Ronaldo47

If you have, or can borrow, an old cylinder vacuum cleaner that can blow as well as suck, the blow option is excellent for drying out stuff with inaccessible cavities. Also excellent for defrosting the heat exchangers of fridges and freezers.

I believe that the Poplar one was Stratford-atte-Bow, which gets a passing mention in Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales".

Something llke that actually happened in Stratford in East London, where the houses in a terrace built on the site of a former paint factory, were found to suffer from sick building syndrome due to gases from the solvents and phenols that had permeated into the subsoil making their way inside the houses. Perhaps fortunately for the unfortunate owners, the issue ended up being resolved by the terrace being compulsorily purchased and demolished when the entire area was cleared to construct the 2012 Olympics park.

In the 1980's the Festiniog railway converted its steam locos to oil burners at the insistence of the Forestry Commision, who were concerned that sparks from coal could start forest fires. Patrons were invited to donate their old engine oil. When we visited the railway in that era, we did see someone asking where to put his gallon of used Duckhams, but on a subsequent visit they were using coal again.

The type of coal that was burnt in many post-war power stations, was usually poor quality stuff of very low calorific value, and had to be pulverised to dust before it could be burnt in the fluidised bed furnaces that they used. A friend who was a chemist at a local power station, and whose duties included checking the calorific value of the fuel, mentioned that, when someone had tried to be helpful by giving some of their raw coal to a visiting traction engine at one of their open days, it had put the fire out. Various employees who, over the years, had liberated some to use in their open fires at home, had had the same experience.

There was a programme on the radio a year so ago with someone who had been on a research project on the types of food ducks liked. They had tried all sorts of things, and to their surprise, the stuff ducks really went for was Kale.

Thanks for the update, much appreciated.

It has to be borne in mind that Automotive fuses have traditionally been rated by the current that will make the fuse blow. The maximum continuous current they will carry without blowing is normally reckoned to be half the blowing current. So a 12V appliance that draws a steady 10A would need to be protected by an automotive fuse with a rating of at least 20A, possibly higher if there was a switch-on surge. Conversely, the fuses for your 13A plug are rated by the current they will carry continuously without blowing, in accordance with modern international recommendations.

The difference between email and fax is that, when sending a fax, your machine established a connection with the receiving fax machine by a "handshaking" procedure, under which, by exchanging messages, the faxed document would only be sent after the sender machine knew it was connected to the recipient machine. At the end of the transmission, a confirmation that included of the number of pages received and the telepone number of the recipient would be received. This was accepted in legal proceedings as evidence of delivery . Conversely, email works on the "store and forward" principle, where a message is divided into data packets that have the address of the recipient. These packets are sent over the network from node to node. At each node a received packet is temporarily stored and then forwarded to the next node, and so on until it (hopefully) reaches the recipient, where all the packets are re-assembled to re-create the original message. Different packets of the same message might well travel via different routes if the network is busy, and sometimes messages get lost in transit and never get delivered. That is why email is not normally considered a secure delivery method, unless the recipient emails back confirmation of receipt. At least, that was the situation when I retired a decade ago. Important documents, especially those associated with legal deadlines) were usually sent by email (for conveniently providing client with electronic copies of documents), fax (to positively establish receipt) and post (to insure against corruption in fax or email transmission).