JBChiangRai

Never buy Atorvastatin in a pharmacy here. Go to a government hospital and get it prescribed. I pay 120 baht for 3 months supply of 40mg Atorvastatin (last tine they gave me double 20mg).

In my experience, the electronics fail well before the titanium plates in the cells wear out. I forgot to mention, make sure any systems you buy are fanless. Chinese made fans invariably fail.

Emaux salt chlorinators are the best value, but if you really want to save money then buy the salt cell generator on eBay and drive it with a car battery charger, about 1,300 baht will buy you a 6v, 12v, 18v, 24v battery charger with a 1-10 control knob for the output. Two of my pools and the pools of two of my mates are powered this way after the electronics failed (which seems to be the weak link). Just remember to reverse the polarity every month or so and adjust the current after adding salt. Still going strong after 5 years on the same salt cells. The electronics on salt water chlorinators are basically fancy constant current devices that automatically compensate for salt concentration. Another tip, don’t tile your pool, use granite. It will last the life of your pool and the cost is about the same or less. I have previously used Astral Pool, LA Swim and Zodiac devices, they all failed ultimately.

The car owners are entitled to have their cars repaired by the main dealers or main dealer approved repairer. The car owner is entitled to reject the repair if he can see it's been repaired. I rejected a repair at the Toyota main dealer in Pattaya when the door they repaired was off shade a tiny bit. I'm amazed how many people drive around in cars where the odd door or wing doesn't match the rest of the car. Whilst I have in the past painted previous car panels at 1,500 baht/panel, if it was my new Porsche you would be into hundreds of thousands of baht. In Chiang Rai, the transport costs alone to Bangkok for painting would eat up your 50,000 baht. What car would you rent them for the 2-3 weeks whilst it was away? They are entitled like for like, if it's a supercar you might well be into a million baht or a lot more. Bear in mind, if they sue you, you won't be able to leave the country until it's settled, it could take up to 5 years. Costs are rarely awarded and your costs will be anywhere between 50,000 and 250,000 baht. There is a lesson here for all condo owners, it's difficult to argue water running down a wall that destroyed an original LS Lowry watercolour painting didn't come from your condo. Your liability insurance should at least match what is below you or be prepared to hand over your condo and any other assets you have in Thailand and if that doesn't settle the debt, to be prevented from leaving here for the rest of your life.

Life is about the journey, not about the destination. Rental properties are never to your own taste. Pink and blue mixed floor tiles? Not for me thank you.

My family's real estate development company have boomed in covid times. In terms of rental properties there is very little rental stock in Chiang Rai and what there is, is mostly horrible, prices have not dropped for decent rental properties here at all. Regarding sales, you can tell immediately looking at a property whether it will sell, and most won't sell in a decade or more, not only must it be well presented but location is really important. The good real estate agents push what they know will sell, agents need to be pro-active and show a customer not what he asks for but what he needs and will actually buy. For example, a customer may ask for a single storey home with 5 bedrooms, a good agent will ask why single storey? why 5 bedrooms? The answer could well be single storey because the buyer is worried about getting old, 5 bedrooms may be because he needs 3 bedrooms and 2 offices. If the right questions aren't asked then a multiple storey home with elevator and 2 offices would be overlooked by the poor agent and a good agent will close the sale. We had a sale where an agent rented a house to a customer who comes to Thailand for 6 months of the year. She didn't KYC, she didn't know their long term aim was to buy somewhere. Another pro-active agent did ask the right questions, did some sums and demonstrated it was cheaper to buy one of our new houses in the long term and they sold them one of our 3 bedroom houses. When I told the first agent who rented them the original house, she said I was mistaken because her customer wasn't in the market to buy. She lost a rental customer and lost the sale on our house which she also had listed. All because she processed enquiries, wasn't pro-active and didn't understand her customers real needs. It's like the old job interview trick where the interviewer says "Sell me this pen?". What he's looking for is questions to qualify what he uses to write with, what problems he has with what he currently uses, what he needs, and then match his product, the pen, to those needs. There's a saying in sales "Two ears, one mouth, use them in proportion". if you don't understand what your customer really needs, you'll do a poor job and more than likely lose the sale or at best sell them something they will regret and blame you for later. I have a story about one of those too, a friend came to a party at one of my houses and said "Why didn't my agent show me this? it's exactly what I wanted", it's the same agent btw. I suspect the big agents here have a founder who knows what he's doing and sales agents who are mostly clueless. I also predict boom times coming when the country opens up.

By "Traditional Thai way" I mean concrete post and beam on pads or piles, with block walls of some sort and cement rendered. I've seen foreigners ask Thais to build in steel or to finish with real "finishing plaster" and it either fails miserably, looks a mess and/or goes massively way over budget. On more than one build, I've seen the contractors walk off site, never to return, invariably with more money than is reasonable at that point. I think you have to be extremely tactful to work with Thai construction teams too, they are very sensitive and losing face can be a major problem. It's quite possible to build post and beam and finish it off with architectural decoration to look different, for example, look at the Queen Mother's swiss log cabin at Mae Sai, it's actually concrete post and beam construction.

My company designs and builds in Chiang Rai. I have seen most building projects fail where the foreigner wants to build in anything other than the traditional Thai way. My advice is to build Thai traditional and finish off the appearance in the style you want, supervise that bit every minute they are working. Never ask Thai builders to build in a way they don’t understand unless you’re an expert and can be there all the time.

Please buy one of the condos I want to build because I need your money to build it as I don't have enough funds of my own. What could possibly go wrong? NEVER, EVER buy "off plan" in Thailand.

The well-known Northern Thailand Tarantula is often kept as a pet by experienced handler’s, it is not recommended for novices as it can be aggressive.

Simple answer - change the statute of limitations, or at least attempt to change it and get rich(er) whilst failing.

Raw milk risks, E.Coli, bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis, listeria, campylobacter, salmonella and many other pathogens. Tuberculosis is rife in some parts of Thailand, there is a very good reason why it is pasteurised, especially here in Thailand and can only be bought legally from the farmer. Most countries ban its sale completely.

The process to get a refund from air asia is very simple, you need document FU23 collect it in person from their office on the far side of the moon. Fill it in, signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. Then you’ll get your refund. Dont expect any better service from the man who painted his plane to support the kleptomaniac Najib Rizak in the general election that he subsequently lost and then Fernandes had to apologize publicly. People like Fernandes kept him in power to steal billions of dollars.

Make sure you have good health insurance, eating unpasteurized dairy products in Thailand is extremely dangerous.

I can see the middle and HiSo classes switching to EV, but I doubt you’ll get the farmers out of their 30 year old diesel pickups belching black smoke. It would be so easy to start with motorbikes/scooters, everyone can lift out the battery and plug it in at home. I drive a BEV by the way. I’ll never switch back to ICE, it’s a far superior experience.

Central Bank Digital Currency can be tagged in any way a government wants it to, for example it can only be valid to be spent before a specific date, only spent in a specific store or on specific item types, could not be exchanged into other specific currencies etc etc You will only have the right to spend it how and when the Central Bank says so, it can also be removed/forfeited at any time. Incidentally, I just got my refund, it took 7 days, much better than they quoted, even so, I’ll be much more careful in future and wherever possible, support local merchants directly.

Expiring currency is one of the many drawbacks with the coming central bank digital currencies.

I ordered a new Yamaha Digital Grand Piano from one of the very few Yamaha Authorised Retailers.

Lesson learned, I’ll order high value COD in future. PITA going to the bank to get the money out though.

On Friday I ordered an item for 139,000 baht, the list price for the item in stock (last years model). Within 5 minutes the supplier canceled my order with “pricing error” as the reason. Presumably because this years model is 6,000 baht more. The next day Lazada approved my refund, but I have to wait 3-6 weeks for the money to be returned. I would recommend you don’t order expensive items from Lazada or order them COD. Actually, there is more to this story. I complained on Tuesday and they said they would try to expedite a refund with the financial time. This morning Wednesday they called me to say it had been refunded and sent me an email to take to my bank to see where it had been lost. The refund hasn’t been lost, because Lazada use AliPay Financial Services it takes 3-6 weeks to reach the customer. So I wasted an hour in the bank too. So they take your money instantly, but take up to 6 weeks to return it. Why am I not surprised?

I had a look at the PH1000, it looks good and might be ok, I get the impression it’s basically a modified grid-tied architecture. You can’t run them in parallel unless you split your house load into multiple consumer units, 1 per inverter. You can use 1 of PH1000 with multiple PH5000’s in parallel though. It doesn’t matter which PH1000 model you buy, the grid failure output is 3.6KW, probably enough for your emergency circuits, lights, refrigerator, bedroom A/C etc. On my next big project, I might go this latter route with 1 of PH1000 and 2 of 6KW PH5000’s

PH1800-5048+ are my Hybrid inverters, I use them as whole house UPS now, when I used them as Hybrid inverters, most of the time they take very little power from the PV, if not charging the batteries and not using much power in the house then they didn’t export all the solar available, they just didn’t draw the power from the PV. I’m a big fan of the Must PH5000 grid-tied inverters, if you know the password to the admin section, you can tailor them enormously so you are the last inverter to shut down if there are others in your neighborhood and low demand.

COD is no good for a large household like mine with live-in staff. Often the recipient is uncontactable and paying for a scam order is too risky. I have always found Lazada very professional on returns.

We have a rule in my household to avoid this - No COD

If you’re going grid-tied and exporting to the grid, sometimes it pays to get inverters where you can get to the settings. Mine have had their voltage limits tweaked upwards so that (a) they are the last ones to switch off and (b) they are cadenced in 2volt increments so they don’t all go off at once. My ROI is about 5 years with batteries.