We've been preoccupied with work around the house and garden this week. Monday and Tuesday were taken up with asbestos removal, Wednesday with the installation of our new combi boiler and Thursday and Friday we were in the garden with Nick and Mike. The latter will be covered in our sister blog http://peelwyke.wordpress.com/.
I'll try to update that tomorrow, meanwhile here's a picture of Nick and Mike working hard!
I mentioned the asbestos removal in my previous post. After the guys in the hazmat suits removed it, another guy came the next day and did tests on the air around the boiler and in the containment unit. We passed the tests with flying colours, so they took down all the stuff and Neil (from British Gas) moved in to take out the old boiler and install the new.
For the sake of our American friends, who do things a little differently, I should explain how our old water system worked. It is fairly typical of many houses in England. The boiler is located in the kitchen (it's the white object on the right of the picture). It heats the hot water for household use and the hot water which circulates through the central heating radiators. Very few places in Britain have basements, neither do they have forced air central heating like they do in the US. In the old days all of our water systems, except the tap in the kitchen would be tank fed. In our case there was a cold water tank in the attic that supplied water to the heating system and to the taps in the bathrooms. Hot water was stored in a copper hot water tank found in the airing cupboard (it's on the left of the picture, the tank is enclosed in an insulating jacket). Keeping the hot water tank in a cupboard gives you a nice warm place to finish drying your washing and air your damp clothes. Most tank fed systems give you rather low water pressure.
The thing we have installed is called a combi boiler. It still heats the water for the hot taps and the central heating, but it does it "on demand". There is no hot water tank and it works with water on mains pressure. Here's what it looks like in the kitchen now. The flue pipe is gone. The boiler is a condensing boiler with a counter-current heat exchanger and it vents to the side. Condensation is collected and drained away. The little red object just above the ground is a large magnet that collects up some of the rust and iron that circulates through the central heating system. The airing cupboard is now empty - it's going to become a larder for me and a cupboard for John's study. Believe it or not, it has two doors!In the foreground of this picture you can just see our double oven. I'm in the middle of cleaning it. In fact, we spent most of today cleaning up in the kitchen. There was quite a bit of dust on all the surfaces, and it was time for a spring-clean anyway!
Later today I took my first long hot bath. Now we're on mains pressure we get a much better flow of water and I was able to fill the bath in 5 minutes rather than 20 minutes. And there was no worry about draining a tank. The water was lovely and hot the whole time! If I'd needed to I could have topped it up at any time. What luxury!
