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4G Mobile Data vs Wired Broadband

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 Our cottage in Wirksworth and a friend's house suffered an Internet Broadband outage last week, and it continues. The cause was a lorry flattening a BT street Cabinet. The friend works from home and has a Sky Business broadband service which is wired (phone line), but with a 4G Wireless dongle as a back-up. She is able to continue working at her PC. What I found interesting is the difference in service quality between the Wired and the 4G wireless. The first chart shows the 4G, with the single PC a couple of metres from the WiFi Access Point.: The second chart is the wired Internet at the Old Post Office, which has the same network equipment and similar "bandwidth" of Internet speed. It is measured over the same timeframe. One probably cause is that many of the local houses will also jumped onto the local mobile phone network to access the Internet while their phone lines are down.

Fixing the data cabling in the Old Post Office

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 The Old Post Office on Bridge St in Belper was built around 1805. So far as we can tell it was two adjacent buildings merged together, Some of the walls are stone and some are Georgian brickwork. The interior of the 6 bedroom end-of-terrace house is a long "L-shape", though this is not obvious from the street. Some of the interior walls are thick brick/stone work. The structure/shape is not conducive to easy WiFi network distribution for modern day Internet.  The Grade II Heritage Listing effectively limits any changes to the fabric of the building. Part of my work involves international video conferences, so one of the back bedrooms away from the noise of the busy A6 Main road is used as an office, with green-screen and acoustic insulation. We also have two separate (diverse) Internet links with a combined capacity of 400/100 mbps (download/upload) servicing our internet usage. The network normally load-shares between the two broadband services, if one fails for any reason

Air Quality testing - Near Old Post Office

 We have just received the air pollution monitor (Flow 2 from Plume Labs) and ran a couple of testing events. On Bridge Street and the corner of Long Row: 11th May at 6:30 pm (Wind speed N.E. 6 mph  18.5C) Recorded NO2 level average over 10 minutes: 144 ppb (276 ugm-3)  Conversion using this tool: http://www.apis.ac.uk/unit-conversion pm2.5 average 3.6 ugm-3 pm10 average 14 ugm-3 Note : WHO NO2 limit 10 ug/m-3 annually EPA NO2 one hourly limit  100ppb for NO2 On Bridge Street and the corner of Long Row: 12th May Noon N02 level (Wind speed 4 mph SW) 64 ppb  (122 ugm-3) pm2.5 average 4.5 ugm-3 pm10 average 40 ugm-3

Cast iron downpipe repair at the Old Post Office

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 We had a guest (family) visit during the last weekend. I was outside the house while the guest was using the bathroom. I noticed the downpipe from the bathroom was badly leaking with draining bathwater gushing out against the brickwork of the house. It was obvious that the cast iron pipe had fractured clear through its circumference at about 2.5 metres above the ground and had become slightly displaced allowing water to gush out. Once the water stopped flowing I decided to investigate and got the ladder out to get close to the damage. On closer inspection I was able to ascertain that some mastic coated aluminium tape had come free from the back of the cast iron pipe. This tape had been painted over at least twice in different coloured paint, so the "repairs" were probably at least 15 years old by previous owners of the building. This had now failed.  The pipe is probably of Georgian, or possibly Victorian, vintage.  I measured the external pipe diameter with a caliper and ch

Post Lockdown drunks

Evidence is reappearing on the streets of Belper that the local bars/pubs are in operation again! This morning we woke to find a broken Stella Artois glass in our doorway. This is most likely to have been from a customer of the newly opened Rumours bar across the road. The George pub along the road has not opened from the Covid-19 lockdown yet.  Slightly further afield on Green Lane near the junction of King Street you have to dodge around broken beer bottles on the footpath.

Why we do not advertise on Google

At the moment, well for the past two years, we do not advertise our businesses on Google. The reason for this is that Google arbitrarily removed our holiday cottage from Google Maps even though it had been validly displayed as a business for three years before that time. This wasted hundreds of pounds of money we'd invested in online facilities.  While Google are within their rights to choose which businesses are shown on Google Maps, we are also in our rights to withhold advertising income from them. So they miss out on income from advertising our international consultancy. The money we spend on Internet advertising goes to LinkedIn and Facebook.

Using Ultraviolet (UVC) to disinfect during Covid-19

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We run a holiday home rental business over in Wirksworth, and soon we'll be reopening for business following the initial Covid-19 lockdown. One of the problems we face is how to disinfect the cottage between guest stays. In essence we have to wipe down with biocide any surface the guest may have touched during their stay. All kitchen utensils, crockery, glassware, etc has to be cleaned. We also have to swap out and clean all bedding, towels, pillows, mattress protectors. All this has to be done in a gap of 4 hours between bookings. Even those precautions do not deal with soft furnishings such as, mattresses, sofas, chairs, curtains, carpets. So we need some way of dealing with disinfecting those soft surfaces. The rental agency (Sykes) has suggested the use of fogging machines. These work by tipping in a couple of litres of correctly diluted disinfectant into the tank of the machine. By various methods the fogger converts the liquid into a very fine mist. You spray this mist a