So what have I been up to
So what have I been up to, well it’s been a while but there’s been some work done.
Firstly I’ve spent more money and after a long wait and after some time being fitted I now have my new windows fitted. I think that there’s some silicone that needs to be applied to finish off the job but it’s 99% there. The windows look wonderful, the two pane per sash frame look handsome and I think that any more would have looked too fake, too much, just too erm Disney. The cream exterior and the white interior works well but I don’t think I can gauge what it looks like till I have the red frames on the bay and arched windows tied in with them. I’m sorta of a mind now that that old English green might have looked better, but that’s based on the flawed outlook of the mixed colours of the original and new windows. I think the cream will out and I think eventually I’ll see the justification of my creamy choice.
I’ve also been doing a lot of donkey work, I’ve done little creative stuff but I have done some lugging and believe me whatever I’ve planned has taken at least three times longer than I had planned. I took a week off and I ordered a skip with my intention being to fill it in a day but it took days…… It really was a lot of hard work… but I loved it.
For instance, a teeny couple of piles of builders’ rubble took hours to clear, the rubble filled bags and bags and it just seemed endless. The pile of wood that the builders and window fitters had left from removing the garage roof and the windows took a day to sort out, rotten wood is rotten to sort out, the pile never seemed to go down and even on finishing the wood pile more wood sprouted from timber left hanging dangerously in the outhouse roofspaces and lots needed to be sawn to size, all damp and smelly but it needed to be sawn up and stored.
The garage where I’d diligently placed all my carpets and scrap to be disposed at my leisure had suffered a de-roofing, the lack of roof had let in the elements and my neat pile of rubbish was now a festering heap of unpleasantness. I dressed in my scruffs and again underestimated thinking a day would crack it, but it took ages, a carpet is heavy to start with but a wet carpet is triple heavy. It got so bad at one point that my fire fitters took pity on me and insisted they help me get the final couple of carpets into my skip when they saw me struggling. I was a mess by the end, I stunk and was covered in various miscellaneous oozings, bruises and scratches. The garage emptied it finally gave up its nasty secrets and I was left with an layer of scrap, rubble and gunk to clear out after clearing out the larger detritus. The cardboard I’d hoarded – eBay sales – was now a soggy mess and needed sorting too, boxes with various contents needed to be emptied, flattened and stored as they simply wouldn’t fit into the skip, this took hours too. All the while the builders’ stories of me probably having a “rat as big as a dog” in my garage were in the back of my mind, no rat but the job proved just as horrific.
All cleaned out, the garage was swept clean, I moved some pallets, I moved the wood, sawed up the beams, sawed up the firewood, moved the fridge freezer, stored my stained glass windows, stored my builders’ sand that had been left and after I’d brimmed my skip the garage was looking brilliant, the garden was looking tidy (also gathered spurious rubbishy odds and sods) and apart from the garden being overgrown everything looked excellent.
So what else, well one night I decided to knock down the wall between the bathroom and the void behind the thermal store that was to become the walk-in shower. Starting late I again underestimated the job and struck out with a claw hammer and the sledgehammer back-side of my axe. The wall just took forever to finish, it was only about five feet across and it wasn’t even a brick wall, it was a simple stud wall in historic lath and plaster. After nearly skewering myself on a million nails I was left with my bathtub full of rubble and bits of teeny wooden sticks, I looked at myself and despite it being late in the night I slowly realised I desperately needed a bath and resolved to clear out the tub and then take a bath before I went to bed. Very very late I achieved my target, the exercise had filled all my rubble sacks and my wood store had been replenished with lots of lovely laths that were in such brilliant dry condition that they’ll make lots of lovely kindling.
Lots of good stuff but as usual not so good news on the fire front. I’d tried and tried to get the fire working but all it had done was smoulder. I’d tried getting the wonderful Gav to look at it but he’d not had enough time to find the source of the issue despite generously offering his time for free. Anyway I got in touch with Dunsley and asked their advice, speaking with their technical advisor, a veritable wealth of knowledge, he said that I’d probably needed a chimney liner fitted, he explained that the Dunsley Yorkshire was quite specific and really did need a liner, a bare chimney just wouldn’t do the job. Unfortunately I’d been advised to go for the full bare chimney with a soot box by the fire fitter, this had been done in good faith as the Yorkshire literature didn’t contain this useful pearl of wisdom of the flue-liner requirement. The technical consultant explained that he’d have to get in touch with Dunsley and make them highlight this necessity as fire fitters weren’t privy to this knowledge and were – in perfectly good faith – fitting Dunsley Yorkshire’s to bare chimneys when they should be fitted only to chimneys equipped with flue liners.
It was still a gamble though…
The solution for me could have been the liner or it could have been something more mystical. I decided to gamble, it turned out to be £980 gamble. The liner I’d been told to specify was a 904 liner, with two walls, a 904/904 stainless steel flue liner at around £50 a metre and with my tall house requiring around 12 metres of 904/904 liner. There were various other bits to cap it, to join it and there was a day’s labour too. All in all £980 I could ill afford.
I got back in touch with the wonderful fire fitters I’d used in the past and within the week I had them on site. Gav again was on the job, Gav and his mate Chris did a sterling job, there was a bit of a touch and go moment with Gav on the roof clinging to a full bag of stainless liner, teetering on the edge he explained later that my roof was particularly bad as although it was sound of structure there was nothing to hang onto once you were up there. It wasn’t a good place to be but after a bit of nail-biting and a tenner flying out of his pocket (found later) I had a flue-liner in my chimney.
So was the gamble worth it…
I wandered off at lunchtime to get some cash, picked up some bacon butties and a burger on the way back and after a quick lunch we gave the fire a go. Welllllll I had said it was bad news on the fire front, well this was the start of the good news as the fire flared up wonderfully, it fired better than it had flared up before, the flue liner had fixed it, still it had cost me £980 for the privilege but it needed to be done, the fitters were apologetic that they’d had to come back to the job, but hey it was in no way their fault, what they had done had been correct according to the literature they’d referred to and they’d ultimately saved the day. The liner is as good as it gets too and comes with a 20 year guarantee.
The next week I was deep in experimentation with the fire. I tried stocking it up and seeing what it would do, it was fantastic but there was still a bit of a problem, the thermal store wasn’t heating.
Readers of this site may remember that the last attempt to fire up the store from the solid fuel burner had resulted in a pipe giving up the ghost and my roof suffering a nasty leak. This time things were better in that there was no leak but the thermal store just didn’t seem to get hot. On closer inspection and a few floorboards removed nothing seemed to be getting past the first valve. Lowering the thermostat to its lowest setting and the flow moved on but it meant getting the thermostat to around 20 degrees when the fire was absolutely bouncing and the pipes were too hot to touch. The only thing getting warm was the heat dump radiators.
I spent the next day quizzing the excellent Matt of HTG the suppliers of the thermal store. He was incredulous that the fitters seemed to have ignored the fitting instructions issued by HTG but we still pressed on for a solution. Getting home that evening and armed with some ideas it still seemed to make no sense, I searched the internet and did some good old hard staring at the problem but still nothing. Anyway on a visit to the thermal store cupboard I suddenly noticed that that the fitter had attached a small plastic wallet to the back of the door, initially it seemed to be just wiring diagrams but then eureka a pipe diagram taken from a Gledhill tank – eh! Anyway it made simple sense, it employed a thermostat on the flow pipe that closed a valve to the heat dump radiator once the water reached a minimum temperature and opened the one to the thermal store. Not rocket science but on closer inspection the valve was in the right place but the thermostat in practice wasn’t on the flow as proposed on the plan but it was incorrectly on the return. Soooo as the return never got hot the thermostat (unless set incredibly low) would never open up. Potentially the valve never opening would mean that the heat from the back-boiler could only ever go to the heat dump radiators, by the time I managed to set the thermostat to a temperature below that of the return pipe these radiators were nuclear, who knows what could have happened.
Speaking with Matt today I sent him down the pipe diagram they’d been working to. He was incredulous that with the two valves they’d effectively created a potential closed circuit which was contrary to the manufacturer’s instructions, the fact that they’d got it wrong too could have had disastrous consequences if not lethal. I can see what the fitter had tried to do and so could Matt, but I’d been charged much more for a system that wasn’t anything like the system described in the HTG instructions. The fitting instructions were for a Gledhill solution which bore no resemblance to the HTG system, the fitter had made the call to do it the way he thought would work, if he’d got in touch with Matt – as I’d asked him to do on multiple occasions – then they could have thrashed out a suitable solution between them. Thing is though, looking at the pipework now, there’s at least three spots where the flow and return pipes touch, this can’t be right. The pipes were also chased into the chimney breast, then surface mounted, then chased in again and this cost me dearly, when the reason for this being done was because of the perception that the house gable end was coming down, which wasn’t the case at all, but I ended up paying for this mistake. This left me with a scarred fireplace with plaster missing from its once beautifully finished face, holes in my coving from the surface mounted pipes, the same coving the builders had diligently avoided marking while working with ton up lumps of RSJ and pipework that’s an eyesore poking out of my lovely stove, not only badly done but touching together – the flow and return that is, what’s the point.
This pipework is going to have to be removed, the system will have to be redone, the plastering to the face of the fireplace will have to be redone and the coving recovered too. This will cost me dearly.
You may say, why not get them back, well I like the fitter I thought he really knew what he was doing and on 90% of the jobs what he did he was great. The electrician was wonderful and I cannot fault his work, there just seems to be a problem with the plumbing (though the plumbing in the thermal store cupboard is great) and the fact that they completely ignored the fitting instructions and ignored the offer of help and advice from the manufacturers. Add to this too that I’m going to have to get the overflow pipe shifted, for some reason it snakes through the house and comes out above my front door, it is ugly, I’ve even been told it could be dangerous where it is and it even nicks an edge of the wonderful original stone lintel above my front door. When asked, the fitter told me he’d had to put it there as I had a pitched roof at the back of the house, well the only pitched roof I can see is the porch and that’s only five feet across.
So why not get him back, well I know that it would just cost me more in stress so I’m putting it down to experience. I’ll look at the great job of the external tank and the job done on moving the boiler and try to forget the nightmare of the stove and store.
I’d have the electrician back in a heartbeat though.
So anything else, well moving all my gear from upstairs to downstairs took days, 64 litre boxes full of books take a lot of moving. I needed to get upstairs clear in order to start work in anger up there, I also needed to shift drawers and a wardrobe to my base bedroom too, this took some energy, at one point with the wardrobe jammed in the door I thought of how I was going to have to explain this to my neighbours from my first floor window. It shifted after a bit of persuasion but this is one of the hazards of working alone.
I also lagged the full thermal store, the insulation had been left, just no-one had bothered to fit it. Is it me that’s being crazy here but when I asked about lagging the pipes under the floor, particularly the flow from the stove, I was told to consider the lost heat as free underfloor heating.