SatNav and a new hot water tank

I've been considering it for a while now: SatNav. I'm sure it will help prevent arguments on the road, so I had a look around to see what was available. I've tried out the TomTom in Manchester and, while it was okay, I wasn't exactly blown away by it either. I felt like it was trying to tell me too much at any time, so I ignored a lot of the clutter on the display and just read the map. It's handy having the map there ready to be glanced at when you're unsure where you're going, but I wasn't a fan of the voice alerts or the other information on the screen.

So having decided it's time to get a SatNav I started looking at what's available. I decided against TomTom, partly on the grounds that I felt it was over-complicated, and partly on price. Liz and I had agreed to "go halves" on the unit, and I didn't want my half to be more than £100. In fact, I wanted it to be considerably less than that.

After much searching I stumbled across a Garmin product that does everything TomTom does plus a whole lot more but with a considerably smaller price tag. It looked good, but I felt like it was overkill. I don't really need an MP3 player, video player SatNav. I just want the map functionality really. But I was impressed, so I had a look to see what else Garmin had on offer.

It was then I stumbled across the Garmin Streetpilot i3. It's small (very important when removing from the car -- another black mark against TomTom I'm afraid) and it's simple. It focuses on the map and only minimal additional information is displayed on the screen. Perfect. Plus, and this is the important part, it's a fraction of the cost of most GPS devices. Out came the switch and today it arrived.

As with any new toy I couldn't keep my hands off it and so it was straight out of the box and straight into the car for some playing. On the whole it's great. It does what I want it to do and that's about it. It has lots of places of interest pre-loaded onto its memory, and I paid £2 to download a list of speed camera locations which I augmented to its memory. Plus I found a nice site which allows you to download business locations and add them to your Garmin product (you have to rename the .ASC file to .CSV for the upload software to work though. Took me a while to figure that out) and so I now have a list of campsites, zoos and vegetarian restaurants in the device too.

But not only can the device mark the location of speed cameras, campsites, zoos and vegetarian restaurants, but it can also tell you if you're approaching them too fast. Although I suspect that feature is more for cameras than anything else. When approaching a speed camera too fast the device will provide an audible warning as well as showing the location of the camera. Very swish. While I was testing this by driving too fast towards speed cameras (that's a joke, by the way) I noticed the device can also detect when you're about to enter a new speed limit and warn you accordingly. I was driving at 40 approaching a 30 zone and it beeped at me until I slowed down. Very clever stuff, and not something I was expecting for the price I paid.

It even knows where my ex-boss lives and can give directions accordingly, so I won't get lost on Friday when I drive to his house to stay there for the weekend for my stag do.

Anyway I could drivel on about it all night. But I won't.

I also had a fit today when the plumbers finished installing a new hot water tank for us. He totalled it all up, and I proceeded to have an asthma attack as I read it. As I couldn't find my cheque book I had to pay by credit card. Ouch.