In September 2020, I bought a pair of Schwalbe Marathon Plus bike tyres from Halfords for £25 a pop.

Six years later, one of them has its first slow puncture.

Two more of the same should cost £32.81 each according to the inflation numbers, but we seem to be up to £35!

Even so, highly recommended. The roads in Oxford(shire) are not in good shape, and to have clocked 6,000 miles (at a conservative estimate) on the same tires and tubes is very good going.

And less than a tank of petrol to get it swapped.

As it turns out “by the summer” means 27 August, which is a bit of a pity as it means three very sunny months will be in the rear view mirror for Brits by that point.

However, if you’re willing and able to pay an electrician to do the connection (and you’ll still have to do that anyway if you want a battery with your mini solar setup) then you have been free to dip a toe in this eco-friendly water for quite some time.

So, back in June, I ordered an Ecoflow Stream Ultra and a couple of JA Solar 460W panels:

No, having them propped up occupying half of my new patio is not the long term plan, but while I work out whether to pay a roofer to put them on the garage, or to build a pergola to host them, it will do.

Ecoflow have of course been selling the same kit to the European mainland for years, so this is well tested stuff with a few minor software updates for the UK.

The panels are generating just over 4kWh daily for me, which means 88p I don’t have to pay Octopus Energy. Assuming, of course, that I can use or store that juice - which I can thanks to the 2kWh battery in the unit, and my house’s base load.

For a Sunday at home working through a few loads of washing and some stuff on the computer, this is quite the result:

And a 3/4 charged battery to see me through the evening too.

Admittedly, the total set-up so far has cost just under £1,000 which means a 4-5 year payback (and that’s before we talk about mounting those panels properly). But it’s not just about money, it’s about the planet.

If you’ve got some south facing ground (or even a wall/fence) you don’t mind the panels being mounted on permanently, you should definitely take a look at this.

I’ve reproduced the email from CAF Bank in full below, and frankly it reminds me of certain press conferences from the days of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars where the Americans would try to avoid admitting they’d accidentally shot someone on their own side.

Both the charities I sit on the board of will be planning a move to another bank within the next 12 months, and can you blame us?

It’s such a shame this comes on the heels of finally getting Open Banking, but clearly they have put their trust in entirely the wrong “global technology partner”.

Dear customer,

As you may have seen, CAF Bank’s online banking service has been unavailable for several periods over the past week. Unfortunately, the online service will continue to be unavailable until further notice. 

I am very sorry about this. I know this will cause disruption, frustration and concern so I want to explain what has happened and our work to resolve it. 

I wrote to you on Friday (24 July) regarding suspicious activity on a small number of accounts. We caught this within minutes. We have contacted customers whose accounts were affected by this attempted fraudulent activity. 

We immediately launched an investigation alongside external experts. Through that investigation, we identified a previously unknown vulnerability in how some third-party software connects to the online banking portal. The core bank is not affected, which means that money is safe and secure in accounts. However, this does mean we need to make changes to the online service. 

I want to reassure you that there is no ongoing threat to the integrity of the Bank itself and our network is not compromised. 

CAF Bank’s online service is supported by a global technology partner which has deployed specialist teams to fix this issue. Those teams are working around the clock to ensure the online service can be restored. While we are mindful of the impact this has on our customers and want to do this as soon as possible, we cannot restore access to the online service until we are assured the issue is resolved. We have been keeping our regulators informed about the issue and the work we are doing to return to a normal service.

All payments authorised online over the weekend before we took the service down are being paid this morning (27 July). 

Banking while the online service is unavailable 

We know many of you will be trying to do your payroll this week. We will still be able to help on the phone and we are adding extra teams onto our helpline to support. We do expect much higher call volumes than usual so I would ask your Account Contact or an authorised Signatory to please call only if they need to make time-sensitive payments such as payroll.  

I will get back in touch with you to let you know when online banking is available and we will update our Help Centre. We will also contact you directly if you need to take further action relating to your account.  

I hope this explains why we have made the difficult decisions we have. I want to say how sorry I am again and to thank you for your patience while we safely restore the online service.  

If you have any questions or concerns, please ask your Account Contact or an authorised Signatory to get in touch with our customer service team.

Thank you for banking with us.

Alison Taylor
CEO, CAF Bank and CAF Financial Solutions Limited

With my “fee” of a four-pack of Thatchers’ Gold and a decent dinner on the line, I felt very rusty. Was Bitlocker even a thing last time I did this?

Fortunately, the free trial of Macrium Reflect was up to the job, and apart from being horrified by the number of screws HP make you undo to swap a simple replaceable part like a hard drive, I was out of the woods. Well recommended, and it also handled the target SSD being smaller than the source.

So if you fancy making me an offer for it first - I’ll throw in the mount - send me an email and we’ll see what we can do. It works very well, but when I can have 5G backup for the hopefully rare fibre interruptions at £0 ongoing cost, it’s hard to justify a tenner a month plus the ongoing electricity to keep the dish and router going.

I must commend the poor sod for working outside on one of the hottest days of the year - it took him nearly two hours to fish through the freshly laid duct from the street and clip the fibre round the outside of my house in such a way that it isn’t visible unless you get down on your hands and knees to look for it.

Here’s the ONT sitting neatly out of the way in the garage near my networking cabinet:

Unfortunately the nasty little PoE splitter I purchased months ago turned out to limit the speed to 100mbps - a problem when you’ve paid for an internet connection that runs at 500 - so I’ve got a better one arriving tomorrow.

Much to the confusion of myself and the Openreach guy, this particular ONT seems to take over an hour to mate with the exchange after being powered on. It does get there in the end though, and the whole point of feeding it over PoE is that it will benefit from my UPS, so I’m not too fussed.

I’ll end with the obligatory speed testing screenshot, although this is just hanging out in the garden using the outdoor WiFi access point - all that work last year getting ethernet up to my desk means I can enjoy the full 500 (or sometimes more) from there reliably.

I ended up having to complain to the Openreach CEO’s office after one too many “computer says no” responses from the email handlers, but - fair play to Kathryn Milligan - I finally got a call from a human who could see how silly the situation was, and with the power to do something about it.

“Major civil engineering work required” turned into “there is a fibre distribution point in the relevant manhole, and we just need to power it on”. 48 hours later, they have, and I’ve been able to place my order.

It’s going to take another three weeks for the appointment to come around, but I think this might finally be the end of the saga. Who knows what I’ll blog about after that!

Could the second finally be getting some FTTP internet at home?

I discovered this week that Openreach have now made FTTP available to every house on my street except me and two of my immediate neighbours.

Andrews and Arnold used to have a legendary reputation for chasing BT/ Openreach to get the best outcome for their customers, but their reply to my sales enquiry can be summarized as “nothing we can do mate, try asking Openreach yourself - here’s the link”.

How the mighty have fallen.

I had already filled in Openreach’s form - to be fair to them, they do have an enquiry route for “my neighbours can get FTTP so why the hell can’t I?”, and I gather they’ve had to pass it to another team … here’s hoping they’ll get it fixed soon so I can stop shelling out for Starlink.

That really would make it a good week.

Update, 17 June - I got a “computer says no” response back from Openreach, so I tried complaining to their CEO and I have been promised an update next week. Apparently the fibre distribution box is in the manhole at the foot of my garden, it’s just not powered on. Come on, Openreach.

And while they technically have been for months, I’d yet to find a single provider who had actually done the work to connect to them.

Quite why there has to be per-provider per-bank work when it’s a standard is a question for another day.

The good news is that GoCardless have finally gone and done it:

… it still goes bang if you try and fetch data for a too-big date range, and it will need tediously re-authorizing every 90 days, but having machine-to-machine hands off access to this stuff is a long, long overdue leap forward.

Regular readers will have heard this rant before, and really, I ought to be finding a specialist who can actually find and fix the leak, not just fill it up again for over £100 and hope I’ll be far enough away in time and space before it all leaks out.

However, being a busy man, I decided to take a punt on a self top up kit:

The instructions were easy to follow (but do read them carefully as the valve is the opposite of what you might think) and to my surprise and delight, the vents started blowing cold again and the system has held for a week now. Not bad for less than half the price a garage charges, and I still have a half full can for next time.