Finding the chase and cutting to it

I don’t normally use capitals in titles, this isn’t a tabloid newspaper, after all, but proper nouns need that distinction…

Eh? What?

The Micawber Principle is this: expenditure less than income gives happiness, expenditure greater than income is penurary, as per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Micawber_principle.

This is a universal truth no matter religion, upbringing or income. Living within your means is a peaceful way to live. Some religions and philosophies say you should never, ever borrow. Everything should be done by saving up and then buying. Great to do, if you can, but that assumes you have somewhere to live already that doesn’t need a big deposit and furniture and linens etc.

So, some debt at some points of your life are unavoidable. The trick, according to many, is to sort out your debt as quickly as you can. The only debt you should ever, really have is for your mortgage. Given that focus, let’s do some basic sums.

Expensive debt

Some debts are more expensive than others. Anything that is more than 2% over the Bank of England base rate is by its nature, expensive debt.

Day to day, we encounter this debt through (in no particular order): store cards, credit cards, and of course, overdrafts, and car loans.

Any of these you are paying interest in need to be “prioritised”, i.e. make savings to pay these off (also called settling the debt). Most of these you can agree an amount to pay them off or potentially consolidate in a single loan.

Luxuries

OK, this is the depressing bit when you have debt. Little treats are expensive: alcohol, cigarettes, petrol not for work, an adults clothes, adults shoes, cinema tickets, chocolate, any food cooked by a business, any ready meals, sugary or diet drinks, sugar, crisps, snacks, etc. The best bit about these savings though are the fact that you can live without them. Tea and coffee made at home is a fraction of the cost of the same drink in a cafe. When you have a little spare money, buy a flask. Biscuits are not nutritially useful, so are luxuries.

Swap alcohol at home for fruit juices: still pricy but with vitamins and minerals that keep you healthy. Squash is less beneficial than fruit juice but way better than carbonated drinks in terms of cost. Limit the use for during meals. Water is cheap out of a tap between meals.

Crisps are expensive for the nutrition you get. Nuts are expensive but way cheaper than meat. If you’re having a couple of vegetarian days a week, nuts can make up for the protein you are potentially missing.

You are unlikely to need a bath or shower every day. You need shampoo and soap – these are not luxuries but there are different price points for these and you don’t need to wash hair everyday. Don’t blow dry – wash hair in the morning and let the air dry it. A longer style only needs cutting every 3-4 months as opposed to 8 weeks.

You need deodourant and toothpaste. These are essential.

Spending strategies

This works wonders and after I graduated and was buying my first house, this is what I did with my wages – I was paid monthly, but I used to do this when I was paid weekly too.

Take out the money you have for the month as cash. Never take out your plastic cards when shopping instead take a weeks’ worth of budgeted money and keep that in your wallet – this is what you are using for your groceries, etc. When the money for that week is gone, you can’t spend anymore. If you have any left, you can use that to put towards something for that month or as emergency money.

Physical money is very easy to keep track of: it’s immediately obvious when you are paying for something. It is slower, but if you are settling big debts, this is magic. It also allows you to protect the money for the rent/mortage, council tax, and of course, water, electricity, and gas bills. They sit in your bank account and do the work for you.

Kids clothing is the hard one, they grow and that can be unpredictable. Secondhand is a god send, school jumbles, charity shops. These are all great sources of cheap clothing. If you’re handy, knit childrens jumpers, gloves, and hats – an adults woolen jumper can be recycled when worn out into a child’s one. Every winter term, my mum would take a Sunday afternoon to make wooly hats and gloves. Mittens are significantly cheaper, simpler, and quicker than gloves. Use scraps to make pom-poms. If buying secondhand coats for the winter, ski gear is amazingly warm and you can often get trousers which can be a boon when the temperatures plumet. A secondhand coat and salopettes are around £8. If you are really lucky, they’ll match too.

Don’t be tempted to buy more than 2 sizes too big. Kids grow but not that quick. Young children may see two or three winters out of a coat, but teenagers might not.

Portion sizes

If I have one tip, it’s this. 50g of dried pasta or rice per person is a portion. Same with potatoes. Keep potatoes in the fridge, about 4C. Large bags from a grocer or supermarket are cheaper than buying for a day – depending on the size of the family, work out how many meals will be covered. A 5kg bag of rice lasts for 100 portions – how long that lasts depends on how many grown ups you have. Anyone over 12 is eating grown up portioons. Children 5-11 are eating half to three quarters, kids under that, about a quarter.

Don’t be tempted to cook then reheat food. You’re paying twice to cook it. Only make too much if it’s a cold item (like a salad) or you are storing it before cooking it. I do this with pasta.

Left-over meat is the exception, roast dinners are brilliant for providing protein for more than one meal.

Big pieces of meat are the way to buy and then follow the roast on Sunday, stir fry or stew Monday, mince on Tuesday. That’s three meals. A £8 joint is looking a bit more worthwhile. Apart from poultry (chicken), we separate out the meals before doing the roast. A set of scales and a knife and that’s cheap eating. Fresh veg are cheaper than frozen. Keep veg in the fridge and a bag of potatoes can last six weeks. Look out for offers, especially on a Friday or Saturday evening or Monday when things didn’t get sold on Sunday. Peel, wash, and process them yourself – loose veg are cheaper than prepackaged.

Don’t buy mince beef – quorn is incrediably cheap, tasty, and a source of protein. Chilli, bolognese, and pies (shepards and pastry) are very good with quorn. It does need freezing and typically cannot be bought in bulk but such a great way to make money spread further.

Shop once a week. Chips are expensive to cook, because you need to cover them in oil and oil is more expensive than water. Stews are amazing in terms of cost and only need 20 minutes or so to cook for a good bit of meat. A tougher cut may need a little more. With veg, 20-30g is enough per person. Rabbit is cheap but doesn’t contain much is the way of useable nutrients, so best avoided more than once a month, especially for children.

Milk is more expensive than petrol typically but essential for children – if you are eating meat, you can get all the calcium you need from other sources. Plain yogurt is much cheaper than sweetened yogurt. Buy some fruit for the kids and make you own from your supermarket’s own brand plain yogurt. From Tesco’s, 500g of plain yogurt costs £0.85p. Seasonal fruit or even jam can be used to flavour it: that’s a do it yourself Muller fruit corner for a bargin – strawberry jam is £0.90 for 454g for many portions where-as a Muller corner is £0.50p a pop.

500g of yogurt at £0.85 and a pot of jam for £0.90 and you have 10+ portions for less than two Muller corners…

fish are jumping and the cotton is high…

Not so easy for some!

It was my husband’s turn to do the weekly shopping and I think he went shopping hungry – big mistake, big supermarket bill just for two people!

We have very little food waste.  But that is largely as we both take account of what’s happening in the fridge before we go: normally.

We also make the effort to store food carefully to get the most of what we buy.  I make my own pasta, which uses up eggs as well as the 00 grade durum wheat.  Jon bought some rolls this week, so I won’t be baking bread this weekend.  The celery in the fridge, with some cream, eggs, and stilton, will make a delicious soup.

A while ago, I bought a load of spinach.  I do that with some sheets of pasta to make a tasty ravioli.  Quite a bit of effort but so straightforward and quick to cook.

Even if we get a ready meal, I prefer to cook my own rice.  There are two reasons for that, for me.  In 1998, I bought my first house: I know, houses were reasonably priced then, I don’t know how lucky I was, blah.

Back to the point!

Sorry, I got my first car load of shopping to fill my new kitchen.  I bought a 5kg bag of basmati rice, I think the price was about £8 a bag.  Well, my now husband moved in and we’d got through that big bag of rice in just over a month!  To say I was a little shocked was to put it mildly because a 500g used to last more than a month…

I looked at the back of the next 5kg bag and it said “a portion of rice is between 50-75g per person”.  I duly weighed out the 100g for me and my husband and cooked it to have with a chicken korma (bung ’em in the oven).

I served up and we both commented on how small the rice looked.  The surprising thing was, it was a good size of rice.  True, it looked lost on the plate, but it was perfectly sized to the curry.  Our 5kg lasted 6 months and in fact, I scaled up to 10kg which lasts about a year.  The price for 5kg is now £16 but you get 100 portions, that’s 16p a serving.  No waste.

It also needs less water to cook it – 100g rice should be boiled in 200ml of water.  That needs 0.18kWh for 15 minutes – that 0.72kW.  Significantly less than a unit of electricity, about 14p to cook.

Life isn’t as cheap as it was but it’s not out of reach of many.  What’s going to be out of reach is wasting food and energy, going out for food, and sitting in the winter with the heating set to 20C.

Already, we’ve noticed the cinema is quieter.  Restaurants are less busy, car parks have spaces in them.  10am in our local supermarket and it was relatively quiet!  The main road outside of our house is quiet and not because the vehicles are now electric not petrol…  Taking a car into town is not just the fuel to power the motors but parking too.

People are making the effort to switch off lights if they are not being used, laptops in home offices are switched off at the end of the day.

I know for some, life is going to be really difficult, but if we’re changing our behaviour to reduce our costs, the planet is going to be reaping the benefits too.

I think it’s very easy to see EPC, or energy performance certificates to the uninitiated, as being theoretical ideals and bearing no relationship to the real world. But over the 20 years they have been around, they have improved the estimates no end.

As a nation, we understand that our winters are cold (and damp) and our summers are hot (and damp). The UK is not completely unique in this aspect, as the 9th largest island in the world, and due to its temperate climate, it being relatively densely populated, it has the great benefit of the Gulf Stream keeping it relatively mild in the winters for our position in the northern hemisphere.

So what?

Sorry, we need to heat our houses during the winters. Full stop. A wise friend of mine at university said the “[northern European] countries had to be more sophisticated, earlier, than [their southern neighbours] as they had to work out indoor plumbing and heating before doing anything else”.

He was in a pub in Hull at the time, on a cold, damp October evening.

Heating matters. The EPC has a section on this and its estimate was less than 4% out and that’s largely as we didn’t have the tado system fully in place last year

That means our carbon footprint is actually a little larger than the 2.8 tonnes (2.98 tonnes last year) but should reach that next year.

It also gives an estimate on how much your electricity bills and heating bills should be (lighting, heating, and hot water generation), and for most households, like ours, that has gone up the last year. The less you need to heat your property, the better.

Now, that EPC doesn’t give your total usage. Washing clothes, cooking, drying clothes, watching TV, making tea and coffee, etc, are not included in the sums.

That’s important because you can eat cold food, barbeque, use solar cookers, etc. The rest is less of a choice – you cannot live in the dark and you cannot go without heating.

Heating? It’s springtime in England…

To preserve health, houses should be at least 16C at all times. That’s the minimum to ensure there is no mold growing. In bath and shower rooms, that may need to flash up to 19C to ensure the rooms dry out fully for some hours a day.

Which is tough to do when you’re short of spare money due to inflation: there is a great deal of inflation in the energy market with gas and petrol prices rising a great deal over the past few months. There is currently talk of reducing the duty on heating oil, to help those off grid. Personally, that help should be going towards reducing your need to burn fuel.

Government should sort that out!

How? I’m not being funny, but high energy prices should lead to demand dropping. In terms of climate change, that’s a good thing – if the war between Ukraine and Russia hadn’t lead to sanctions, governments across the world might have had to increase taxes to curb demand.

We live on a major road, and we see fewer cars out and about during non-commuter times. Petrol locally is retailing for £1.67 and diesel is £1.78 per litre today.

In principle, no-one wants to see global warming, but it’s harder to justify turning down the central heating a degree, if you can afford it. Replacing thin insulation or filling gaps under floors is a real hassle, not to mention expense, if you don’t really need to do it from a cost point of view.

We’ve been ahead of the curb because I chose to prioritise it and have worked towards a five year improvement plan trying to work out what would work for us in terms of comfort, cost, and “bang per buck”. (To the discerning, return on investment, either in terms of savings or reduction in CO2). No move has been made in a hurry, and to spread cost and effort, in small steps.

EPC is one way the government is looking to make the changes count. If you rent a property, your landlord should ensure the property has at least an EPC rating E and in three years time, that needs to be a C. In terms of costs today, that’s an energy saving worth £500 per annum.

Left to me to make the change as I don’t rent 🙁

Plan – a big bang approach to this is, potentially, going to cost a lot. If you have an analogue thermostat and radiators, changing the valves to thermostatic ones one month means you can change the thermostatic ones to smart thermostatic ones the next month. Then do the room thermostat last – expensive but not as big a hitter in terms of energy efficiency!

Decorating a room and getting new carpet? Well, that’s a good time to look at the floor’s insulation. Though it’s a good bet that a house built before 2007 is unlikely to have insulated floors. Even a Victorian house can have the upstairs floors insulated by fibre glass – cost effective in terms of materials but you might want to devote 4 hours to each room, including remediation. Some floor underlays can help keep provide extra insulation too.

Guess it would recoup the money long term…

In the short term, it can make a big difference to your house’s value. moneysupermarket.com – the value of efficiency shows that a band C has a 10% higher price and a band B-A has a 14% higher value. In our area, that’s equivalent to £7,880 (the cost of a 4MW solar array) and probably improve the speed it takes to sell. After all, would you want to down grade from a B/C rated house to a D rated one, if you had a choice? The average property in the UK is rated D – a brand new home from a big developer is not necessarily better than a Victorian one that’s been modernised.

An EPC also gives advice on what you can do to make a difference and often includes solar generators, solar water heaters, and low carbon heating schemes though there seems to be a price limit on these recommendations, with few being made if the cost is above £10,000.

We’ve not finished our journey. Our windows are OK, but not particularly high spec. That’s the next big job in our house.

Eh?

Few things in life are as good as enjoying time with friends, catching up on what’s been going on, and getting to enjoy the world going by your back garden.

Oh, yeah?

Yes. It’s well known that humans are gregarious and after the past couple of years, it’s great when old traditions start up again, like the Ipswich to Felixstowe classic car run, held on the Sunday of the first bank holiday in May.

First?

This year is unusual as we only have one in May, but seeing classic cars, lorries, buses, motorcycles, hearses, etc, drive by your backgarden wasn’t something we had considered a tangible benefit, but it’s a great excuse to have a barbeque. Albeit, sometimes in the rain – this year, my husband, Jon, bravely manned the grill while the rest of us sheltered in the warm and dry kitchen…

A big thank you to our friends, one came all the way to Ipswich from Hemel Hemsted which is no mean feat, and my mum came down from North Norfolk. Some came all the way from the destination, which I always feel a little mean about. One friend brought their classic Spitfire and all brought food and drink to share. We all got to ooh and aah over the classic vehicles driving past the house.

I don’t get what this has to do with the title?

Hold your horses, I’m getting round to that. It may not seem obvious why I’m talking about a classic vehicle run as a means for getting people together while talking about carbon footprints and being happy with a B. Doesn’t everyone want an A, after-all?

Internal combustion cars are responsible for a fair bit of the carbon dioxide produced each year. Even car production has a significant footprint, nearly 0.42 tonnes a year per person. Yet, the car has allowed people to flourish in many areas, to travel for pleasure and business and allowed the young and the old to travel with very little hinderance across the UK and beyond.

To ensure we (and everyone else across the world) retain this capability, we have moved to reduce our carbon footprint in other areas and I am proud to say, our recent energy performance certificate (EPC) assessment rated our home as being grade B.

Any houses sold in the UK need to have an EPC performed so prospective owners can see how much CO2 their future houses would generate. This is critical to the UK reducing its carbon footprint down to net zero and help the world reduce global warming.

Now, a B is OK, it means our home produces 2.8 tonnes of CO2 per annum through heating it and its inhabitants and in providing light and cooking. It’s a theoretical minimum and what we should be aiming to achieve. When we bought the house 9 years ago, it’s rating was a C and it’s theoretical footprint was 4.9 tonnes a year.

The average home in the UK produces 6 tonnes of CO2 per annum – there are 62 million dwellings in the UK, so that is a whopping 372,000,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum.

If everyone achieved a B – which should be achievable for most homes, that would come down to 173,600,000 tonnes a year. A big difference.

Now, we’ve managed that reduction while keeping a gas boiler. Insulation means despite having a house three times the size of the average house in the UK, our gas bill is about a third of what is normally spent by most house-holds. Only heating rooms we need and frost protecting the rest means we don’t damage our health but ensure our bills and carbon production are as low as possible. We’re comfortable but aren’t spending a fortune and most of what we’ve done is achievable by all.

Yeah, I bet!

Truly. For a three bed-semi, with 6 radiators and one room thermostat can do this for around £375 – that’s a sizable amount of money but with gas and electricity prices likely to get bigger over the 12 months (and beyond), a worthwhile investment. The average gas bill is £900 per annum at the moment, so that’s more than a third to save any amount off this bill. That’s a tough reach for many.

Insulation between floors and even insulating garage doors if you have rooms above them can make a huge difference. If you have removable floor boards upstairs, this is not an easy or pleasant job, but can make a huge difference. The cost would typically be £100 or so, if you can do it yourself.

Simple steps like wearing a jumper indoors, sharing a room with each other while awake or even cuddling up with an extra blanket can keep you warm without having to heat the room to more than 18C. In the 1960s, the average room in the UK was 12C over winter, now it’s over 18C – but many keep rooms significantly above this comfortable level all the time.

If we’re not in a room, we keep the temperature around 16C to prevent mold and damp.

Lag pipes where possible. Having done this during our recent ensuite renovation, we’re not wasting any heat in our pipes and ensuring they are not subject to frost damage.

OK, OK, I get the point. Start saving to start saving for this coming winter.

Absolutely. With the room and smart radiator valves, although it would cost more long term, you can do each room in turn. Ironically, updating the radiator valves in the lowest used rooms might return the biggest savings long term. Our spare room is only heated more than frost protection when someone stays over, for example. Do the most occupied rooms last. That’s the approach we’ve taken downstairs, for example and from day one, we’ve saved 10% as a minimum each month (18.9% as a max).

Every little step you can make helps us all achieve what we need to in order to save the planet.

I’m sitting on the sofa in our kitchen, taking a breather having realised ninety minutes ago that I had royally and completely screwed up.

Oh yeah?

Your sympathy is awe inspiring, you know that?

Get on with it!

Ok! Well, my newish pump has two ways of working: enter the carbs and it works out the dose or enter the amount of insulin you want. Well, I was just out of a hypo and got these confused – due to my ratios, that meant I got ten times the insulin I needed to cover my breakfast (thankfully, including a slight lowering as I’d been on the lower side of normal).

Ouch!

Ouch, indeed. Thankfully, I spotted the mistake before I got too low and having considered eating 130g of CHO via various sources, decided on a correction using glucagon (which would cover 5 of the 13.5iu I had mistakenly taken), 250ml of coca-cola, and a packet of crisps as we had no bananas in the house.

Wait: crisps?

Potatoes have almost as much potassium in them as bananas and potassium binds to insulin in a similar way to sugar. Indeed, it’s one of the ways foods high in potassium take more insulin in a bolus than other foods with similar sugar content.

Anyway, glucagon is the main helper and I’ve managed to keep my levels up but glucagon always wipes me as it’s asks the systems in my body to convert the stores in my body to glucose and the injection is a massive dose of this which happens in a small way every second of every hour of every day. To say I feel pooped, even though I haven’t technically speaking been hypo, is putting it very mildly.

Take it easy?

Guess so, another wasted day 🙁 just for the sake of a little confusion.

Oh no, not another depressing one?

Hey, stop that. No, I’m back on energy consumption now the clocks have gone forward…

Oh, all right then, though looking at energy prices, it’s not that happy-a-subject

Thanks, I think.

Like many couples, we sat down and looked at some of the changes in the last budget. While there is unlikely to ever be another deal like FIT (feed in tariff), there are some interesting things even if you aren’t in a Council Band D or lower house.

Like what?

Well, many energy saving devices and installations are now zero rated for VAT, please see Energy efficiency improvements including solar panels and batteries. Please note the first bit of the article is for major installations, like air and ground source heat pumps. There’s also the government article on the changes here.

While solar panels were often VAT free, there used to be a number of conditions, but these are now zero rated, full stop. Same with batteries, which were only zero rated before the last budget if they were installed along with a solar array.

As I said, our conversation at lunch time strayed into batteries and what we’d like to have as a result. We’d still need to buy a couple of solar panels to qualify for the zero rate, but they’d soon recoup themselves with the smart export guarantee.

Given our situation, it’s not an easy sum. The solar is very standard but our vehicle to grid makes our usage a little unusual. We’ve got the house tuned so we’re rarely using more than 310Wh, although that peaks for cooking, boiling the kettle, etc. So 24*.32=8kWh battery.

But the car changes all that! When the V2G is storing energy, we peak up at 3kWh, lets say that happens 3 times a day. While we effectively don’t pay for that electricity (we get the money back when we donate), we’re still drawing 9kWh over three hours. Much of that is while we’re generating energy from our solar cells, but still.

We’re also begining to be able to use our spare solar power to heat our hot water – saving us burning gas during the summer months.

Anyway, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be an easy sum. Speaking of which, we’ve just got the barbeque out. Which should save a little more energy tonight, even if it is way to cold to eat out this time of year 🙂 and it is only carbon neutral.

I bought a piece of beef for Sunday lunch and the left overs are being made into burgers for tea tonight.

Have a great one!

I was born with misaligned teeth. Not by a great deal and not really at the front, apart from protruding canines at the top.

As a teenager, braces were discussed but at that time, aspartame came on the market and we soon discovered that triggered fits in me.  No aspartame, no fits: I also measure my proteins and ensure I don’t have too much phenylalanine from any sources – as this is the protein aspartame is metabolised as and while I’m not PKU, too much phenylalanine is not great for me.

Anyway, that put pay to the conversation about braces.  Fits and braces don’t mix.

Of course, the fangs were awkward once they came in fully and in my mid-twenties, I finally gave in and had them ground down which meant the permanent holes I had in my lip finally had a chance to heal…

Boring!

Sorry, just giving the background to where I am today: day 2 of my Invisalign™ journey.

Now, the clear aligners are removal so any issues with lows causing fits can be aleviated.  The trade-off is the time.  Fixed aligners (you know, the old metal fixed braces) would take a year or so to straighten my top and bottom teeth.

The removable aligners are a bit slower.  The process involves wearing the first set of aligners for two weeks, at least 22 hours a day.  The more I can wear them, the faster the journey.

Then that set will be swapped for a second set and so on until the last set is worn.  40 sets in total, so that’s at least 80 weeks or 18 months to you and me.

The aligners are largely invisible – they fix onto pegs on key teeth which allow them to do their magic.

However, any food or drink I have can end up sitting in them and being prone to infection, that means everything I have that isn’t water requires me to remove the aligners (top and bottom) each and every time.

My smile may end up straighter, but in the meantime, my teeth have been brushed so many times in the past 30 hours.  I am flossing twice a day too.

Of course, that should become easier as the process is performed, the idea is to create some space to allow me to keep my teeth cleaner too.

Wow – what’s it like

Early days to be honest.  It’s definitely doing something.  The early days of each set are likely to feel quite alien and uncomfortable.  It’s day 2.

I’m already better at getting them on and off for food and drink.  I may end up slimmer too, as the cleaning after eating is a bit of faff: light snacks are really not worth the effort, so they can disappear.

Same with tea and coffee, wine, in fact, I’m a new fan of water 🙂

listening to Radio 4 happily announce the launch of “the artificial pancreas” in the NHS.

I realise, I’m one of the 900 trialing this approach in the UK and it’s far from the freedom being touted in the article.

I got my new pump, a Tandem TSlim X2 with “Control iQ” on the 13th January and on the day I got it, my HbA1c was 5.6% which in layman’s terms means an average of approx. 6mmol/l.  Over the past few weeks, using my Dexcom, I have tuned my basal dose in my pump and my boluses to keep my glucose between 4 and 6.7mmol/l 80% of the time and between 3.8 and 10mmol/l 97% of the time quite often.  I still get highs, I still get lows but I’m in amazing shape.

This is not the same as being non-diabetic; the average non-diabetic is ranging from 3.5 to 6.8mmol/l > 98% of the time.  But I’m reasonably close with a target blood glucose level of 4.8mmol/l for corrections etc.  If I’m bolusing, that’s my goal 75% of the time (exercise changes it as does driving).

What am amazing thing to be doing, with the trial, I mean

I was looking forward to it.  I knew it wouldn’t be running as low, in “normal mode” as I do, but I was expecting it to spot when I was high (getting my boluses wrong) and correct round the edges and more importantly, pick up if I’m dropping a bit low.

Well, it’s done that for you, hasn’t it?

Not really.  First, I had that great HbA1c on a completely different insulin, which didn’t work with the algorithm.

So, a new insulin.  Which meant my basals didn’t work.

Shouldn’t be an issue, it will tune on top of the basals.  Only it didn’t.  After 7 weeks, I’d ditched it for running over night from about 9pm.  After 9 weeks, I’d ditched during the day too.

Why?

I don’t like running that high.  Full stop.  More importantly, I don’t want my insulin to be shut off when I’m above 7mmol/l, because it believes I’m going to be low in 3 hours time leading to my blood sugar being above 10mmol/l regularly.

It reducing my evening basal regularly meant I was being hyper more times than I could mention with blood sugar high enough to wake me in the night needing the loo and that’s when I could persuade it that my blood sugar needed to be below 7mmol/l to allow me to sleep!

It decreased my time in range against the levels I was given as a 7 year old and just left me feeling tired all the time.  A thoroughly miserable experience and that’s ignoring the fact it didn’t cope with different stages in my menstrual cycle – I had to manually programme them.

Did it at least protect against any hypos while running?

No, it was more cautious about correcting highs but that just meant I had to turn it off – the classic was when I’d got a bolus wrong and it shut my insulin off when I was above 9mmol/l leading to me being above 13mmol/l and fighting a hyper at 3am.  When I got it below 8mmol/l I turned on the closed loop only for it to not start “tuning” when I got to 6mmol/l which would have saved me from dropping below 3mmol/l an hour later because it deemed 6mmol/l as being “perfect”.

And that was before I caught Covid-19.  I thought it might at least help with that.

No?

No.  I tried for the first couple of days but it wouldn’t keep my blood sugar down enough to allow me to fight the infection.  That’s when my non-diabetic husband suggested I give up the fight and turn off the loop.

A failed experiment then?

Pretty much.  The worst bit is being on an insulin that is harder to correct highs with because it has a slower acting rapid onset.  Having spent the past 6 weeks tuning my basal, I’m pretty much I still bereft of losing my old pump and the freedoms it gave me.

 

The recent budget has brought a couple of interesting things with it.

The one I’m going to go through today is the 0% rating on the purchase of new solar panels.

Rich man’s game

No, wait, solar panels have come down in price, so while some of the subsidies have disappeared, if you weren’t buying a new system, a VAT rate of 5% would be applicable with little help outside of that.

There is help available via some grants to help if you are on a low wage.

The VAT break is important: a 4kW system would be around £5,000 including VAT a month ago, so that drops to £4,761 and there are other deals around.

That, coupled with the fact you’re saving on your electricity and getting the smart export guarantee makes solar tantalising.

Tantalising?

Yes, so for every 1kW we export that’s generated by solar, we get £0.30 back per kWh. That means we get around £1,020 a year back on what we generate. A really good year, that goes up to £1,080 which covers a great deal of the cost of the electricity we do by from the grid.

While interest rates are still low, this is a worthwhile investment.

Of course, we also get the chance to use that electricity – during the weekend, that means we don’t spend more than a couple of pence a day. All our cooking and cleaning is powered from our panels. Timing is everything and we do plan what we do when.

The great thing about moving to summer time?

Absolutely. While the clocks going forward is really hard work in many respects, being able to time hot meals, so they are cooked by the power of the sun makes it so worthwhile in reducing carbon dioxide production and of course, costs.

Not the whole story for you, though!

No, we also do vehicle to grid. That give us £0.32 for each 1kWh we export back to the grid that’s been stored in the car. We get around £700 a year from that, if we don’t use the electricity ourselves.

Some of that power has come from the solar cells, so it’s hard work getting a complete picture. But, it’s interesting that we can subsidise most of our power consumption with our exports.

Yuk, depressing!

What, no! I’m not talking about aging, I’m talking about the clocks going forwards.

Losing an hours sleep, everyone whinging, boring!

I take it that you’re still out of sorts from losing that hour?

Hump…

OK, well, this time of year is hard for anyone replacing missing hormones in their body. That hour is, usually, followed by longer days and less sleep full stop. Ironically this stress on my body just makes me want to curl into a ball and fall asleep but due to high pollen counts last week, I had the added joy of antihistamines.

Whinger…

Hey. While I have managed to get 6+ hrs most nights the past couple of weeks, it has not been in continuous, uninterrupted bliss. While I’ve had a “closed loop” pump, it was allowing me to go very high “to prevent hypos” which just meant I couldn’t get to sleep in the mornings. Fun. So that’s been off for a couple of weeks now, lowering my “go to bed” values and stopping the high alarms. I am back up to > 94% in range too (the 6% out of range is typically on the low side) – and if we count what non-diabetics have their blood sugar at, more than 97% with most of the out of range values being on the high side.

Oh, that’s confusing

Even 5 years ago, the common consensus was that “normal people” had blood sugar between 4 and 8 mmol/l when ever you test them. The widespread use of continuous and flash glucose monitors shows this is not true. A fit and healthy adult typically has a range of 3.5 and 6.7 mmol/l – the 3.5mmol/l tends to self correct without any undue harm.

The ranges for type 1 diabetics tend to be a little higher, 4 and 10mmol/l, for historic reasons – insulin has a parabolic action over a number of hours when given subcutaneously. If giving large doses of long acting insulin, 4mmol/l is borderline “hypo”. Though in our non-diabetic adult, it wouldn’t cause concern as their insulin would not be released and glucagon would be given until the values raise.

My glucagon reaction is there, although it’s fighting much higher levels of insulin over a longer period, so sometimes I need to give extra glucagon infra-musculy.

Still confused!

OK, so doing this myself, most of my values are within range with peaks during meal times or having corrected a lone at 3am.

If we look at 8:47am (just after I had breakfast), my closed loop system would have shut off my basal insulin (given once every three minutes to cover my background requirements) and waited until I got back up to 6.1mmol/l, which happened due to breakfast at 9:07am. That gap at that point in the morning would mean I was then hyper (above 10am) at 11am. To counter this behaviour (as I couldn’t alter its algorithm and decision making). I had put nearly 4iu on my basal at various times fo the day.

Having used the pump in open loop mode, my basal has gone from 42iu a day to 38iu and as you can see, my evening levels are pretty spot on. I had a late lunch and didn’t bolus quite on time, but that is a decent graph and an average of 6.4 – the closed loop was averaging 7.3mmol/l as an average.

The evening meal, which tends to be my main eating event of the day, was typically high using the closed loop as it was desperate to prevent a hypo and shut of my basal for up to 45 minutes after eating although you can see from the graph above that just didn’t happen.

Is man better than machine?

I think there are a few learnings:

1. The basal has to be good to start with
2. You cannot tune the basal with the closed loop going
3. It is much more proactive stopping hypos without trusting I know what I’m doing basal wise
4. I’ve set up the pump with my ratios for insulin effectiveness and carb to insulin ratios. They may be exactly what I use, but I also use the exception rule – different foods act in different ways and I balance meals effectively.
   I also understand that between basal pattern shifts, things need to be a little looser on occasion.

The really irritating thing is when I’m correcting under bolusing – not giving enough insulin when eating. It assumes you’re effectively overdosing and switches off your insulin when your blood sugar is high – doh.

When I do this myself, I do a differential – I wait until my blood sugar is back to 10mmol/l and then work out if I have too much insulin on board – the amount of active insulin in play and how long that’s going to last – if it’s 30 minutes, I may just keep an eye on everything but if it’s 3iu over 3 hours, I’d tune the basal or have a little corrective carbohydrate to ensure I end up around 4.5-5 mmol/l.

It’s not the closed loop algorithms’ fault. It does not have the full picture – indeed, if I haven’t bolused, it does a reasonable job. But it is not good working out, even if I tell it I’ve had CHO, that I need insulin after 45 years of not making my own.