{"id":13018,"date":"2020-02-08T17:26:50","date_gmt":"2020-02-08T17:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=13018"},"modified":"2020-02-08T17:26:50","modified_gmt":"2020-02-08T17:26:50","slug":"blogathon-08-20-an-old-boiler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=13018","title":{"rendered":"Blogathon 08\/20: An old boiler"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One Wednesday evening, a few weeks ago, our hot water decided to buck the trend and do cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And only cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Round about the same moment our central heating decided to become central cooling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then it went central cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately that was in the middle of one of the January’s bloody-hell-it’s-really-cold spells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I looked at the boiler but all I saw was some red lights and an error code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A quick google of the error code told me the boiler was super hot, massively out of temperature range, and helpfully informed me of a couple of reset tricks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did the reset tricks and gazed lovingly at the boiler as it burst back in to life<\/s> gave me the same errors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One phone call and an emergency plumber who knew less than the square root of naff all later, and I called it a night on the bad boiler front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next morning I got a very reliable, local plumber out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He didn’t try to sell me a new pump, like the emergency plumber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He explained that if you listened, you could hear the pump actually working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The heat exchanger has gone, he said. I could probably order a new one, but parts for these old boilers are increasingly difficult to find, he added. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked how old the boiler was and he helpfully rang the manufacturer, read them the serial number and I clearly heard the manufacturer say that boiler came off the production line 21 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than try and get a new part I asked the chap to sort out and fit a new boiler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For almost a week (remember it was a cold spell when all this was going on?) we kept the log burner going; stacked it up with coal at night and during the working day, and fed it logs in the late afternoons and evenings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hot water was provided by Sam who boiled kettles and pans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, a week to the day later, we had hot water and central heating once more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Truthfully, it wasn’t really a hardship, doing without hot water and central heating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The log burner kept most of the house above freezing (it throws out a lot of heat). And water heated on the hob kept us clean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dogs missed their weekly bath for a week and a half though. That was very noticeable; they are both extremely powerful mud magnets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when they’re freshly bathed they’re fragrant in a whole different way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Freshly cleaned up mud magnets<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One Wednesday evening, a few weeks ago, our hot water decided to buck the trend and do cold. And only cold. Round about the same<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}