ssomon
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Posts posted by ssomon
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There used to be an annoying insect buzzing around this forum, which I fear has returned.
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Brico Depôt have the best prices for building materials around here, and offer delivery - a link for details is at the bottom of each page.
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Maybe add some guy ropes at the ends of the ridge, to stabilise it and stop it shaking itself to bits in the wind?
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Since your garden sounds like it's a continuing work in progress, you'd better put it in a bl00dy big pot on a trolley.
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One day l'Academie will realise that C18 French is not adequate for C21, cannot cope with modern life, and that whatever far-fetched new words they invent to replace the foreign ones they dislike rarely catch on, as the "bad" words are already too extensively used.
In any case, there are probably just as many French words used (or misused) in everyday English, which doesn't really bother anyone in the UK.
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Maybe they should leave it in the potable water?
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17 hours ago, NormanH said:
At lunchtime today for "la Fête de la Truffe":
That should take care of the IBS!
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My wife and I have OAP's from both the UK and Spain, each for a similar period of work in each country.
When we first claimed, the total of both our UK pensions, converted into Euros, was roughly equal to the total from Spain, but now there is a significant difference.
Last year, the total of our Spanish pensions was 68% higher than that from the UK.
The rot set in for our UK pensions when, instead of the expected annual increase in 1997, Gordon Brown introduced the Winter Fuel Allowance but did not increase pensions; the value of UK pensions paid outside the UK has fallen ever since as the WFA payments increased. For 2022 we expect this to continue.
We just received our January Spanish pension payments, and were pleasantly surprised to find our total has increased by 26.6%!
This is because the predicted inflation rate used to calculate pensions for 2021 was lower than the actual rate, so the shortfall for last year of 1.6% has been paid as a lump sum. Part of the increase is due to the 2.5% increase in pensions for this year.
What a contrast to what is happening in the UK.
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On 13/01/2022 at 20:28, anotherbanana said:
There has already been an outcry by the Academie Francaise who think the cards should be in French alone. Given that Zemmour has been ranting about banning the use of English in the EU I wonder if printing the cards only in French might be a politically expedient move..
Seems he's a few straws short of a bale. Doesn't know that they speak English in Ireland.
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I'm quite peed off with the unvaccinated myself, and I couldn't care less if they get peed off, or who wants to make them peed off.
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Once the igniter has turned off, the exhaust blower and feed motor continue running. Tthe air circulation blower starts once the heat exchanger has warmed up enough, plus there is a control module and a few lights. The manual says 460 VA total, but I haven't measured this.
I am aware of the limitations of lead-acid batteries and problems associated with large UPS systems. Also, I prefer low-tech solutions. I supplied and installed high-tech solutions for super yachts for several years, but I didn't have to pay for them ?
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41 minutes ago, Gluestick said:
I couldn't agree more Gardian!
Bearing in mind I am a qualified accountant still in part-time practise.
I would also comment from my own investigation into the potential of buying and letting residential property in France some years back, it was not a very attractive proposition. French law much favours the tenant.
Commercial property might well be a better proposition.
That depends very much on the location. Rural commercial properties generally do not attract high rents.
We bought our current house, which includes a shop of about 75 m2, in 2010. It is quite neat and modern, with two display windows, and frontage on a main road of 6.5 metres. It sold fishing and hunting equipment and clothing, and had been closed down for a couple of years, following the retirement of the previous owners. We hoped to rent it out at a reasonable price to supplement our income.
When we advertised it for rent we received several offers, but well below what we expected. There were probably at least a dozen empty shops in the town at the time. More have closed down since then, and a Carrefour Market opened almost opposite us 3 years ago, together with new small shops for rent around it.
Our shop is connected to the same electricity supply as the house, and the cost of separating them would not be covered by the rent offered, after taxes, for more years than we could accept. So I bricked off part of it as an office, another part became a utility room, and we use the rest for storage.
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5 hours ago, Teapot1 said:
Alternatively a pellet stove can run from a small inverter battery setup during a power outage.
Yes. I did consider that possibility. The stove needs 800VA for normal operation, but can be switched to manual mode, which does not use the igniter unit, reducing the requirement to 460VA. A suitable inverter would probably take around 40 amps from a 12 volt battery to supply this.
I bought a 600VA inverter for this purpose, but then realised that the 12V 72AH battery I intended to use wouldn't even last 2 hours with a load of 38 amps, even when new and fully charged. The house is very well insulated, and the temperature wouldn't fall low enough to be a problem in that time, so I never installed the inverter, as we have only had quite short power interruptions since we moved here.
However, we had a power failure lasting over two days in our previous house, about 5 km away. We had a wood stove there, and I kept the deep freeze plus a few lights working by connecting the house to a portable generator. I have a fear of this happening again, and stove has been shut down a couple of times when its exhaust fan motor seized up. Fortunately the weather was mild at the time and we managed with the air/air heat pumps. I now have a rebuilt spare motor, but fitting it is not a quick job, especially if it were necessary in the middle of the night.
All considered, having an independent source of heating, which my wife can also manage to switch to, seemed to be the best route.
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Not useful to Danny, but a warning to those buying a house to be very wary of any equipment - toilet cisterns, bathroom plumbing and drainage, ventilation, etc. etc. needing eventual maintenance, but built into the house structure with no access except with possibly expensive structural work.
Last month we bought a free-standing wood stove which had been installed in a fairly new house. It had been replaced with a more modern one connected to the same flue system. Plenty of access all around the stove itself, but the chimney, which had an elbow or a tee, had been built into the wall behind, making cleaning or inspecting it quite a problem.
We bought the wood stove is to solve a problem we have. Our pellet stove needs electricity to operate, so if we were to have a supply failure we would have no heating unless we bought some portable gas or oil heaters. I had considered a pellet stove not requiring electricity, but these are expensive, and I read a few reports that their fuel consumption is high, that they don't burn efficiently, and produce excessive soot and tar deposits. The old wood stove was cheap enough, and should be adequate for emergency use.
The stove will be installed with a metal flue inside an existing masonry chimney, which is currently unused. We intend to store a few compressed wood logs inside the house, which are clean and don't harbour wood borers or other nasties.
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GS. I'm afraid you're only going to get the carp that fitness freaks produce.
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On 18/12/2021 at 19:50, cajal said:
Nooo, don't try this at home. In my misspent youth, we used to mess with this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, one time, nothing appeared to happen, so my pal Jeff foolishly decided to clunk it with a hammer. To this day he still walks with a slight limp as a result of the tube disappearing into his leg, just above the knee and exiting via his lower thigh. He has also coped miraculously well for the last 60 years without a left hand.
Over the years, I've often wondered how I would have carried on had I been the one who swung the hammer. What kind of profession I would have followed I can't begin to imagine, as you don't come across many one-handed professional guitarists.
Oh, and I can still hear the bang to this day.
What fun some had in their childhood. I met one guy who somehow lost an arm by throwing a weight attached to a wire over a power transmission line, and another who lost a hand while throwing rocks at a mortar bomb he and his friends had found.
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On 09/12/2021 at 10:58, ssomon said:
Notaires are qualified as lawyers but do not act as such. They are government officials who are mainly responsible for overseeing, facilitating, and recording financial transactions according to the law, for which they charge fees according to an official scale. They calculate and collect the taxes due on the transactions, and will also give general advice on legal matters connected with their function. They do not charge for advice, which may only be worth what is paid for it.
On 09/12/2021 at 17:47, Cyclohexane Chair said:A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client, perhaps.
On 09/12/2021 at 17:52, Cyclohexane Chair said:Thanks so much everyone for your kind replies. You've cheered me up no end. But I still can't decide whether to look for my own notaire on the internet, or hope that the one my brother chose will be honest with me.
You still seem to think that a Notaire is a lawyer. Many Notaires were lawyers, but they are no longer practicing as such. They are tax collectors for the government and not really concerned with your and your brother's personal arguments.
If you have a dispute with your brother over the estate you either settle it between yourselves or get a French lawyer, avocat, to start a legal process to sort it out.
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14 hours ago, Teapot1 said:
Its an interesting concept as it turns EV owners into little power stations and sell electricity at a price when demand is high (mornings and evenings) then recharge overnight when prices are low, it takes up the over capacity during the low night time usuage as you said you cant just turn off a power station so it can be a useful feature. With solar PV battery supplies can do likewise.
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news/electricity-explained-battery-storage
That sounds handy, just so long as you don't want to use your EV to go to work in the morning and return in the evening, and don't mind a chunk of the battery charge having been used by the grid just when you planned a trip.
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I'm surprised anyone thinks Boris' utterances have any value.
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14 hours ago, Cyclohexane Chair said:
................................ I thought a notaire was a lawyer, not a judge. Is the line between judge and lawyer blurred more in France? Is a notaire somewhere on a spectrum between the two? I heard that under the code Napoleon or something the judge is also the investigator, like in Almodovar's High Heels (set in Spain).
Talking in a friendly manner is always a good idea, surely? The French appreciate it when you assume that the default language is French, too, I think.
Notaires are qualified as lawyers but do not act as such. They are government officials who are mainly responsible for overseeing, facilitating, and recording financial transactions according to the law, for which they charge fees according to an official scale. They calculate and collect the taxes due on the transactions, and will also give general advice on legal matters connected with their function. They do not charge for advice, which may only be worth what is paid for it.
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Sad that you feel you can trust an unknown Notaire more than your brother.
I'm not sure that there can be two Notaires dealing with the same estate, but if so, they would simply share the fees, so neither would be likely to be very happy, or favour one inheritor over another. The fees would definitely be higher, due them having to correspond with each other, spending more chargeable time over every decision.
In any case, the Notaire only divides up the estate according to the the valuations of its components, which you can contest, and the law.
It also seems, as you're not there, that you don't have any control over who enters the property and could remove items not included in the Will, if there is one.
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I don't think he should be warning them.
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6 hours ago, Teapot1 said:
..................... This is a transitional period for the better. Take away the 6.5% of the worlds GDP and stick that into renewable and batteries (those batteries do not have to be lithium iron or other rare metals as is being proven now with iron air to name but 1.
ion, expert?
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2 hours ago, Ken said:
You mean in the same way as car Grand Prix races perhaps?
Are those the ones governed by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile in Paris?
What the Presidential candidates are worth
in The Complete France Post Bag
Posted
See? Leopards can change their spots
UGH!