Can anyone recommend the best place to get these so our essential electrical stuff will work properly in Canada? Want cheap and light weight ones. Laptops are dual voltage so just need adapters, but some other stuff is not therefore will need transformer adapters I presume.

Skibunny, sadly unable to face life without GHDs

you can get GHD products in canada, trust me, cara has researched this exstensively as she stated we couldnt go unless she could. cos they are not dual voltage.

millets or boots do normal travel adapters. and there is a online store that has been posted on here for transformers. just search the forum and youll find it.

my family have got a transformer, and to be honest it never get used. most things you take like mobile phones etc are dual voltage. cos big stuff like TV's etc are useless anyway.
anything with a power adapter stands a fair chance of being dual voltage.

cheers I'll check boots website and do a forum search then, thank you

and Robert Dyas here (UK) also - about £4-6 I think

and they sell them the other way round, if that makes sense - bought one for my new Canadian mobile phone to recharge it here ...

also if you need one in canada "the Source" do them (used to be radio shack) for $15.

If your laptop is anything like mine then the power supply may use a kettle lead, and you can just buy one in Canada. You'll only need an adapter if the lead is non-standard.

I got adaptors (not transformers) for 97p at Asda in their holiday/suntan lotion section. Buy a handful, I can never find them when I need them!

GHDs - mine exploded a Maplin's 100w transformer after about 2mins use. They worked okay-ish here despite not being dual-voltage but I bought local brand ones after a while. Much better. And now I don't use them - gone curly. The new GHDs are dual-voltage, I think I had a junk email from them the other day advertising the fact.

but the adaptor is 99 cents, generally less than the lead. (Though I was able to use a Canadian laptop in the Netherlands with the lead from a Philips radio).

Note that you'll also need a phone jack adaptor for anything that plugs into the phone line and more bits for anything that goes round-and-round where the speed of rotation is important; record players, for example.

True, but my experience is that adapters are a pain if you don't need them.

There's something in that. The experiment with the radio cord followed my breaking the adapter!

You can generally find a proper transformer in a specialist electrical store in Canada, or a lighting store. That's where I got mine. (You can likely find a bayonet lightbulb here too if you have brought a lamp over - they don't have bayonet fittings here, only screw ones). You still need an adapter to plug into the transformer so it will take the UK plug. I can't quite remember the cost of it - about 60 dollars? I use it for my sewing machine.

Ooooh! I'll check mine properly as I only got them as a Christmas present so maybe they'll be ok....
I'll have a look in Asda for adapters - that's a bargain, thank you

The GHD MK4 's came out early in Feb and are indeed dual voltage - they also have a sleep feature and a few more new gimmicks.

http://ghd-uk.co.uk/new-mk4-ghd.php

I bought a pair and they are fab - I sold my old pair on EBay for £70 which was not too bad at all. Couldn't face a day without mine either so I know where you are coming from!

When I got to canada I ordered a couple of transformers from these guys, good price and they ship from canada. Now used to power some stereo stuff and a few other misc. items that were not dual voltage.

http://www.voltageconverters.com/

A lot of modern stuff is dual volage, cameras, phones, computers etc. even my dell desktop was dual voltage, just flicked a small switch.

Some stuff does not seam to care, even though it says 240v only. Electric toothbrush for example.

Some others you can change, my dualit toaster for example, I rang dualit in the uk before I left and they sent me for about 20UKP new elements for 110v.

A