Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Many large retailers will have ecommerce sites with products and pages of content in completely unrelated niches so your extra pages of loosely related should be fine. They may not rank highly for the terms related to the main theme though.

Thanks a lot for the valuable advice - looks as though the risk reward ratio does not stack up in my favor just yet. I'm definitely going to hold fire until the Panda update has stabilized even though I am sure I would be benefiting the users.........