Eddie

Also worth some perspective: a 19 point wobble is noise unless you are applying for a mortgage within the next couple of months. Scores are a byproduct of behaviour, not a scoreboard to optimise. You removed a temptation you knew was a temptation, which is worth more than 19 points of a number that recovers by itself.

Worth adding that marketplaces in this space charge the seller a monthly listing fee plus a closing percentage, and the structure changed a couple of years ago from pure success fee, so check the current terms rather than what a 2022 blog post says. It affects your walk-away number more than most people expect on a small deal.

Get closer to the microphone and turn the gain down. The direct sound gets louder while the room stays where it is, so the ratio of you to room improves without treating anything, and on a condenser at 15cm you will get a substantial amount of proximity warmth as a bonus. The costs are that you have to be disciplined about plosives, which means a pop shield and singing slightly across the capsule rather than straight into it, and that any movement changes your tone. It is the single biggest free improvement available to a bedroom vocal.

Since it is short, use it deliberately. Drive it properly in the first fortnight, motorway, hills, cold mornings, full lock in a car park, air conditioning on max, every electric window and the heated rear screen. Then have an independent garage look at it in week two while you still have recourse. Most people discover the fault in month five.

Before the iron comes out, try the board with a different cable and port. Rare, but partial power delivery has faked a dead row for me once.

Worth checking against your rent end date though. Saving three days of interest and paying an extra half month of rent is not a win.

Two things in your description are killing them, and neither is the cold.

First, living on the charger. Most tool chargers stop charging but keep the pack sitting at full, and lithium cells age fastest when they are held at full charge and warm. Second, light use means those packs sit at 100 percent for weeks between jobs. Store them at roughly half charge instead, take them off the charger once the light goes green, and top them up the night before you need them.

The unheated garage is fine, cold storage is actually good for calendar ageing. What you must not do is charge a pack that is below freezing, so bring them inside for an hour first. Do that and you should see three to five years instead of eighteen months.

Put your working hours in your calendar in their timezone so they can see the block, and set your chat status to something explicit. Half of the pressure to answer at 3am is imagined and disappears when the expectation is written down somewhere they can see.

Mine took five months, but I switched from a fixed amount to a percentage of every payment and that removed all the decision making. Eight percent, automatic, the day it lands. I have never once felt it and I stopped having the monthly negotiation with myself about whether this was a good month to save.

Wrote this out as a checklist for the weekend. The stop and restart warm one had not occurred to me at all.