What a bad end to the year!
Two major incidents concerning my car - a set of new tyres following a tyre write-off, followed by front end bodywork damage. A total of £3,100-odd to sort all that out.
Now, it's the turn of my elderly gas boiler. When I came home from holiday on 8th November the pilot light was out and the house was cold. Gas consumption while I'd been away had been much as expected, not markedly less, so I assumed this was a mild-weather glitch of very recent occurrence. I relit the pilot light, and had heating and hot water again without further fuss. But the pilot light has gone out six times since then - three of those occasions in the last two days, this morning included. A definite sign that all is not well.
It's an old-fashioned Potterton boiler from the 1990s. Unsophisticated, outmoded, relatively inefficient by today's standards, but normally reliable. In fact, it has given no trouble of this sort in the last ten years.
As I understand it, the pilot flame plays against a copper rod called a thermocouple, keeping it up to a certain temperature. If the pilot flame gets weak, as it does when it turns yellow and flickers, the thermocouple doesn't get warmed up enough and the gas flow is then automatically cut off. It then has to be restarted. So far I've had no hassle restarting it. But it looks as if this is now going to be a breakfast-time necessity, and one day soon I may find I can't get it going again.
I have an annual service booked with Stuart, my hard-working local heating engineer, on 21st January. I'm wondering whether my boiler will get worse before then. He knows about my current problem, but has so much on in the way of pressing work that he can't personally do anything about it before taking a well-earned Christmas family holiday break in the Lake District.
Well, if the worst happens over Christmas and the New Year, I do have electric heaters, an immersion heater for hot water, an electric shower, and plenty of warm clothes, and can - in effect - live a bearable 'caravan life' inside my home until my boiler gets attention. I won't freeze to death - especially if the weather stays mild.
Once restarted in the morning, the boiler keeps going all day. And the pilot light stays lit with a steady blue flame. Surprisingly, it stays lit through the night when the boiler is off.
I suppose that normal daytime usage in the cold months warms the boiler up fast and then keeps it hot - and with it the thermocouple, so that it becomes much less likely to shut off the gas flow if the pilot light falters for a few minutes. Therefore the first firing in the morning - when the boiler has cooled down overnight, and not yet at its ordinary operating temperature - is the critical time.
Wishing to be more economical in my gas consumption, I'd turned the heating down by a degree in recent weeks. I'm thinking now that it might help - pending that service in January - if I turn the heating up again, so that the initial firing in the morning lasts longer, and makes the hotter thermocouple less inclined to react to a weak pilot light.
And why is the pilot light misbehaving? It's likely to be detritus in the feed pipe, causing a restriction in the gas flow. But of course that's just a guess! I'm no heating engineer.
My gas boiler must be over 25 years old, and (if needed) certain important replacement parts are unlikely to be available. So it would be as well to brace myself for a new boiler. I think that might cost me about £2,500. Hence the extra financial pain this winter.
It's even worse that this expenditure of £2,500 will be for a type of household heating that I'd rather move away from, wishing to become as all-electric as possible. I want to do my bit to save the planet. But I see no other affordable heating solution at this point.
Damn.
Merry Christmas.
SEQUEL
Better news. My local hero heating engineer Stuart has come to my rescue. Tweaking the strength of the pilot light flame, and replacing the thermocouple, have markedly improved matters, and - so far (I keep checking) - appears to have cured the problem.
I hope so. It's bad enough having a twice-wounded car, and a savings balance that is staggering from twenty-six rounds with the meanest heavyweight boxer in the universe. The hassle and purse-ache of having a new boiler on top of all that might have been the last straw!
