Selfsufficientish.com

Sorry to hear about the A**A misbehaviour down south. I stay in a town of 30,000. The nearest A**A is 3 miles away and I have not shopped there since Morrison's opened in town. There are plenty of local traders here and I support them because I can buy without taking waste packaging.

John.

This is probably a little cynical of me but sometimes I get the impression people actually want to have a disaster/emergency and have to struggle/be hard done by, so they exagerate scale of the threat posed. This feels like the weather reports we had earlier this month predicting doom.

Cynical hat taken off now

People are not helped by Doomsday predictions by scientist etc, who should know better.

John.

It said on the Today programme that the strike might have a much bigger effect as they've had to shut the site down, which means shutting off a BP plant that is powered by Grangemouth and processes all the oil from the big pipeline from the North Sea.

hamster wrote:It said on the Today programme that the strike might have a much bigger effect as they've had to shut the site down, which means shutting off a BP plant that is powered by Grangemouth and processes all the oil from the big pipeline from the North Sea.

Yep! 700,000 barrels per day from the Forties systems. Shut this in for a week and that's something over $560 million worth of oil that won't be landed until the end of the field's lifetime, which is how these things are accounted. Not exactly going to do any favours to the UK balance of payments...

I just did a online calculation

USA national average price of petrol (gasoline) is $3.51 per gallon

That is about 40p a litre

In Britain we pay average 109.2p per litre which is about $9.80


I am flabbergasted, I really was unaware of this enormous price difference

No wonder most Americans drive everywhere and most don't see a problem of having enormous cars.... flippin' 'eck

I feel somewhat for the green movement in the USA, it must be much harder to get people to sop wasting precious resources when prices are like that.

yes.. they pay more for bottled water...

All petrol stations around us are rationing between £15 and £20 per car, apart from the supermarkets. Saying that, queues are fine.

Think they might be making a massive deal out of this to distract from the teachers' strike and the u-turn on the 10p tax thingie-majiggy; give the proles something else to get all afluster about.....

I'm feeling vaguely smug as I run a diesel car and currently have 500L of heating oil in my house tank.

500L of heating oil which I would *never* dream of putting in my car. Oh no. Particularly not with 1/2L of 4 star petrol to alter the burning point to the correct level for diesel fuel efficiency as recommended by my fuel engineer brother.

Because that would be *wrong*.

Lincolnshirelass wrote:I'm feeling vaguely smug as I run a diesel car and currently have 500L of heating oil in my house tank.

500L of heating oil which I would *never* dream of putting in my car. Oh no. Particularly not with 1/2L of 4 star petrol to alter the burning point to the correct level for diesel fuel efficiency as recommended by my fuel engineer brother.

Because that would be *wrong*.

Not that I would ever suggest doing anything un lawful, but if circumstance dictated, I myself would blend back, and only in extreme urgency you understand, with about half a pint of white spirit. Flash point would be fine blending with petrol, but front-end cetane and ash would go right to pot.

To be frank, these days heating oil is usually diesel with some dye added. It makes life easier for the refiners.

We needed to get petrol today for the farm (quadbikes are on the go all day, particularly during the lambing), and fortunately the petrol station where we usually get it had some left. However, neither they nor the next one down the road have an diesel at the moment. All our works cars run on diesel, of course...

ina wrote:We needed to get petrol today for the farm (quadbikes are on the go all day, particularly during the lambing), and fortunately the petrol station where we usually get it had some left. However, neither they nor the next one down the road have an diesel at the moment. All our works cars run on diesel, of course...

They may well be able to run on a veg oil/diesel mix.

Stonehead wrote: They may well be able to run on a veg oil/diesel mix.

Good idea - I still have 15 ltrs of sunflower oil somewhere!

Rant warning!

As we've shown above, some people in this area are finding it difficult to buy the fuel for getting to work, or working. And what is happening in our picturesque glen today? A BL DY RALLEY!

No warning to the residents, of course. I only found out because I had to go to the village to pick up my milk, and there's cars everywhere... These blimming idiots don't know how to drive on a narrow road, we are in the middle of lambing, and no matter how well you fence a field, there's always lambs on the road - and the spectators are worse than the actual drivers. And anyway: in this day and age, when even the last idiots seem to come round to the idea that yes, our action might have an effect on global warming, and there is such a thing as peak oil - should there still be ralleys?

Somebody at the shop said - it had been announced for weeks. Where? At the Forestry Commission car park. Sorry, I only live and work in this glen; I don't have time to park my car at the visitor's carpark and play at being tourist...

Arghhhhhh!

Rant over. That feels better.

And now - back to work.

There, there, Ina. Just done the same thing myself elsewhere. Have a glass of wine.