Old Post Office Belper

 Way back in early January 2025, we had a Virgin Media salesman knock our door and he offered us Full-Fibre Broadband Internet.  Today, I paid into the bank their compensation cheque to the amount of £317.20 for their failure to provide a service. Sorting this out took a lot of phone calls, even more emails and lots of letters. Eventually, after I'd exhausted their complaints process, I took them to the Ofcom Telecoms Ombudsman who ruled in my favour. Essentially they'd not done full pre-installation process, and hadn't obtained permission to run fibre cables over neighbouring land, before offering me a service. They'd offered an attractive price for the first 18 months , so I thought I'd give them and their appalling customer service a try. Then it all went wrong. So now, if I check on-line with their full fibre checker program, I'm told they cannot provide Full Fibre to the Old Post Office. However when I run the same checks on my immediate neighbour's add...

  The Stolen Lion Fixture at Belper Mill: A Continuation of a Historic Tale As the rich tapestry of history continues to unfold at the iconic Belper Mill, the saga of the stolen lion fixture remains a poignant chapter in its story. Since its disappearance, the lion has captured the attention and imagination of residents and historians alike, resonating deeply with those who appreciate the heritage of the area. Historical Context Belper Mill, located in the heart of Derbyshire, is an impressive example of the industrial revolution's architectural prowess. Built in the late 18th century, the mill stands as a testament to the innovation of the time, primarily serving the cotton industry that thrived in this part of England. The mill not only played a crucial role in the local economy but also contributed to the cultural landscape, symbolizing the strength and resilience of the community. The lion fixture itself is a striking piece of craftsmanship, representing not just a decorative e...

  As part of a project to document the historic parts of Belper that are close to the Old Post Office, here's video footage of Josephe Street.

 Taken at 98 Metres using DJI Mini 4 Pro in early evening May 4th.

 As part of the project of photographing/videoing the locality. Here's a video shot over William Street in the early evening at the start of May 2024.

 

 Against all odds, I actually had a straightforward household maintenance job on the Old Post Office building!   Our garden tap had started to drip excessively. It was an old style brass tap, and I correctly guessed it was made from Imperial size components rather than metric. I assumed it would be a 1/2 inch flat rubber washer, so I took a walk down to Tomes. Unusually they were out of stock, so I had to go further to Tool Station down in Goods Yard Road. To be safe I purchased a set of different sizes of tap washers. After pre-checking the spanners sizes I found a 13/16ths inch spanner was ideal. A trip down into our cellar to turn off the water at the mains and back to the job. It was all over and done within less than 10 minutes and no unwelcome gushes of water.  So now I've plenty of spare washers and a properly working cold tap in the garden. It turned out that my original guess of 1/2 inch flat washer had been correct. Changing the garden tap washer in the Old...

 One of the features of the Old Post Office is the road traffic outside on the A6 Road. This road starts in Luton and heads north to finish in Carlisle (Cumbria) and calls in to Belper. When this time lapse video was recorded (11am on a wet April day) the traffic was relatively light for the time of day.  If you watch carefully you'll see one of our German Shepherds poke her nose into the scene.

I was practising with my drone flying and took it up to about 50 metres above our garden, dodging all those pesky trees. I couldn't resist taking a snap of the football game in  the stadium at the bottom of our garden. All done within CAA rules for a sub-250gm photo drone. Click on the image to see an enlarged version. 

 Here's a couple of views from above the Old Post Office, taken at 35 metres. To the North To the South East towards Belper centre.

 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.

 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 ...

 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

 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 an...

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.

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.

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...

As part of our work to support one the local Covid-19  support group s we are lending VoIP phone handsets to some of the organisers. The handsets are programmed to use the special range of distinctive numbers allocated by us to the team. To ensure good quality voice on the phone we are using Polycom desktop handsets, these are business quality devices designed for office use.  We're also helping the Belper Covid-19 Mutual Aid Group, but they have less complex telephone requirements. Once programmed by us, it should be just a matter of plugging the Polycom devices into the the RJ45 LAN outlet on the broadband router in the home and, after power is supplied, the devices automatically connected to the  Sipgate  service. The organiser team then obtain the full facilities of a distributed office PABX in their own home. It also protects the personal phone numbers of the organisers from general public exposure. There always are some weirdo's who would want to exploi...

I've recently been organising an event which needed to have tickets issued, and also capture contact details of the attendees to allow follow-up email messages. A couple years ago I'd come across www.trybooking.co.uk which is an Internet Cloud based system run by a small British company based in Kendal. I liked it then and used it successfully for some free ticket events. They don't charge a fee for free tickets. It is fully featured and takes the pain out of issuing, controlling and following up of tickets. For the recent event I decided to charge a small fee, to weed out the non-serious prospective attendees. I've looked at several different USA based systems, but was not happy with the features. I recalled the Trybooking system and decided to give it another go. Since my last use of the system a couple of years ago they have improved an already good system. From the attendees viewpoint it works well on PCs, tablets and Smartphones.  Their fee for chargeable...

One of the advantages of living in the Old Post Office is the large cellar, though it is a right pain when that same cellar floods. However the real plus side is I've plenty of space to store 5 litre containers of various fluids suitable for a Man Cave.   One of those liquids is Iso Propyl Alcohol. It's a handy solvent, but I used a lot during the last clean up of the cellar, wiping down tools and the like. I decided it was time to replenish the stock and went online to order another 5 litres. The last one was about £25 including carriage.  I was annoyed to find that all of my usual suppliers were out of stock of this very common solvent. People have been panic buying this too.  Iso-propyl alcohol is good for wiping down and sterilising surfaces. On Ebay and Amazon people were asking around £75 for 5 litres!  Eventually I was able to find a supplier who is selling at £12.30 ex VAT for 5 litres and have ordered through them. It will arrive in a coupl...