Is this a Pikey record?

[The Medway Handyman]

Had to dispose of a cooker hood, hob & oven. Left outside at 3:50pm, gone by 4:55pm.

Now that's what I call efficient recycling!

[Lee]

Program on Ch4 last night called 'Scrappers' was, subject to the usual tv treatment, somewhat interesting. Was surprised just how much competition there was between rival 'scrappers'.

[Artic]

Lee scribbled...

None of them were Irish pikeys !

[Peter Crosland]

Not a record though. I once had a customer who had a TV and VCR rental business. When he had scrap machines he put them on the pavement outside the back of his shop where there was a service road. He wnet to get his van to take them to the tip and within ten minutes they had all gone. Subsequently he just put them outside early in the day and they had always gone by lunchtime. This was in a respectable area of an upmarket area in the South-East. I would save him quite a lot in fees these days.

[Bob Minchin]

My experience has been very different. I took out a CI boiler earlier in the year and I phone the scrappy three times after missed appointments to collect it. It was left out on the boundary line of my drive. In the end I had to take it up to the tip myself.

[chris French]

Depends or the location really, not much stuff would go where we live now, in London anything remotely useful would disappear.

Though some cheeky buggers did come and empty out the trailer of stuff waiting to go to the tip - an old dishwasher and smashed up cast iron bath mostly. (saved me a trip tip though)

I'm surprised there is any money in old cast iron though.

[mike]

Things go pretty quickly round here too so I guess the Asian family across the road thought it would be a good way to get rid of their old fridge free zer.

Two weeks later it's had plenty of viewers but no takers. Is there some re gulation that makes them hard to turn in at the scrappy's? I thought they' d know some illicit way round it but maybe they're just fine upstanding cit izens who wouldn't do such a thing.

[amcmaho]

regulation that makes them hard to turn in at the scrappy's? I thought the y'd know some illicit way round it but maybe they're just fine upstanding c itizens who wouldn't do such a thing.

Refrigerant CFC gases probably, should be pumped down and recycled. The single mum scrappy woman on the Scrappers programme last night left one , saying you needed some special licence to handle them.

[Tim Streater]

Then there was the story, apocryphal perhaps, of the English bloke who broke down on the autostrada. He walked down to the next emergency phone, called for help, & walked back to his car. By which time someone already had it up on blocks and was taking the wheels off. The scrote then tried to negotiate with him about sharing the car out between them.

[Nthkentman]

Had to dispose of a cooker hood, hob & oven. Left outside at 3:50pm, gone by 4:55pm.

Now that's what I call efficient recycling!

Nope....

Remove old PC from back bedroom, Walk downstairs and back 3 times (Regular 13 tread and through house) Each time I put something out before I returned it was gone...

No sign of the "Removal Men" either. End to end about 15 minutes of work.

Last year power cut because pole over road incomer at the base went bang very prettily plunging 8 cottages into darkness at 9.30pm. Local power co sent man up ladder to uncouple remains to "Tail up" to a newly arrived 200kVa genny (Brought in my MEMS from Gillingham, one of my customers using a lorry crane I service to position it safely on the kerb)

12 midnight...Power back on to the light humming of the genny. 3am.... Beep from my UPS suggests no power, look down road, genny stopped.... Why... because the 3 x 25m long 1" thick copper tails form it leading to the pole were missing ! 6am, MEMS return with new tails. Local power reconnect. 6.15 power back on.

8am crew turn up to repair feed to pole. Power on at 10.30

11am MEMS re-appear to collect Genny................. Minus the tails supplied at 6am

No one saw anything disappear !

[Tony Bryer]

Happened to me when back in the UK recently. Helped replacing a near new steel bath with walk-in shower. We put the bath out of sight behind the car and when I next looked it had gone. Less than pleased since we'd planned to put it on eBay. What surprises me is that it's not the sort of road you'd drive down expecting to find anything.

[Adrian C]

My car is mostly parked out in the street. I'm considering mounting a couple of CCTV camera's in it, Wifi'd back to the house - to report back to the council the activities of a fleet of dodgy vans that regulary roam our area. Lost a load of sheets of 8x4 plywood to them :(

[GMM]

Round here, we'd call that slow! Less than 10 minutes is my record for metal objects, and that was an old rusted wheelbarrow that I put out the front pending putting it into a skip I had: Dragged it out the front, went to do something else and 10 mins later it was gone. Saved me the trouble of taking it another few yards.

It used to irritate me that they would come and lift stuff from private property but I've come to see it as a service, so when it took a couple of hours for the old washing machine to disappear I was starting to wonder who I should write to, to complain about the inefficiency....

[Bill]

I had £15.000:00 of 3 aluminium pneumatic telescopic masts stored behind my house, very heavy and not in sight of any public area. They disappeared one day. So this mobile "scrap" collecting scheme isn't all it's cracked up to be :-(

One of the guys did get done, but only for handling and it did lead to a rather impressive raid on a local caravan park, but the masts were long gone and scrapped.

If only they would take what we wanted them to it would not be so bad.

[GMM]

Well, indeed. And the tragedy is they probably only got a tiny fraction of the £15k when they scrapped it.

Ive come to the conclusion that if it's not secured, it will definitely disappear. I caught a pikey one day trying my sideway door. He was a bit put out when I told him to eff off and said I shouldn't use such bad language in an area like this. When I asked what the 'king hell he thought he was doing, the response was 'Just looking for metal mate, what's wrong with that?' Priceless, I thought. So I said I could find him 50kg of steel if he wanted it. His eyes lit up, but he wasn't so pleased when I showed him the lamp-post across the street, but I thought it fulfilled his criteria, ie metal and accessible...

Since then I always make sure that everything is well locked up. Ideally, it would be electrified too, but that might conflict with part p....

[ARW]

15 minutes for the old bath yesterday.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Islington/Hackney... Plumber manhandles old cast iron bath downstairs and on to pavement, after which he's pretty knackered. Pops back in for the bath feet and takes them outside, by which time the bath has gone (less than

5 mins). We left the feet outside for a few days, but no one came back for them.

[Peter Johnson]

In the 1990s the Snowdon Mountain Railway installed a wind gernerator to power the points at Hebron station, which has no road access. Someone went up the mountain and stole the copper wire that fed the current from the generator. The replacement installation had two generators and less copper.

[Andrew Gabriel]

There's more refrigerant in the expanded foam insulation of old ones, and that's much more fiddly and expensive to recover.

[GMM]

Didn't stop them taking my old freezer. Perhaps our local pikeys don't care about the rules, at least not when they're not on the telly. Imagine that eh?