Old Post Office Belper

I've been restoring and repairing my workshop in the cellar of the Old Post Office following the November floods. The water was almost chest height in the cellar. One of the casualties was my Draeger dust mask. I have a, now repaired, dust extraction system, extractor fan and vortex, to capture the wood dust from the machinery, but the system needs to be supplemented with a (P2) half face respirator mask.  I've plenty of spare filter cartridges for the respirator, but the main mask had been immersed in sewage water, so I threw it away not wanting to breathe in sewage living microbes. I've got to the point on the workshop repairs where I need to renew the respirator to continue normal woodworking. Normally this is just a quick trip to Screwfix to buy a pack containing the Draeger 3300 half mask for painters and farmers. I quite like these masks because they seal well on my face and handle most organic vapours as well as dust. However it seems that, with the Corona Virus...

Here at the Old Post Office in Bridge Street in Belper there are two incoming phone lines. They were probably Post Office lines dating back for decades and then transferred over to BT when that took over the telephone system. We used to use Plusnet (a BT subsidiary company) to provide broadband Internet over those phone lines, until they had a prolonged spell of poor customer service (despite the stories in the marketing TV adverts). We swapped the Internet service provider to use Zen Internet about four years ago. They are not the cheapest, but provide excellent customer service, and they answer their support/sales phones promptly. We'd left the phone landlines in the hands of BT.  However a couple of days ago, BT sent me a notice of a price increase. They seem to do this annually without any real justification. It was only 1.7% this year, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I'd been considering moving from BT for a couple of years, even though I quit...

We were relieved to have only minor groundwater flooding in our cellar following Storm Dennis. After several years of nagging Severn Trent finally installed a non-return valve to stop their sewer from flooding our cellar. I've added a commercial electric sump pump in the cellar. It kept the water level down to a few inches when the water table temporarily rose as the Derwent was flooding. No more cloudy sewer water, just relatively clear groundwater. Sump pump, temporary position but doing the job The drain by cellar door; in the previous flood this was a metre deep in water The non-return valve meant our drains were blocked from the sewer for a few hours while it was overloaded. However that was infinitely preferable to the alternative flooding back-up. Across the road the River Gardens restaurant suffered cellar flooding. Severn Trent Water  really need to find a longer term solution for the overloaded sewers in Bridge Street in Belper. Meanwhile we were keeping an...