On Fri, 29 Aug 2014 15:53:08 +0100, Johny B Good
wrote:

On Fri, 29 Aug 2014 08:46:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 28/08/14 23:27, Johny B Good wrote:
I guess I've now got a target price point for my local suppliers to
try and undercut. I suspect there's feck all chance of making a
cheaper purchase locally but I thought I'd seek out some opinions in
regard of there being any less greedy suppliers out there to which I
could turn

There comes a point where I calculate that to actually get in the car
and drive to a shop that carries most items costs me around £5...I don't
baulk at £3.95 postage at all, and if you spend more than an hour
finding a cheaper alternative you have in fact wasted at notional rates
another tenner.

This is all too true. :-(

I suppose it depends on how much value you place on the benefit of
having a functioning Mempac battery fitted into the controller. In my
case, it's not so critical for every day operation with the mains
supply proving, thus far, to be as reliable as it has been over the
past 30 years or so where I live.

My main hope in posting my query was that someone else in this group
may have already dealt with this issue in a remarkably economic way
and would jump at the excuse to disseminate their hard won knowledge.
:-)
If you don't ask, you'll never find out so it's worth a punt
before wandering off into the wilderness of commercial reality.

Well, for the benefit of those who like "Closure" and didn't spot my
response to the "Coin Battery" thread started just 2 1/2 hours prior
to my last post above, CPC got a mention as a supplier who do free
deliveries on orders that meet their minimum 5 quid order value on
card transactions.

I posted a query to the group as to whether or not they sold that
Varta Memtec battery on account the site was down for maintenance when
I tried to check it out in the wee small hours yesterday. I'd posted
the question as a reminder to myslef as much as expecting someone else
to "Do My Homework For Me".

Sure enough when I downloaded the latest batch of news postings and
caught myself back up with the "Coin Battery" thread, reminding me to
check out CPC, it turns out that they sell the solder tagged version
for a mere £3.94 +VAT. Not too surprisingly, the tagless one, for
which the controller is designed to accept, was more expensive
("Supply & Demand" effect), staggeringly, almost double the price
which took it well over the 5 quid minimum for free delivery.

Since it's fairly trivial to remove the spot welded solder tags off
the cheaper battery, I ordered that along with a couple of other
useful items to pad the price up to £5.53 +VAT (allowing for the VAT
about £1.50 cheaper than if I'd bought the tagless battery on its
own).

In the end, I was able to source the battery (along with a couple of
other useful items) for a total of just £6.64 delivered, over 3 quid
cheaper than any of the other suppliers I'd found!

It might seem a trivial saving to most but I'm not exactly awash with
spare cash so it was worth the wait for, as Mr McCawber might well
have said, "Something (better) is bound to turn up." which indeed it
did. :-)
--
J B Good