Day: November 14, 2006

Heating woes

Pipes and gauges

Ah, the joys of moving to a new house. The Scottish Gas engineer arrived this morning around 11:00 — hoorah! He promptly diagnosed the problem: the unit’s water pressure was too low and the on/off switch was broken. Half an hour later the boiler was working. Hoorah! pt.2. At last, we had both heat and hot water.

In fact, we have constant heat and hot water. The heating programmer clock in the utility room says that the central heating is off, the clock on the boiler itself says that the central heating is off. The radiators, however, say otherwise.

Not only that but the system appears to be draining almost as quickly as it is filling. There is a safety valve pipe thing under the boiler where you can see if there is any water draining, and it is a running at a fast and constant flow. I’m no heating engineer, but I know that that is not good.

So, I was back on the telephone to British Gas to ask them to kindly come around again and fix it. They fixed it enough to switch it on, now hopefully they’ll be able to fix it so that it works as designed. Only the kind lady at British Gas wouldn’t speak to me because I’m not mentioned on the contract; they would only speak with Jane. The wonderful nonsense of legislation sometimes.

Looks like I’ll be waiting in for the gas man again tomorrow morning.

Update

You can follow this adventure in the blog post: Heating woes, pt.2.

The Move Postmortem

Music room
Our new music room.

The move went well; very well, despite my last minute worries and minor panics. As I get older (and possibly wiser) I’m getting better at trusting that things will work out fine if I give them space. So long as I’ve prepared well and set things up I’m happy. It’s a far less energy consuming way to live!

Our trusty team of friends and family turned up when they could and mucked in with great energy and enthusiasm. We were so blessed to have so many willing people to come along and carry our worldly belongings, and all for the price of a portion of fish and chips and a slice of cake. If only the wider world economy was so simple.

The two van approach clearly worked a treat. As soon as van #1 was filled a team was sent up in it to unpack it at the other end, and van #2 was moved into place (no mean feat on those narrow streets) and packed up and then sent up to the house, while van #1 returned to the beginning. Repeat as required. The house was cleared in only four van loads.

Our heartfelt thanks to Eddie and Rebecca, Pauline and Paul, Soo and Martin, Dorothy, Rich, Ian and Yvonne, and Colin for all their help, fun, laughter and friendship. It was a good, good day. At the end of which I was utterly exhausted.

The following morning Rich, who’d stayed over once we’d made his bed (by which I do mean built), and I built the bunk beds and then a couple of other manly tasks that involved either screwdrivers and hammers or muscle power.

Now, three days later we’re very nearly unpacked. You can see a photograph of the music room above, where I keep my ‘guitarsenal’. The study will take a few days to put together as we’re going to paint it first before stocking it with books … seventeen boxes of them! Clergy are such fun to move!

This afternoon my Mum is travelling up to Edinburgh to be met by Jane and brought up to see the house for the first time. In the meantime I’m waiting for Scottish Gas to send an engineer (any time between 08:00 and 13:00) to fix the heating and hot water, of which we currently have neither.

p.s. the telephone and broadband move went very well. BT was more than helpful and everything switched over on time, as requested. Marvellous! This morning I plugged in the wireless modem/router and — ta-da! — our broadband information super highway was happily gushing down the interweb pipe ready for consumption.