Yes - you have got it. The new boiler had developed a fault and was no longer working. We checked the manual and in spite of pressing the "reset" button, the boiler soon ground to a halt once more. The digital display was flashing "F29" which meant that we wouldn't be able to fix it ourselves.
Fortunately, the boiler is under guarantee so on Monday morning a central heating engineer from the company that did the fitting work arrived to assess the problem. He soon decided that it was an issue that needed to be addressed by the boiler manufacturer.
Another big van arrived this morning from "Vaillant" and within half an hour the problem was fixed. We had central heating and hot water once again. Whaay! Forty eight hours of living in a fridge was over and we could return to normal life.
Both Shirley and I grew up in houses that did not have central heating systems. Our houses were heated by coal fires and electric storage radiators. In wintertime, I often woke up with a freezing nose, reluctant to throw back the cosy bed covers and put my bare feet on the ice cold linoleum in my bedroom. Sometimes there was ice on the inside of our single-glazed bedroom windows.
At this latitude on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, home heating in wintertime is essential and those cold forty eight hours we have just endured reminded me of how much British people rely on central heating these days. Of course we cannot burn domestic coal any more and in cities wood-burning stoves are greatly discouraged. People are kind of trapped. We have to pay the energy providers.
As I thought about writing this blogpost, I investigated how Arctic peoples kept themselves warm in desperately cold winters. Clothing and footwear were of key importance. Of course they used animal skins including the hides of caribou, seals and polar bears. Their shelters were well-insulated - including igloos built of packed snow. Inside a well-constructed and inhabited igloo, the temperature might rise to be 100 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in the outside air. Coastal Inuit people made oil for cooking and light from seal and whale blubber. They were very resourceful people but their winters must have been very hard indeed. It is likely that genetically they were better predisposed to coping with very cold weather.
Are you feeling the cold? It sounds as if you are getting soft. One would expect people who grew up in those North Sea gales gusting straight from the Urals to the East Yorkshire coast, whistling up the Humber and Trent valleys, would be made of more vaillant stuff.
ReplyDeleteYou are right. We are getting soft - like the Inuit people who live quite differently now.
DeleteI live in the southern part of the US and will freely admit I'm soft when it comes to cold weather. I don't handle the heat as well as I use to, either. Our summers (and often springs and autumns) can be brutally hot and humid. It's the humidity that's so bad. I'm glad you're warm again.
ReplyDeleteAre you as soft as a marshmallow Kelly?
DeleteYou had electric storage radiators??? Luxury!
ReplyDeleteWell, there was one on the landing and one in the hallway. Electricity was cheaper at night so that's when they clicked in.
DeleteAnimal fur is an insulator, ask elderly women who wore real fur.
ReplyDeleteI am not defending wearing animal skins: John O'Hara wore a coonskin coat in the 1920s; some of his stories describe the snow blizzards in Pennsylvania.
Taker's comment on North Sea gales reminds me of the 1932 novel *Three Fevers* by Leo Walmsley, set in Robin Hood's Bay (republished 2005).
The novel ends with a sea storm, according to the blurb.
It was admired by J.B Priestley and Rebecca West.
My copy came from Oxfam.
Well I must say, I had never heard of "Three Fevers" though I have visited Robin Hood's Bay several times. I must tell my friend Tony about it. He loves the place so much that his will includes an instruction to have his ashes scattered there.
DeletePeople deal with the realities they are given, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteThe Inuits could have moved south to warmer climes. I wonder why they chose to stay in those challenging northern regions.
DeleteThat would have been more difficult than you might imagine.
DeleteI am spoiled with central heating and a gas insert. I'm used to being cozy no matter what the temperature outside. I can tolerate being hot, but I hate being cold! I'm glad you have your creature comforts back.
ReplyDeleteWhen you lose your heating - even for 48 hours, you really appreciate it when it returns.
DeleteThink of this as a foretaste of what is in store for us when the Government Net Zero lunacy fully kicks in!
ReplyDeleteIt is concerning - that's for sure.
DeleteI remember growing up in North Dakota where there was a coal furnace in the basement but it somehow fed a steam heating arrangement that fed radiators throughout the house. But still you had to keep shoveling coal to keep that fire going and then there were the ashes to carry out. I can remember the joy when natural gas and central heating arrived. The coal bin in the basement was cleaned out, paneled and turned into an office for my father's insurance business and a "ham shack" for my radio hobby. And, yes, I guess we got soft too. I do not miss the "good old days".
ReplyDeleteI am pleased that this blogpost aroused such an array of memories in your head Catalyst.
DeleteFor about a decade, I lived a long ways north of where I do now and whenever I visited my home in the south, I laughed at how bundled up people were. Even after I moved back that first winter, I scoffed. After a year back home though, I was bundled up just like everyone else and would nearly freeze solid when visiting old friends back north.
ReplyDeleteOur bodies adapt given enough time.
I think you are right and over hundreds of years the Inuit people adapted very well indeed.
DeleteSorry about your heating woes! We've had the coldest January in quite a while and I NEVER seem to feel really warm lately. It doesn't help that at work I sit in a cold, drafty hallway so I get chilled throughout the day and it seems to carry over into the evening when I'm at home.
ReplyDeleteI guess the school's doors keep opening and closing, letting the cold air in. Maybe you could wear furs like the Inuit lady in the bottom picture.
DeleteI remarked something like the other day. My very white great nieces are troubled by hot weather. My great niece twins whose father is originally from a Pacific tropical island never seem troubled by heat. Is it in the genes?
ReplyDeleteMany English houses seem to have a secondary electrically heated shower for such reasons I suppose.
Well our electric shower did come in handy but it wasn't planned.
DeleteI find nothing worse than being cold and not being able to get warm.
ReplyDeleteAnd not being able to take a hot shower? I'd snap.
Keeping warm is a fundamental human urge.
DeleteI was also brought up where the house was not heated at night. We grabbed our clothes and ran to the heater to dress beside some warmth.
ReplyDeleteIn wintertime it must have been bloody cold at Esk. Good job you had your brothers to keep you warm.
DeletePeople tell me that they get colder in Sydney than they do in places like the UK. It's crazy, right?
ReplyDeleteHouses here are barely insulated, some people don't use heating and most people dress as though it's permanently summer.
All of that is ok here, if that's how people want to live but over there it's a much more serious matter.
There needs to be a heating allowance for people who are struggling
This year with prices of gas and electricity about to rocket because of supply issues, many decent British people will simply not be able to pay their bills. What then I wonder?
DeleteAfter reading this I'm sure everyone would call me a wuss for complaining about Australian winters, but round about August/September I often wish I had Eskimo furs and fur lined boots for my daily walk to the shops. And where I live we don't even get frost on the grass, let alone snow and ice everywhere.
ReplyDeleteThousands might call you a wuss River - but not me. If I thought that I would keep it to myself.
DeleteIn the spring of 2016 (or '17?), I was without heating and hot water for four weeks. It was not freezing outside, but still cold enough for me to really, really want the heating on, and I hated to wash my hands with cold water instead of hot. For my morning ablutions, I heated water in my electric kettle and filled the sink. For showers, I went to my gym just down the road. Never before or after have I been such a regular at the gym than during those weeks!
ReplyDeleteI hate being cold and not having access to a hot shower. Good job your boiler problem was sorted so quickly!
And good job your boiler breakdown was in springtime and not winter!
DeleteI sympathise. Back in late 2017 I had a boiler service and they condemned it unfit. It was the beginning of November and they turned the boiler off, but it was only then that they told me it would take 5 weeks to replace it with a new one! During those 5-weeks it snowed and I was absolutely freezing. I bought two fan heaters but in my large house it didn't do much good at all. How we coped in the 1950s I don't know but I must have gone soft in my old age. I was so grateful when on the 4th of December they put the new one in
ReplyDeleteGood heavens! Five weeks without heating. I would have been tempted to have a couple of long weekends in a warm hotel.
DeleteAh yes, ice on the inside of the windows. I remember it well. Just an electric fire in the bedroom but it would only be on while you got dressed/undressed!
ReplyDeleteElectric fires would literally toast you if you got too close.
DeleteCan sympathise with your predicament.
ReplyDeleteLast autumn I decided to change from oil-fired central heating, which, over the past 20 years, had always been efficient and reasonably priced to run, to propane gas. We don't have natural gas in this part of town, there were few takers when it was first offered.
The new eco boiler fitted looks about the same size as your new one. It's a Junkers, the same make as my previous oil fired boiler. Imagine my horror when standing under the shower a few days later, the water suddenly turned ice cold - no forewarning with the water gradually getting cooler. Within a few minutes the water was back to normal. This happened two or three times and the engineer came out to check. No reason for it to happen - was I sure it had gone cold? (Why do they never accept what a "mature" female tells them!)
It transpires, after a couple of weeks and two more visits from the engineer and one from the gas provider, that it's something to do with the fact that when new, the empty gas storage tank is filled with nitrogen, which is displaced when the liquid gas is pumped in. This, apparently, can cause an interruption in the supply of gas to the boiler, and I was told that it might happen again. So far it hasn't and it's two months, to the day, since the system was installed, so I'm hopeful the problem has been solved. It's been exceptionally cold here in those two months and I'm already on my second delivery of gas which is delivered by kilos not in litres - and it's cost me around 1,400 euros to date - we pay upfront for it here! I'm sceptical that such a small boiler will actually efficiently heat the 12 radiators I have, even using low settings on the thermostatic valves, and have now turned half of them off in parts of the house I don't use.
1,400 euros in two months? Good heavens, that's a lot. Is Spain also on the verge of big fuel price hikes? It is all the news today in England. Many extra people won't be able to pay their bills and the rest of us will have to make sacrifices.
DeleteOh, Lord, that sounds miserable. (Both your recent outage and your childhood winter memories.) I'm not sure I ever appreciated how good I had it in Florida! I'm glad the boiler got fixed.
ReplyDeleteAnybody who grows up in a sub-tropical climate is blessed in the sense that they never have pay much heed to the cold.
Delete