Saving a few bob from Sky & O2

I've been a Sky customer a long time. 21 years to be precise. 

Originally I took the plunge because cricket, especially test cricket had moved to Sky from terrestrial TV and Mrs H got fed up of me moaning that I couldn't watch my favourite sport on TV.  And football, and golf and Formula 1.... and we use use Sky for our internet provider.

Anyhow to cut a long story short(er), although the offerings from Sky are great, they cost a lot of money. And somehow even when you take out or renew a contract, they still manage to put up prices "in-contract" (it's in their T&C).

It's always worth giving them a call periodically though to see if they can lop off a few quid here or there, and some say threatening to cancel has reaped dividends, but it's not always the case. But there's nothing to lose by asking is there?

So with my monthly Sky bill rocketing, and due to go up again in a couple of months I rang them up to see what they could do.

Well on my first call we managed to sort out a significant saving, although that was dependent on me getting some reassurance that cancelling one of the services (multi-screen - where I have a second box to watch TV in another room) didn't affect our ability to stream sky programmes via the Sky Go app to our iOS devices. You dogged the ability to do this concurrently to 2 devices, but you can use up to 4 devices concurrently when subscribed to Sky multiroom. Handy when we're away from the TV on holiday etc.

However, despite getting confirmation of this from the agent, on checking my future bills online later, it appeared that Multiscreen hadn't in fact been cancelled.

Cue a second call to Sky. The second agent told me the service indeed had not been cancelled, apologised but then confirmed that I did need to continue that to keep watching via Sky Go on more than 2 concurrent devices as set out above.

So, I agreed that I'd keep Multiscreen....

...until I checked online for my future bills and found that the agent had in fact cancelled it!

Much gnashing of teeth ensued and a third call to Sky was made this morning, where a very nice and apparently much better informed agent sorted me out, managed to shave another tenner off in the process and waived a previous admin charge.

All in all I've been able to shave about £15 a month off my monthly bill without any reduction in services, so it's worth a call.

UPDATE:

You can probably scrub a lot of the above. Following further gnashing of teeth (I've barely any left now), it turns out that you DO need a Sky Multiscreen subscription to access content (including your recordings) via the Sky Go app, and Sky Go Extra alone will not allow this. However, the nice lady in the Tech Support team did at least offer me an 18 month subscription at £8pm rather than the usual £15pm. 

So the long and short of it is that I've managed to shave off barely a fiver from my monthly Sky outgoings and had three frustrating and one successful call to Sky along the way.

Now I was on a roll (I'm a poor pensioner after all 😄) so I contacted O2 to see if I could get a cheaper phone tariff, because the only ones they were offering me online appeared to be more expensive ones.

The long and the short of it after a bit of faffing, is that instead of paying just over £23 a month on a rolling monthly contract, I'm getting the same service (10GB data, unlimited calls and texts) on a 12 month contract for £10, so almost 60% cheaper for the same service.

So today I've managed to knock £28 a month of my monthly bills. The moral of this post is I guess that it pays to at least ask the question of these companies...

Happy saving folks.....

Twitter: @Statto1927 

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/people/simon_hiscocks/ 

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April15th: Sparkly Sirius

I've mentioned before that I'm fascinated by space and the night sky. Inspired by a post on Twitter a few days ago, last night I made an attempt to photograph the star Sirius (also called Alpha Canis Majoris or the Dog Star). Its name is derived from Greek meaning glowing, sparkling or scorching". Easily visible in the night sky currently lowish to the south in early evening, it's very bright (though not as bright as Venus at the moment). Of particular note is that it's probably one of the "twinkliest" stars in the sky, and even with the naked eye you can see both the twinkling and as well as some apparent changes of colour as it twinkles.

The collage photo below is the result of my efforts last night. The change in colours from this star are literally over a period of a couple of seconds whilst I took a burst set of photos and are both amazing and stunning in equal measure and are largely due to the light from the star combined with the atmospheric conditions as the light hits the earth's atmosphere. I'm dead chuffed with the result of this as my first effort at this.

Sirius - changing colours captured 9pm 14 April 2020

I achieved result this by tripod mounting my binoculars (Olympus 10x50 DPS1 - excellent for star gazing), focussing on Sirius and then defocusing slightly (to get a more blurry and therefore deliberately fuzzy shot of the star) and then hand holding my iPhone XR camera lens to one of the binocular eye pieces and holding the shutter down for a couple of seconds to get multiple burst images. It's a bit hit and mis-using the phone hand held to actually get the shot, but after a couple of goes shooting nothing I managed it!

Once I got the shots, I needed to post-process them as the star was just a tiny coloured dot in each frame. I exported all the images from the iPhone, and then used software called "BatchPhoto"to import and crop all the images in one go so the crop ratio was 100% (doing them individually/manually would be a disaster). Then after exporting the cropped images, I used a Mac application (sorry - no Windows here), called CollageFactory Free from the Mac App Store to pull together the image above in a grid.

The night sky is truly a wondrous thing, and with the current clear skies and relatively mild evenings, it's a perfect time for getting out in the garden and having a look around. There are numerous people to follow on Twitter who provide all sorts of great info about the night sky, but if you only follow one I recommend @VirtualAstro (website at meteorwatch.org). One imminent thing to watch out for is the Lyrid meteor shower which occurs this year from tomorrow (16th) to 25th April peaking late 21st/early 22nd.

Back in the world of #isolation life and Covid-19, my son has somewhat expectedly been put on furlough. Daughter is still working from home, most of her IT issues seem to have been sorted, and my wife has a week off from work this week (well her normal 2 days anyway). She's been to see her Mum today and do some shopping for her - all ok there. After yesterday's nice walk over on the local golf course, the next highlight of my week will be a trip to the doctors surgery on Friday for my routine blood test.

I can assure everyone that the cat is fine, but living a pretty dull life currently. Sleeping most of the time, as evidenced by this shot of her underneath the rosemary bush next to the compost bin!

Spot the cat

Until tomorrow....

#isolationlife
#stayhomesavelives

March 25th: Food and space

Well if we're in this for the long haul, we should be good here. I already had onions, strawberries, raspberries, potatoes, leeks, radish, spinach and rhubarb on the go in my (very small) plot, and yesterday I sowed tomatoes, courgettes and cucumbers. I would say we won't starve, but it'll take months to grow so it might be too late by then. Better brave Tesco's or some other outlet soon then...

Actually I went to Lidl's. It's a five minute walk, so I doubled up on my allowances for a daily walk outside the house essential shopping. The Lidl store has been rammed of late in common with many other supermarkets. In fact, come to think of it, it's busy most off the time, even when we haven't got an apolcalyptic situation. This morning to be fair, whilst it was fairly busy, I've seen it busier, and there was an air of calmness about the place. It was pretty well stocked with everything (except flour, and I didn't go down the loo roll aisle) plus the normal "extra" stuff that the store is famous (or is that 'infamous' for). People didn't seem to be panic buying anything (apart from a bloke who had a carte of 24 cans of cider who it seemed was politely asked to step to one side and speak to someone (seems you can't buy 24 tinnies at once). Trouble is, when I go shopping I end up buying things I wasn't sent for. Today it was two doughnuts and a a pair of Belgian iced buns, some eggs (apparently we already had some) and a chicken and mushroom pot noodle. The main thing I went for was milk, and I forgot to buy that.....

Elsewhere, both kids have been WFH, my daughter's IT issues seemingly largely resolved. My wife went to see her mum and get her shopping and stuff. I've done more gardening, sorted my compost heap (yes it's a thing), cleaned the uPVC windows (plus the conservatory inner window sills (did the outers yesterday), and have managed to walk the equivalent of 2.8 miles today doing it all.

Oh, and I cooked tea. A favourite of ours, since I've started my retirement cooking, chicken and turmeric rice.

The cat's still loving the sunny weather (no rats today). She's in for a shock when the weather turns colder later this week.

Photo of the day, an overhead pass of the International Space Station taken this evening on my iPhone. This was the second half of the pass after a quick run from the back garden to the front garden. You can also see the constellation of the Great Bear/Big Dipper or Plough to the left of the picture. The bright star to the bottom is Arcturus.

The ISS is approx 250 miles up and going 17,500mph. Currently has a crew of 3 three, although it can accommodate up to nine. There are usually six, and they usually stay on board for around six months. The current crew is US astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew “Drew” Morgan and Russian Cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka. Self isolation at its best! You can learn more about the ISS here 

International Space Station over Barry

March 24th. Lockdown day 1: Supplemental update - Pale Blue Dot

Sorry for two posts in one day, but I was out taking photos of stars earlier, and it got me to thinking about Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check the link out (it's a very short read).

The point I'm making here is this in the context of the situation the world currently finds itself in. This is us. There's no one else (at least if there is, they're keeping well clear of us). Let's not fuck it up.

20th March - quick update

Just a quick one as I missed posting this yesterday, and will do a lengthier post later.

Still all alive and well at Chez Stats.

Boris has ordered the shutting all pubs and restaurants. No surprising really, but still a stark reminder of where we are.

New Chancellor Rishi Sunak calm and comprehensive approach to the financial challenges facing individuals, business and the country in general seems to be being received very well in the main (there's always someone with an axe to grind though. Hey, this is unprecedented folks, one step at a time...).

Just found out that I can "pause" my Sky Sports subscription whilst there's no live sport on their channels (thanks to an article I came across in the Independent, otherwise I wouldn't have known as Sky aren't doing this automatically). It's worth doing. You still have access to the channels, you just won't be charged for watching old re-runs and documentaries.  It's easy to do online and Sky will resume automatically once live sport returns. Seems a no-brainer.

Braved the weekly shop this morning (21st) with Mrs H. more on that later.

Cat couldn't care less.