Because of diabetes and stroke, my eyes aren’t so good any more (see elsewhere in this blog). One of the ways in which this manifests itself is that I find it difficult to quickly differentiate the different coins when I’m out and about. I try to deal in just £1 and £2 coins, any smaller denomination I shove into my back pocket, and when I get home I stick it into a piggy bank.

This piggy bank had now become full. So I a ctually bought off eBay a coin-sorting machine, which not only sorts the coins, but will also count them so I can put them into bags. So this contraption arrived yesterday, I plugged it in and it took just about 15 minutes to sort the coins. It would have been a lot quicker, except this first time, I insisted on verifying its complete batches. No mistakes.

So, when it had finished counting, I had a total of around £70, of which I think £46 was able to be bagged up ready to take to the bank. However, given that this machine cost £70 itself… But it saved me lots of time.

Incidentally, I was expecting a compartment “none of the above”, just somewhere it could use for coins it didn’t recognise. A catch-all mechanism. But there wasn’t one. So I couldn’t resist sorting my small pile of Euro coins, just to see what happened. The result? The machine obviously makes a “best guess” at what the coin is. Unfortunately, since it has been calibrated for Sterling, when confronted with Euro coins it got things hopelessly wrong. So I think there’s a way to go before they have a “perfect” device. But as long as I make sure all my future coins are Sterling…