A draining experience

With a great deal of whooshing and gurgling the old central heating system has been drained. Given the size of the building and the pipes, this took a while. Next we get the plumbers to disconnect the radiators and call in the architectural salvage folk in Edinburgh to take them away.

Getting anyone to take away the scrap piping is a bit harder as there's almost no value in scrap iron (unless you're buying it of course). Probably best to hire a skip as there's no shortage of junk needing thrown away.

Two weeks (estimated) till the new system's finished.

Communication breakdown

The heating engineers tell me that they had thought we were going to be closed during their installation.

No.

We are continuing to accept visitors and are trying to minimise the number of missing floorboards for them to fall through. Meanwhile, the roofer they are getting to deal with the installation of boiler flues came and looked at the work R****** D***** had done and was not mightily impressed. He will come and remedy the situation, hopefully next week.

Not much else happening this week.

In with the new

The heating engineers are getting on well and so far are keeping external piping to an absoltue minimum.

Paving at the back is finished and looking good and even the roofers have been in touch. Seems that R****** D***** is a one man band and the one man has broken his arm in a car accident.

The heating engineers are bringing a roofer along next week to fit the chimneys for the new boilers, so we'll ask him to take a look and see if he can sort the problem.

Pipe up

The heating engineers have been here for a week and things appear to be going to plan. Because the old system uses huge pipes which run vertically from cellar to roof, it has so far been possible to install the new system while keeping the old one working. This is a good thing because the temperature outside has dropped to somewhere near freezing. We hope to be able to minimise the length of time we have to do without heating - possibly to only a week or so.