The Gas

[bunn]

This morning the Gas went off.  This was well timed, as it is so much warmer now, but still a cause of woe.  Neither the boiler nor the gas fire was working. 

I went and prodded the tank, which told me it was 15% full.  I thought this dubious given that it was last filled in October, so I rang Calor and asked them if the gauge might be off.  They said that Telemetrics had told them the tank was 14% full, and passed me to Emergency.  

I was very impressed.  Emergency told me to find the Regulator Spindle and twiddle it. Unfortunately our tank is rather venerable, so their description of where the Spindle might be hiding did not match our equipment.  They sent an engineer instead, who turned up, to my amazement, within three hours, and twiddled our spindle for us.  For free!  I was even more impressed when he got the gas flowing again. The fire and boiler both had hiccups to start with, but seem to have resumed operations now we have turned them on and off again a bit. 

He has promised to send a new Regulator, as ours is apparently over 20 years old (I would have guessed at least 30, myself...).    Calor may not be a cheap way to heat a house (we've just gone up to payments of  £125 a month!  Woe!), but they certainly seem to do a good job for the money.  I can definitely see why people are putting wood fires back into their houses though. 

Comments

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

£125 a month!

(Goes away and whimpers quietly at the thought of it.)

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

Quite. Our gas and electricity combined recently went up to £60 a month.

I can certainly recommend wood-burning stoves. My mother has two, one about five years old and the other maybe 30 years. They certainly make the house nice and warm, too warm sometimes.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Just the cost of delivery on our Calor propane whacks up the prices (no mains gas here obviously), and heating the house during the day while I (and pp often too) am working doesn't help either.

I grew up with solid fuel (wood and anthracite), and yes, it's cheap and warm, but I must confess that cleaning the grate and storing and lugging the fuel about is something that I remember being an awful pain when you have to do it every sodding day. However, if the price of propane keeps going up I think we may have to look into it.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

The (newer) stove my mother has is a Clearview (I think). There is virtually no cleaning of it required, and it burns pretty much everything to nothing. We had it going all over Christmas and in the four days we were there we didn't have to empty the ash-pan at all and there wasn't really any more ash in it at the end that at the beginning. It is also really easy to light and to control.

Yes, lugging the logs can be a bit of a pain, but usually we only need to do that every two or three days for mum and she's got one of the largest stoves.

Mum does have a very good source of logs: my cousins, who are local, thoroughly enjoy sourcing wood and splitting it into logs. (They've also got a wood-burning stove.) She's got a log shed which is about the size of a single garage, but only four feet high and open on one long size. They come over and top that up every few days. Mum has a couple of wheeled garden bins to shift the logs from the log shed to the house and a couple of log baskets near to the stove: makes life much easier.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

We have two separate flights of three steps up to our house, and about ten more down from the back garden, so wheeled things are not much good: it would all have to be carried. On the plus side, it would be an incentive to keep the trees cut back: Hazel grows SO FAST!

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

Ah, steps, not good! Mum had a ramp put in from the back door to the concrete area outside, but then she's disabled and uses a wheeled walker; everything else is more or less flat.

I would think that hazel is probably too small to run a stove effectively, unless you're burning the ages old wood. Mum tends to burn oak, apple, birch and similar sized logs. Inch diameter stuff makes good starting wood though.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I reckon hazel makes trees at least as fast as apple and birch, its just that you don't usually see it allowed to get to logs. The stuff in our back hedge is big enough that I am looking at one trunk speculatively, thinking it might make a nice shaving horse body...

We have a fair bit of ash and holly, too.

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

It is good news that you are warm, though!

My brother and his wife have a wood burning stove and it's very efficient. Also pleasingly cosy to curl up near with a good book and a cup of tea.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

The great joy of Calor though is that it replicates the enormous convenience of mains gas. It just works, no lugging sacks or logs about or having to worry about not enough fuel or the fuel getting wet - the tank signals the Calor Mothership when it's getting empty and people come and refill it, and there you go, instant warm...

We have a space in the livingroom that was once a stove thing with a back burner and now hosts a calor fire, so we could put a stove there if the prices keep spiralling though...

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Did you cure the boiler's hiccups by making it sing along to Iron Maiden. too?

I want a Regulator Spindle which I can twiddle! It sounds as if it ought to be followed with a "+2" or "of doom", or something.

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't it be '...of the Fates'?

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

:-D

[bunn.livejournal.com]

no, we didn't get that far. We turned-it-off-and-onagain.

Modern boilers do seem to have a lot of electronics though. Maybe we could wire it into 'Rock Band'... :-D

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

And now I have a vision of Calor Head Office as rather like NASA, with banks of screens showing the telemetry of customers' tanks...

Wood-burning stoves have become so popular around here that we have had a log shortage this winter, and I have seen people out gathering firewood on the Common for the first time.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I must say the idea of actually being able to do something useful with the dratted hazel hedging is appealing. At the moment we have a number of bonfires...