Frushers Blog

2nd Caravan trip - Llandovery

2026-05-26T19:00:00+01:00

Getting there

Second outing in the caravan was to Llandovery and Erlwon Camping and Caravan park. The site was jam packed for the bank holiday weekend and the weather was absolutely cooking. We didn’t have a great journey there - it was supposed to take about 2 hours but we got stuck for about 1 1/4 hours in a queue due to a broken down lorry on a roundabout - darn. Since we left about 17:30 we didn’t arrive until about 20:40.. late.

Straight into sticking up the awning and getting things so the kids could sleep - we still put them to bed about 8:30ish but being holiday it was going to be later than that.

First surprise of the stay - “we’ll send you an email for the pay-as-you-go electric” the management lady tells me on arrival… hmmmm - I didn’t read that but going back and looking at the sites booking page you pay £3 for access to electric then pay for usage”. Once we’ve setup the awning I stick on £5.00 begrudgingly paying an extra 54p for the pleasure.

Awning goes up well - being sunny really helps - along with being on grass. Much easier to punch in the pegs into the ground rather than smacking the metal ones with the hammer.

Day 1

Antique shops - Jacob was desperate for going to the one he’d seen en-route in Trecastle and we managed to convince him he wanted to look in the one on Llandovery. The campsite is literally 7mins walk from the town centre so really nice to just wander in. A Co-op is 2 minutes walk away from the site which was super handy. Town didn’t open till 11am so had some coffee and cake in the Craft Centre - really nice. Then wandered on through to the Llandovery Antique Centre which was great, lots of stuff found and the owner was great!

Day 2

Beach day! Abigail had decided she didn’t want to see the local carnival and demanded we go to a beach instead.

Wash out for bank holiday

2026-05-03T17:00:00+01:00

Wash out

Sadly not a weekend I fancied for for a caravan outing, it promised to be a washout this weekend so I didn’t bother booking anywhere. We have booked a weekend away outside of London and we are intending to commute in on each day to have a day out in London.

Have done a few jobs this week: * Removed another two rotten wood posts holding up my raised veg plot. The one at the back came out pretty easily and replaced with a new post. Replaced the small piece of wood completely rotted through with a new post which should hold the side of it better. * Added guttering round the side of the summer house, we had talked about buying a waterbutt though it’s awkward against the house so instead I’ve added guttering on the summer house. * Was going to bin the camilia but actually it wasn’t full of ants and seemed to have reasonable roots so have given it some fresh compost and will see if it re-invigorates itself * Usual gardening chores - both gardens mowed

Bad bin men

Pesky bin men didn’t bother emptying my green bin, we are generally pretty good now not filling it completely in the two weeks but that’s no excuse not to empty it. We’ve logged a miss-collection with the council and hope that they do actually come back an empty it. I’m not holding my hopes up considering it’s a bank holiday

Bad council

Homeassistant stopped announcing the bin that was being collected - wierd I thought. I called the endpoint and found that the council has changed their response that is produced when you query it.

Instead of passing back a JSON structure with “status” and the collection days in a sub-structure it is now just the collection days as the main structure. Simple fix for me to change what was being parsed out so that is now fixed. You might ask why I didn’t just use the ‘UK Bin Collection day’ addon? Well I tried, but it didn’t support my council so I started to add it and then found someone else had already got a PR in for it. Sadly though it was stuck in review and then got rejected because the person submitting the PR didn’t update the PR when the core addon changed. All in all it’s a bit of a pain when this sort of thing happens, people try and contribute then there’s a lot of noise about non-conpliance and people get put off and don’t bother.

Down and Up

2026-04-21T17:00:00+01:00

It’s going down!

First we have the email we have all been waiting for - how much exactly did we save by the government reducing the green levy on our energy reduce my prices by?

Well - in West Midlands my Octopus Go rates were:

Night	Day	Standing Charge
8.50	29.616	52.494

They then become on April 1st:

Night	Day	Standing Charge
6.50	27.157	57.350

All rejoice - look at the massive overnight saving and the huge reduction in the day rate. Of course this wasn’t going to last very long now there’s a war (completely made up by the USA) that would cause this to change.

Now it’s going back up

I wasn’t expecting it to change quite so quickly but another email lands in my inbox - my prices are going up on May 1st:

Night	Day	Standing Charge
8.625	29.732	59.050

So all the government jubilation at our energy costs being reduced and that everyone was going to benefit… all for 1 month… thanks. The real kicker here is that Octopus didn’t reduce the daily standing charge, it’s been increased even though that is where the increase was seen when the green levy’s were put on energy. The jump from 52p to 59p is 12% - go figure that out in your inflation figures when they say it’s only running at 3%

Clearly this isn’t the last of these rises - we are going to see things getting very messy later on in the year as this wars not going to be finished any time soon. I’ve sat and thought about switching to the fixed Octopus Go tariff for a while. It’s another 1.5p at night and 2p during the day on the current tariff plus another 2p on the daily standing charge. I’ll take a bet on hoping the war will be at least somewhat done by winter when costs will hit me.

Octopus export price dropping

2026-02-17T17:00:00+00:00

Export price down

Octopus export price dropping :-( 12p instead of 15p

I guess it had to happen at some point since Octopus likely aren’t making enough money from us. Comes with a sob story about wholesale prices settling and being lower. I’m not sure that I believe the rational but then I’m getting cynical in my older age!

This gives me a bit of a conundrum about if I should change over to a different tarrif. There’s not a great selection of alternatives. Either Octopus FLUX export but I’d need to take the hit on using FLUX import which is expensive. Alternatively I could move onto Agile Export which would at least give me potential higher export rates into the evening.

We’ve been doing OK each year on Octopus and haven’t really ended up being in debt, in fact my account is around £330 up (amusingly I’m not allowed a refund) - the main reason for this was working FLUX hard a couple of years ago that ended up with a monster surplus of credit.

Feb half term

2026-02-16T12:00:00+00:00

Half term

Feb half term with the kids comes around pretty quickly. Nothing super exciting planned as usual but did plan to sort the car out since I can take it in. Expecting to blow a good ~£100 a day as usual when the kids are off.

Get the car MOT done and sort out the timing belt, expensive but needed. Not exactly fun for the kids but a day wandering around in town. Abigail will like it, lots of charity shops. Going to be looking at the best part of £1300 for the MOT/timing belt/likely 4 sensors for tyre pressure sensors
Art in nature on weds, have a look around their gallery - should see some of the art group folks
Booked in to Camping and Caravan show in Birmingham on Friday as Amy took the day off.

Not that it’s costing me any A/L, I’ve spent the F/L that I had, I’m down to a paltry 12.5hrs now

Old man syndrome

2026-02-01T12:00:00+00:00

How did we get to this point?

I’ve gone and turned into my parents in a single not so small decision to get a caravan.

Last year I went camping with my sister to Wales, we all had a great time but there was a fair amount of stuff that I didn’t have or didn’t got well. I don’t own a very good coolbox and although the dodgy old one that I brought likely 20+ years ago worked to a point it wasn’t great. Then the beds didn’t work out - they were hard and don’t fit the tent properly, the portable toilet broke and leaked (yuk!) and we practically lived off my sister and her many bits of kit.

So I had planned on getting things better for 2026’s camping trip - I’d buy new beds, fridge, likely steal my sisters old trailer so that I could fit everything in without needing my dad to come along just as extra carrying capacity. Then I was still a little miffed that Amy still won’t come along which just makes life a bit harder than it needs to be.

The more I think about it the more it seems daft but the alternative of a caravan didn’t bode well when we went looking before. Amy said she’d go if we got one but the kids took over and demanded being in the caravan and that just meant that I was buying a huge caravan which is awkward since I don’t really have space to store one. So I shelved the plans.

Oops

Then one soggy Saturday afternoon to get the kids out of the house I wandered along to the caravan place again to look at a new model design as it looked like something more useful than weird fixed double beds. Though at 22K that wasn’t getting brought. The kids run around the place looking in every caravan and I plop myself down in a 2 berth Baileys Pegasus - the cheapest caravan they have. Eventually they find me and I propose that this van is what we should get. Lots of kid moaning ensues about there being no space for them and we head home.

Overnight I think it over some more and take my dad to see it, he puts the stamp of approval on it and after a good amount of thinking I stick the deposit on it.