If you’re one of those people like me who were happy to collect Tesco Clubcard points up then spend the resulting vouchers on a bottle of wine in-store when they came in, it might be time to think again. Tesco Clubcard Rewards has been running for some time but its surprising how few people know about it.
Put it this way, I used Tesco Clubcard points to pay for a £270 ferry to Belfast last week. I didn’t use a penny of my own money.
Tesco rewards are worth 4 times the value of the original Clubcard vouchers and can be used for travel, days out, restaurants and a whole variety of other things. You can even swap them for Air Miles. So for the ferry voucher we used £70 of Tesco clubcard vouchers. OK, it took a bit of time to save up all those vouchers but in the end we’ve got a summer trip to Northern Ireland for the family.
The booking process for the ferry was fairly straightforward. We received our vouchers then went to the Tesco Clubcard website where we swapped the vouchers for Ferry rewards tokens. When they arrived in the post we phoned up the ferry company and booked a month ahead of time. We posted off the rewards tokens to the ferry company and when they received them they confirmed the booking.
Even if you don’t want to save up for the big value items, a tenner of Clubcard vouchers will buy you £40 of restaurant vouchers. That should be enough for a meal for 2 in many of the restaurants they list.
It’s the time of year when people start looking in the shed for their barbeque on a sunny afternoon. If your old BBQ is no longer usable you may well be looking for a new cheap gas BBQ. Gas has the advantage of being ready to cook on very quickly and compared to charcoal is very clean and a lot less smokey.
Before you run off to the local garden centre though, have a look at Tesco. Their cheapest gas BBQ is just £50. It’s got two burners and side tables.
Bear in mind that you’ll need to add the cost of a gas bottle on to this if you don’t already have one, and also the cost of a regulator if the provided one doesn’t suit your bottle manufacturer.
If that adds up to too much then Tesco have a good range of charcoal BBQ’s too.
Most people know that opening the fridge door and letting warm air in is a bad thing. Keeping a minimum amount of air in your fridge or freezer by keeping it full is one way to minimise the running costs. Another way is to defrost it regularly, or run a freezer that self-defrosts.
At the other end of the process though is the cooling grid at the back of the fridge. This grid is like a radiator. It gets rid of the heat that has been sucked out of the fridge and puts it back into your kitchen.
You should leave enough room behind and above the fridge that the heat expelled can escape into the kitchen.
In addition, in most kitchens this grid gets covered in dust. That dust acts like a insulation blanket and prevents the fridge from getting rid of the excess heat efficiently. You can’t really help that but what you can do is pull the fridge out and vacuum all the dust off the cooling grid. Your fridge will work more efficiently and you’ll reduce your energy bills. If you make this part of your regular cleaning duties you’ll stop wasting so much energy on running your fridge or freezer.
There are quite a few places now to buy your digital music from. Itunes is probably one of the busiest and provides a great service. I’ve had to contact customer service a couple of times with problems and in both cases I’ve been refunded immediately, no questions asked. They are good, however they are expensive.
It seems a lot of people missed the fact that Amazon now offer an MP3 download store. And it’s cheap. Take U2’s No Line on the Horizon album, released just a few weeks ago. Itunes are selling it at their standard £7.99. Amazon MP3 have it at £4.50. Add to this that your music is DRM free in MP3 format and it’s a pretty attractive option. MP3 format means you can use it on all music players, not just Apple Ipods and it can be managed in any music software. Not all new albums are discounted this much but it’s definitely worth a look. Who would ever have thought that a new U2 album could be legally purchased for just £4.50? Good on Amazon.
Offline retailers are having a tough time just now with the pincer movement of reduced consumer spending and more competition from online retailing. Consumers are looking to the internet for more choice and cheaper prices. As such local retailers with less of a range and higher prices are being squeezed out.
It doesn’t have to be like this though. The Internet can be used to make informed product choices before purchasing locally.
Take for example your local outdoors store. It stocks a couple of jackets by the manufacturer you want but they don’t have a style or colour that you like. You go online, check out the manufacturers website and find a model that you do like. You can then search for that product in Google with the word “review” in the search box after the product name. This will give you loads of review sites letting you know exactly what other people think of the jacket you’ve got your eye on. If the reviews aren’t good, repeat the process until you find one you like that has reviews you are happy with.
Finally, once you are settled on a product go back up to the shop you first looked at and ask them if they’d be willing to get you the exact product you’ve asked for. 9 times out of 10 they’ll say yes. You probably wont have to pay delivery and depending on when the retailer next places an order with that supplier, you could have the garment pretty quickly.
Congratulations, you’ve just helped your local shops.
I haven’t bought elastic bands in years. The Royal Mail has been providing them free for ages. Albeit one at a time.
When a pile of mail drops through the door held together with an elastic band I take the elastic band and put it around the pen jar that I keep in the kitchen. Doing this regularly means I have an elastic band at hand whenever I need one.
This tip wont save you huundreds of pounds but it will stop you having to go out and buy elastic bands when you need them.
I’m in the process just now of transferring the old WisemenFishHere site to the new format you are seeing now. It’s all setup with Wordpress now so that I can spend more time writing and less time messing about with adding pages and links etc. Hopefully that’ll mean lots more relevant information being published more frequently on the site. Thanks for looking in.
Cheap sofas are available all over the UK but it helps to know where to find the cheapest sofa deals. Sofas can be bought over the internet, but it really does help if you can visit a shop first to sit on the cheap sofa of your choice and know that it is comfortable.
Find cheap sofas at IKEA. I know it’s probably the first place many of you thought anyway, but IKEA have good quality furniture at prices that strip chunks off other furniture sofas. IKEA is also great for cheap leather sofas.
Sofa Workshop is another good place to find a cheap sofa and cheap leather sofas. Be careful though that the cushions are well filled. We had a sofa workshop sofa and the seat cushions were fibre-filled rather than foam and fiber. After a year we had to replace them.
They are constantly advertising on TV, but dfs do seem to be a great place to get a really cheap sofa. Only a limited range visible on their website - best to visit the shop for a cheap sofa we think.
Habitat for cheap sofas - Great quality, cutting edge design and not outrageously expensive. Habitat is a good bet if you are looking for a cheap sofa.
If you are not worried about having a used sofa or armchair then you can get some great cheap sofa deals through the classifieds. Try Craigslist and find your local area then search for a sofa or armchair. Similarly for UK users, Gumtree is another excellent site for cheap used sofas.
If cheap just isn’t cheap enough then try out Freecycle and see if anyone near you is giving a sofa away free. With these classifieds websites, often you’ll have to provide the transportation for your new sofa and armchairs. Check out your local paper for a “man with van” or hire one locally for a couple of hours to go and pick up the sofa.
Welly boots are making a comeback. Everywhere you see adults and children splashing through the puddles in their wellies. Whether it’s green wellies, blue wellies, red wellies, funky wellies, pink wellies or the classic hunter wellies you can find them online.
For child wellies in loads of colours the best place to start might just be Little Trekkers. They’ve got loads of kids outdoors gear and wellies in red, blue, pink, fleece lined wellies and more.
If you are looking for the classic green welly by hunter wellies, www.wellie-boots.com is the place to go. They have all sorts of wellies for different outdoors activities and also blue wellies, red wellies and others for the fashion conscious.
If you’d like to give some of your welly money to charity at the same time as buying a pair of coloured welly boots, have a look at Giving Welly - they’ve been making a donation to loads of charities just from people buying wellies.
I bought the Panasonic DMC-FZ7 camera in July 2006 after scouring the market for a good bridge camera to suit my needs. Price-wise, the FZ7 came in at just under £230 from rankhour.com and delivery was rapid.
The Panasonic FZ7 is an upgrade for me from an old point and shoot digital and the difference was immediately apparent. Starting up is quick. Autofocus and Flash charging also quick. Good big LCD screen on the back, though I prefer to shoot through the viewfinder most of the time.
The Panasonic FZ7 has a picture steadying function which should probably be left on all the time in my hands. Quality of the pictures is very high with good sharpness on the autofocus. I didn’t find the manual focus that easy to use and will probably rely on the autofocus most of the time.
The pop-up flash does not come up automatically in low-light situations and it would be the main thing I would change. So far I’ve forgotten the flash more times than I’ve remembered it indoors and although the camera compensates with aperture and shutter time it has meant a few blurry shots.
Although the Panasonic DZ7 looks like a big camera in the pictures, it doesn’t feel it in your hands. Indeed it is a little small for large hands. I wouldn’t mind at all if the body was a little bigger.
The accessories that come with the FZ7 are pretty basic and I can’t see me going out with the lens hood very often - it is a bit of a faff to fit it.
One thing I did do immediately is go and but a decent case to fit my new Panasonic. Nothing worse than getting a new bit of electronics then having your 2 year old child drop if on the floor.
Overall I’m very happy so far with the Panasonic FZ7, but I’m sure I’ll post another piece about it when I’ve had more of a chance to play with it’s advanced features some more. After all, that’s what I bought it for.
Other Panasonic FZ7 Reviews:
Read the DPreview review of the Panasonic FZ7.
Read the Photography Blog review of the Panasonic FZ7.
Buy the Panasonic FZ7 cheap at:
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