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

[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.