Peter's Blog

For a long time I resisted the temptation to buy a cordless drill for the simple reason that I would only use it twice a year and could live with my corded. This is an old black-and-decker hammer drill which has served me well for many years. It's main drawback is that the flex is only about 3ft long and it almost always needs an extension lead (adding insult to injury wrt cordless).

I was in Tesco a while back and they were having a 20% off all power tools day. The only power tool I could find was a cordless drill which was about £10. A drill for £8? Irresistable bargain.

This drill taught me the delight that is a cordless drill, particularly using it as a screwdriver. My corded drill can be used as a screwdriver but it was always too much hassle. The way you can back screws in like nails in a Norm Abram fashion was much faster and easier than a normal screwdriver. The cordless was only 9.6v but it was powerful enough.

Since moving house I have been doing a lot of DIY and there is much more to do. Previous owner unscrewed just about every fitting possible and there is a lot to put up. The battery in my cheapo drill stopped holding charge in pretty short time.

I decided to treat myself to a decent drill, not cheap stuff. I decided against Black and Decker (cheap stuff) and set my sights on low-end professional gear, blue Bosche, Makita, something like that. I headed off to B&Q where they have a little pile of 'bargain' power tools and saw there a Makita 6270D. This is a 12v drill but I was thinking of getting a 14.4v so I was a little disappointed. Also it looked small, not macho enough, almost like a little hobbyist thing for drilling balsa wood. There were no other drills there I fancied so I thought about it:

• It was a Makita, it was on my list
• According to the box it came with two batterys
• It was within my budget
• I would be using it mainly for wood and plasterboard, 12v is enough to start my car, if sometimes I need more power I use the corded drill.
• Only 10mm chuck but again 95% of holes I drill are within this.
• Who really cares whether it is macho enough. I don't work on a building site and rarely expose my bum crack. If it's small I can drill holes in the ceiling without needing someone else's help to hold it up.

So I bought it. When I took it home I found:

• It is lovely, really precision make.
• The trigger control is very good, you have fine control over screwdriving speed
• There were three batteries in the box (!)
• Keyless chuck which works nicely, I've only had a drill slip once.

The first job I did with it involved drilling tiles with a tile drilling bit and it coped with this faultlessly. I've used it for a few jobs now and am very happy with it. It easily managed drilling 10mm holes when I was putting up a large heavy bathroom cabinet on a tiled plasterboard wall using the beefiest fittings I could find. I haven't needed the corded drill so far.

What don't I like about it? Nothing springs to mind.

When I moved into my new house I was aching all over from carrying heavy boxes and wanted a nice hot bath. I turn the hot tap and the hot water trickles out, no power behind it. The house has a weird thermal store thing rather than the conventional hot water tank so I decided to call the company that made them. They determined asap that it was out of guarantee and referred me to a plumber. I called him and he said that it was probably because the heat exchanger was scaled up and needed changing.

I called him round and he said that the thermal stores were being put in a lot of new houses in my area which was a mistake because the water is very hard and they scale up very quickly. The thermal store relies on keeping a supply of very hot water inside, about 85 degrees C. When someone turns on a tap a heat exchanger uses the hot water to heat up cold mains water to 60 degrees very rapidly, giving instant hot water at mains pressure. Nice in theory but he reckons that 85 degrees makes the pipes scale up quicker. Our house is only two years old.

He replaced the heat exchanger for £250 and gave me a quote for £850 for a water softener or £1600 to rip out the thermal store and put something better in. I am more tempted by the water softener idea since we would get all the advantages of a water softener: soap lasting longer (!), no limescale marks on the shower cubicles, no furry elements, life would be heavenly.

I haven't given the nod yet, I ought to get more quotes.

With the new heat exchanger the thermal store is wonderful: nice powerful hot shower, even on the top floor. It can fill a basin with hot water in seconds. Turning the central heating on, the house is warm in minutes where my old house took hours.

The plumber was very cynical about the thermal store, he seemed to hate them. I am wondering whether he is right or whether he only ever sees the ones that aren't working and he doesn't particularly enjoy fixing them?

Happy with new washing machine, had it for 6 months, time to remove old machine from garage and recycle it. I avoided the temptation to turn it into a fighting robot and the problem boiled down to how to get it into the car single handed. Here is how I did it:

• remove top
• remove concrete block from top of drum
• turn upside down
• remove strut across hole in the bottom by deft use of club hammer
• remove large concrete block through hole in bottom
• carefully remove and unscrew front panel of machine
• cut through various hoses on drum with hacksaw
• cut through wires with nearest suitable tool, it my case garden shears
• remove drum from machine
• put parts in car
• take to recycling depot
• carry parts up 8 foot staircase and throw in skip.

I can imagine that the tech community is keen to hear my opinion on the Cuprinol fence sprayer, THE gadget for the British garden this summer. I have been putting off painting my fence for about 5 years now so it was very dry and grey. The adverts on the TV show someone whisking through painting a fence so I had to give it a try.

Impressions:

• It is expensive: £25 for the sprayer and £10 for a 5 litre bottle of fence treatment. Luckily homebase had a 10% everything day so I took my chances. I bought 4 bottles of treatment as each one is supposed to cover 5 x 6 foot square panels.
• the sprayer works on compressed air, pump it a bit and it sprays. Pumping is not hard work (compared to rowing). It only needs 4 bar to work and goes for over half a panel.
• very easy to use, actually quite fun. Almost had a fight with wife over it.
• did fence in about 2 hours. The blurb says you can spray a panel in four minutes and this is about right.
• the treatment comes out of the bottle orange but if you try to spray the fence orange you use up a bottle in two panels. This got me worried about having enough so I concentrated on just getting the fence damp which just about worked, just covering my 20 panels.
• the fence looks good. This is 'Harvest Brown':

• washes out in water. Fill with water, tie trigger shut and leave it to clean itself.
• the spray has quite a range. I was somewhat distressed to discover I had sprayed the front of my car, about 10 feet the other side of the fence. It does wash off with a bit of a scrub.
• Spiders don't like being sprayed orange. They may have had more of a chance to escape if I had used a brush.

Conclusion: the coverage is a bit thin and it'll probably need another £40 worth of treatment next year. Ok for now though.