The Oven Cleaning Business

My lease on my Berlingo is running out in the next three months and for the life of me I can't remember if I have to give it back or I can keep it. There are two different types of lease you can get when you lease a van and on one you must give it back and the on the other you can negiotate a price and keep it. I've got a feeling that mine is on the one where I've got to give it back. It's not good news if I've got to give it back as I've got to fit out a new van. I know it's just a case of transfering the kit from one van to the other but it still is an inconvience.

I need to find out soon so that I can order a new van, so another job on my list for this week.

Ideally the best way to buy a van is either outright or on HP where you end up owning the van outright eventually.

Yesterday was very cold still and I had to go out and help one of the guys with a problem on their van. It took me a couple of minutes to do the job but it took me nearly an hour and a half to get there and it was just on the other side of Bristol not that far from our office.

The problem was the slip road from the M4 to the M32 was closed as it was 'iced up' and for the same reason the M32 was closed northbound as the slip round going from the M32 onto the M4 was also closed. So the whole junction on the east bound side was closed. I had to drive to the next junction on the M4 and then double back to get onto the M32 to then drive two junctions down.

After listening to Jeremy Vine Radio Show today it looks like icy problems on slip roads can cause disastrous accidents, with an accident on the slip road near Reading causing more than one death where people who tried to help died. So really after cursing the Highways Agency yesterday today I can see that they prevented a serious accident by there actions and have to applauded for that. Everything was very well organised with big flashing signs and lots of other warning signs.

Last night we had a call from one of our oven cleaning operatives to say that he had lost his key for his van and another call from another one to say that the water pump inside the van, we use to power our rinsing system, had burst! The temperature in the van had dropped to minus zero temperatures over the last few days because of the cold and as the van hadn't been used for a couple of weeks there was no residue ambient temperature, and the water in the pump had frozen solid.

So a right pair especially as we had we are really busy today.

Luckily we had a spare set of keys for the van – but now we've got to get a spare one cut which will be tricky as we are going to have to get the key to a key cutter and the operative is busy. So from this we need to keep two sets of keys as back up and not the one we normally keep; so a first thing to put on my to do list.

For the pump problem we switched vans this morning so that I now have the one with the broken pump and I will get it replaced over the new few days. So it was lucky we had a spare van. I've told the other two operatives to lag their pumps to make sure they don't freeze.