers

My Wife and I are leaving France due to my work commitments / promotion. Therefore the purpose of the house we currently live in there will change soon from main residence to Holiday home. We will visit as often as we can and whilst visiting for this short period we do not want to have to stoke the central heating boiler with logs.   I have therefore decided to fit a Gas Combi boiler and an underground LPG tank in the back garden of the house.   I have fitted a few Gas Boilers in the Uk and as such have a bit of experience in doing so. I am also paid in pounds sterling so sourcing one there makes economic sense.   What I need to know is, are there any Combi LPG gas boilers that are available in the UK and France so I can buy a model which technically could have been purchased in France.   Is the LPG pressure outlet of the tank suitable for a UK sourced boiler without replacing the regulator.   I would source a boiler in France but frankly I am sick of paying over inflated prices for goods there.   Cheers

Is it true that if I were to sell my van and transfer the ownership to the buyer the van would need to have eighteen months minimum CT? It has one year left currently. Doesn't seem right anybody know what the deal is? Cheers

As we are moving abroad with my job our house in France will no longer be used as our main residence. My wife has decreed that if we are not living there she is not prepared to fetch logs from the barn during the short spells we will be at the house so the intention is to replace it with an LPG combi boiler. So I need you guys on this forum to tell me where the best place to advertise our green solid fuel stanley superstar cooker / Boiler. This is a very heavy cast iron aga type beast. I intend selling it with all the flue pipe (stainless) pumps and an indirect cylinder. Cheers Craig

I am moving my family out to Doha to join me there in May. I intend shipping our car out in the next few weeks. I had a great deal of difficulty finding anyone in France who does this so I am using a company in London. They have mentioned the documants I will need to enable them to get an export certificate. I was thinking I may need a French Export certificate to show the UK shipping agent. Does anyone know where I may get one or if such a thing exists? Many thanks Craig

We would like to have our garden looked after while we are away. our postcode is 23160. If anyone is interested they must be fully registered and insured and have their own equipment. We will be at the house early April so could arrange to meet prospective gardeners then to discuss any remedial work to bring it up to standard and then decide how much time it will take to maintain it. Cheers Craig

Thanks all the original post did not ask about tax but cottisations. I now realise that there is also a tax implications which need to be considered.

From what I am led to believe from people I have worked abroad with previously who worked for Schneider that if your earnings are earned abroad and that you are not resident in France for more than 183 days in the tax year then you are not taxed on your earnings. Just like it would be in England only England is 90 days. If there is any likely hood that I will be taxed in France then I will simply go back to being UK resident and fall under the UK ninety day rule it is that simple. I am not going to have anyone benfitting from me having to work in a dump if I can help it and why should I. As far as the health cover goes then I will simply take out private insurance for us all. We could open a B&B as our house in Brittany was operating as a B&B prior to us buying it. Cheers

I am about to start a new contract whereby I will work in Qatar on an eight week on two week off basis. I will be paid through a UK limited company gross. As I am not in the Uk at all hardly and in France considerably less than the 183 days which is the French criteria for tax free status. I should not pay tax in either country. Some people will probably find this disgusting but it isn't a great deal of fun working and living in some of the places I do so there has to be some benefit. My wife and two children live in France permanently and we are covered for health purposes up until January 2009 by virtue of an E106 form. We have Carte Vitalle's and are in the French system. Presumeably this will run out in January and we need to find some way of keeping our cover up in France. I have as far as I can work out three choices:- Pay 8% (think that is the figure I have seen quoted) of my salary for health care, which would work out at nearly €13,000 per year which I feel is too much. This is only based on the start up hours for the project so this number would rise as the project progresses. Pay Private Medical Insurance which works out at about €5,000 per year which is fair I would say. My only problem is that France as a whole would not benefit from this and only the insurance company would. Third choice which is my favourite all though it may mot be legal. Start a business run for the sole purpose of providing my family with Healthcare in France. In that, possibly run a B&B which charges me say €7,000 euros to stay everytime I come home for two weeks. We simply declare this and pay the cottisations based around the figure we decide. Then money is paid to a French pension, national debt and health cover and my wife can use the rest for housekeeping. Would this work or is there something that I have overlooked. Cheers Craig

For "Gods" sake this is all that is wrong with people living in France who originated from the UK. I have worked all over the world. "Brits" British. "Pakis" Pakistanis", "Krauts" Germans, "Kloggies" Dutch, "Yanks" Americans, "Noggies" Norwegians nobody has hangups with this terminology. The only time this becomes an issue with people who have led insular lives. I am Scottish or "Jock" but unoffended by that name. If I said I was English where I live in France I would be not be treated so well. Go Figure! This post was about people moving from Australia to France and what problems they will have when they get here. Forget the I failed and as such you are more than likely to do so. Learn the language prior to your arrival and work hard when you do arrive and you will be ok. "What is impossible for some people is a walk in the park for others" Regards Jock

I think the French problem goes far deeper than that. It is not just shops, it can be the whole attitude of complete organisations and the fact they seem dissinterested in living up to their contractual responsibilities. I recently finished a large project in Kazakhstan. I was working for the client who are a very large American oil company. As part of the project a large French company based in Grenoble had been contracted to design, deliver and commission an electrical control and power management system. Which they attempted to do. During commissioning we experienced all manner of problems. Huge time delays in starting equipment and similar time delays in the feedback from the control system confirming a start. They had a raft of specialists on site, none of whom seemed keen to leave there cups of coffee and deal with problems. Getting them to address the problems was a nightmare. Bearing in mind we were trying to commission and start up a 500, 000 barrel per day facility. This went on for some time. Eventually a meeting was called and we were told that we were going to redesign the control system using other manufacturers equipment. This was kept secret from the French company and when the new equipment arrived onsite two American managers flew to Grenoble and told the French company their fortune. All of the French employees were sent home and we intsalled and commissioned the new system. All this at a cost of over $20,000,000. What the French failed to realise is that the plant once up and running would make $65,000,000 per day and that the oil company was not going to wait around for them or accept they were French and in that they had a different work ethic to everyone else on the project. Another slightly different example. I got a new mobile phone from a French provider and it broke. I went back to the shop who would have nothing to do with the problem and insited I should contact the repairer directly which I did. I was told to post it to them at my cost. They repaired the phone which took a month. All of the time I was without a phone and when it came back it had no Sony Ericsson sticker on the front of the phone as they had to remove it to get at the screws. Maybe I am just expencting too much of people!

I use a product made by trend which covers your whole face so you don't get crap in your eyes either. It is however a bit expensive just to sand your beams. I think I paid about one hunderd and twenty pounds for it.

We currently have a house, large barn and four and a half acres of land. It has been our primary residence for four years now. We recently bought another house in different area in France and intended selling our current one. The climate for selling the house is obviously not great right now and the farmer next door has asked if we want to sell the barn and the land. We have done a lot of work on the house but nothing with the barn. So from an analytical point of view there would be no capital gain on the value of the barn and it would be worth virtually the same as the percentage of the original purchase price. I would be grateful to hear from anyone with experience in similar circumstances. Cheers 

"However, if the original questioner's work is shore-based in Paris, for a French company, which it appears it may well be, it is probably stretching the point too far to expect offshore workers' concessions." I have re-read my original post at no point did I ever mention offshore workers concessions. I am an Engineer and as such can work on and offshore aswell as in different industries should I choose to do so. The work in Paris is office based at Stade De France and the project is an onshore project for Algeria. I never got any concessions whilst working offshore so would be astounded if it were possible in an office in Paris. I merely inquired what the company type in France was called which, is similar to a UK limited company. Home tomorrow so it doesn't matter in any case as I can look up the information myself.

Does this include a house boat on the Seine as the original post referred to working in Paris. Cheers

Ernie **** the telecomms guy? I have spoke to you on the phone when you called to speak to Alan Colenut. Have you heard from Alan lately as he is in France too. My forum name came from the Alba as after I relocated to France Mal Sharp renamed me Xavier LeBlanc which is what used to come over the tannoy. Cheers

Yes it is a contract job. I don't think I would like to be employed in France unless it was working for myself as the pay is not so good. First time I have been in Aberdeen for a couple of years as I have been out in Kazakhstan and in Stavanger Norway before coming here three weeks ago. One way or another I don't plan on being here long. Off down to TGT Theddlethorpe for a site visit  and home to France from East Midlands on Thursday for five days. So I am looking forward to that very much. I assume you work offshore. I worked for Chevron on the Alba from 2001 until 2006. Cheers

We have lived in France for nearly five years and during this time I have worked in the UK and overseas as an Engineer in the oil industry. I have a very good chance of being offered a job in Paris in the next few weeks. I therefore need to find out how working and being paid in France could be achieved. I did the mandatory course at the Chambre De Metier to start a business in France. During this course I remember one company structure which was very similar to a UK limited company in that I could pay myself a fair wage wage through the company, pay cottisations and tax based on this wage and then take additional money out of the company and only pay the French equivelent of advanced corporation tax.  I have the paperwork at home from the course but unfortunately I am stuck in Aberdeen and as such have no access to my notes. Hopefully somebody can help. Cheers  

Can you see the pictures as I could last night but cant at work today for some reason.  No I am no professional. I have a very good friend in the UK who is however and I have learned a bit from him over the years. I work as a control systems engineer in the oil industry. It all started with the decision to buy a few bits and pieces of machinery to make my own windows etc. I bought a sawbench with a moulder on the back of it. The small planer and the dimension saw and a small roll around extraction unit. Whilst buying this I was introduced to a guy called Terry from Chichester. He had been working for a dealer who had died and the guys wife had asked Terry to sell all of the equipment. This guy also ran a sharpening and grinding service so there was an abundance of moulder tooling lying around. The guy was a dealer for Moretens and Robland but also bought and sold second hand equipment of any manufacturer. I had what I needed and was happy with that. I did however keep in touch with Terry as he was collecting moulder tooling for me. Every time I spoke to him the equipment that was there was becoming cheaper and cheaper. For example I picked up a Moretens PH260 four sided moulder with a pile of brand new blocks and the Robland D630 thicknesser which was also brand new with all of the options for  £6500 pounds. This was ten grand less than it should have cost. So I then came back to France and sold some of the original bits and replaced them with new equipment where it was available. I then thought I would run it as a business as I was working month on month off at the time. But that has not happened yet. The lathe is a prototype made by Startrite. I do not think that it went into production. I have not acually used it yet but can not wait to see how it performs. It can take a sheet type template or an actual spindle in the back which the cutter follows  when you set the tool and pull up the lever. As as said when I get home from Aberdeen I will try and get started and take some more pictures. Cheers

My lathe is quite big although it does have a rest and I have bought a set of turning chisels and I can not wait to give it a go. I think it can turn around 1.8m in lenth and probably about 300mm in diameter. Cheers

[IMG]http://i516.photobucket.com/albums/u324/XLBtoolate/IMG_0069.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i516.photobucket.com/albums/u324/XLBtoolate/IMG_0071.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i516.photobucket.com/albums/u324/XLBtoolate/IMG_0196.jpg[/IMG] Here are a few pictures of my new kitchen ceiling / upper bedroom floor all in oak and machined using Ryobi chain morticer and Makita 355mm frame saw. I am stuck in Aberdeen right now but will post more pictures of the workshop and machinery when I get back home in the next few weeks. Cheers

[IMG]http://i516.photobucket.com/albums/u324/XLBtoolate/bed.jpg[/IMG] Here is a bed my dad calls the "Desperate Dan Bed" I made it when I was having a go at timber framing. Ubustable no matter how rough your sex life is. Cheers