Stupid Old Boiler

I haven't written a blog in quite a while.  I can never think of anything to write about. I either deem things too personal or too boring to write about. This week had a bit of excitment (and I was asked why I hadn't written a blog in ages and would I write a new one) so I thought I would put my thoughts down.  Shouldn't take too long, I may have a lot of thoughts, but they are usually just the same few going round and round my head.  Mostly the phrases "For fuck's sake!", "I'm horny", "I'm hungry" and "I want a beer" if we are completely honest.  But enough of that, on to the matter at hand.  Recently, the temperature in this great nation of ours has begun to drop.  That's fine by me.  It's November.  November is supposed to be cold.  When the Baby Jesus created England and November he decided that is the way it should be.  I'm not of these people who complains, on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, about the weather doing what the weather is supposed to do.  It gets colder towards the end of the year and warmer in the middle.  I'm not about to get into a debate on weather extremes or the great British summer.  Sufficed to say, it was warmer in June than it is now in November and that is how it's supposed to be.  If it's warm I work in an office with air conditioning and my car has the same. My car also has windows that go down and back up again.  At home I can open a window, or go outside and wear shorts and t-shirts whilst drinking a cold beer.  Warm is fine.  Cold is fine too.  I have some nice coats and jumpers I can wear.  I can have a nice hot cup of tea or coffee.  My office also has heating, as does my car.  As does my house.  When the house is cold I can set the timer on the boiler to turn the heating on and have the house nice and warm in time for getting up.  If I am cold in the moment I can have a hot shower or turn the heating on and the radiators warm the house.  I take it for granted.  It just works.  If I am cold I walk up to the boiler and press the on switch and..... oh.  What does that flashing red light mean?  Why aren't the radiators getting hot?  Why is the shower freezing cold?  That isn't what is supposed to happen! What do I do now?!  This is what happened to me on Wednesday night.  Now I'm not completely unpractical.  I am my father's son.  I have a good dose of common sense and can do some basic things around the house.  The pressure was down on the boiler recently which caused it to trip out.  Sharon's dad is a plumber and he showed me how easy it was to repressurize it.  The pressure again looked a little down this time, so I repressurized it again.  Didn't work.  I had already reset the system.  Being an IT bod I know the old switch it off/switch it back on trick. The warning light was different than the previous failure a few months ago.  The fault indicated last time, was that the pilot light wasn't igniting.  This time it is a fan/flue fault.  I know enough about boilers to know that you don't mess about with that stuff.  You get an engineer.  Some DIY jobs have a worst case scenario of a wall looking a bit shit after you'ved papered it and some have a worst case scenario of killing yourself and your loved ones by carbon monoxide posioning.  This was in the territory of the latter.  I rang Sharon's dad just in case it was something simple.  He suggested repressurizing a little more.  Didn't work.  I told him about the fan/flue warning light.  He said that you don't mess with that stuff, you get an engineer.

As it is a rented house my first port of call is always the landlady.  I rang the landlady and she had had a bit of a personal crisis that day, but was as helpful as she could be.  I offered to get it sorted if she just gave me the info I needed to do it.  She did. That was more than good enough for me.  As it was late Wednesday by this point, things had to wait until Thursday.  Me and Sharon curled up on the couch with the quilt and watched TV.  On Thursday I rang the boiler manufacturer who we may or may not have had a service contract with.  The landlady thought it may just have expired (sod's law).  As suspected, it had just expired.  They said they would send someone anyway for a fixed fee of £310.  That included call out, parts, labour and a further year's service cover where all future call outs, parts, labour, etc would be covered no extra cost.  Seemed reasonable, the landlady was going to take out more cover, and anyway, she was paying for it, not me, so I went for it.  Having said that, it was the option I would have gone for had it been mine.  That was a good enough assessment of whether I had made the right choice on someone else's behalf for me. They said they would send an engineer sometime between 8am and 6pm on Friday, so I shifted a few things around at work and managed to get the day working at home.  Friday morning came and, as promised, the engineer rang at 8am to give me a projected arrival time.  He said between 11am and 2pm.  At 12:30pm he arrived.  HORRRAAYYYY.  Not far away from warmth.  I made him a brew (In my Beatles cup no less.  Keep the engineer sweet and he will make my house all nice and warm) and left him prodding and poking the boiler in an engineery manner. After about an hour I heard a rumble and so put my hand on the living room radiator.  Warmth!  REAL FUCKING WARMTH!!!  I didn't realise how much I relied on being able to press a button or turn a tap for something as simple as warmth.  The engineer said it was a loose connection on the circuit board.  He also said if there were any similar problems in the future it probably meant that that circuit board needed replacing and he would make a note of that in his report.  The engineer left and I turned the heating up and set about enjoying being warm in my house somewhere other than in front of a fan heater or under a quilt or, in the case of Wednesday and Thursday night, both. I even took off my hoody and my upper body was covered merely by a t-shirt. Can. You. Imagine. The. Wonder? I was a happy man.  I am currently partaking in Movember, but over the past few days my lack of shaving, due to no hot water, has made my tache more of a beard.  I decided to have a shave and a shower.  Bliss.  I turned the hot tap on and got out my shaving things.  The water ran hot.  Ahhhhhhhh.  Nice hot... hang on, it's gone cold again.  I looked at the boiler. FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!!! The fan/flue fault light was illuminated once more and the boiler was doing cock all else.  The boiler was back to being just a rather large set of pipes and electronics that's only function is illuminating a few LEDs. I rang the boiler people back and told them it had tripped off again and that I wanted the engineer to come back and replace that circuit board.  They said they would contact the engineer and put me on hold.  After several minutes on hold they said the engineer was booked for the rest of the day, but they would send someone tomorrow.  Annoying, but not entirely unreasonable.  If they had said Monday I would have been more than a little upset and quite probably shouty and sweary.  That is how things stand now.  I am sat in my living room in front of a fan heater, typing this, sporting a beard and rather greasy hair.  Sharon has a couple of appointments that she can't cancel tomorrow, so I face the prospect of a day of cancelling what I had planned to wait for the engineer. A day not entirely unlike today.... only with the outcome of a working heating system one hopes.  

On the plus side, Friday night, for me and Sharon, won't be spent as Wednesday and Thursday night were. On the couch with a quilt and a fan heater.  No, tonight we are off out on the town to drink in nicely heated pubs in wonderful Bury with my even more wonderful cousin and his bird.