– or A good Day’s Work

It all started when my wife decided to boil some tea towels just after returning to Britain following a long tiring flight back from holiday. The time change had caused her to wake early in the morning which was when she decided to put tea towels into a large saucepan and begin heating them up on our electric hob. Unfortunately, afterwards, she went and sat down in a comfortable seat and immediately fell asleep. As anyone who has ever tried to boil tea towels in this way will know, as soon as they come to the boil they and lots of soppy water will rise up and boil over. The task needs very close supervision.

I was fast asleep upstairs while this activity was going on and the first I knew about it was when a loud bang woke me up. With pints of boiling water pouring into the innards of an electric hob that was sunk into a worktop, a massive short circuit occurred, wires were fried and the main fuse in the fuse box exploded.

I know we should just have claimed for the accident on our house contents insurance, but we didn’t. Instead, being a man who likes a challenge, I tried to mend the hob. It was many years old but like so many older electrical items that had not been designed to fall apart after five years careful use, until that incident it had worked perfectly. It is fair to say that my rewiring effort was not 100% effective. The problem was, when so much heat was produced by the short circuit, it had fried off the coloured insulation of many of the wires and, in addition, had fused them together. Without a circuit diagram to help me I was working in the dark. The hob certainly worked after my efforts but making the control switches activate a specific plate was not entirely straightforward. If the same accident occurred today we would simply go out and buy a new induction hob but these hobs were not available at the time of the accident and finding a replacement hob was not easy. We had, for some time, also been dissatisfied with our kitchen. It was a kitchen we had inherited and was probably at least thirty years old. It was also old and faded and did not work all that well.

So, instead of wasting any more time on the hob we decided to install a completely new kitchen. At the same time, as it was immediately adjacent to the kitchen, we decided to create a downstairs shower and toilet where only a toilet had been before. It meant moving one small wall but was definitely worth doing. As we would have to relocate the old boiler, or buy a new one, we also decided to upgrade the the central heating system. With hindsight, it would have been far cheaper to have thrown away those old tea towels and to have bought some new ones. But it was far too late for such recriminations. The old floor-standing boiler took up lots of space in the old kitchen but, in fairness to it, had worked perfectly, was replaced with a newer model which was wall-mounted in the adjacent garage. This simple change freed up a great deal of space in our new kitchen. The refurbishment and creation of both a new kitchen and a new bathroom/toilet was a considerable success and we continue to be delighted with it. But one serious, big problem emerged.

The controls, pumps and automatic valves of the central heating and hot water systems were all placed in a cupboard in the top hall where they were readily accessed while the boiler itself was located in the garage. In other words, these two components of the system were located rather far from each other. Nevertheless, by the time the work was all finished, everything seemed to be working correctly and perhaps, wanting to think the best, I was rather slow to spot a nasty problem. In fact, it was my wife who drew my attention to it. When passing the cupboard in which the pump was installed one early morning, she was concerned that the pump appeared to be operating even when the system was not calling for hot water or for radiator heating. When I looked at what was going on, I realized she was right. The pump never stopped pumping, even when it was not required to do any pumping.

It was time to call for help but, as you might already have guessed, when I tried to call the engineer who had installed the system, he had already gone out of business and was no longer contactable. As it happened, the son of a neighbour had just started up his own plumbing business and was looking for customers so I asked him to take a look at the system. He spent an hour or so puzzling over the wiring and went away never to be seen again. The task was clearly beyond him. In fairness, no one likes having to clear up the mess left by someone else.

So, rather than embarrass any more heating engineers, I decided to roll up my sleeves and sort it out myself. In truth, for someone who has spent many years trouble-shooting problems on ground control approach radar systems as well as complex computer systems, the task was not too difficult. I have poured over so many circuit diagrams while repairing sneaky little faults on radar systems as well as on early computer systems, the various alternative circuit diagrams that could be used depending on whether one wants  a hot water priority system or a central heating priority system or a combination of both were quite simple to follow. However, because the boiler was so far from the control panel, pumps, etc and because I was working alone, this added an extra level of difficulty I could have done without. After making sure both electricity and gas were isolated, I disconnected anything and everything the heating engineer had wired up and I tried to start from a completely fresh sheet. That was the point of no return. I now had to make the damn thing work. I opted to connect up a combination water and heating system and after a couple of hours effort I was satisfied with what I had done. I switched everything on again and, much to my relief, everything worked perfectly. Indeed, it has been working perfectly ever since.

I enjoyed the challenge, I learned a considerable amount about central heating systems and, incidentally, I saved myself many hundreds of pounds of money. I call that a good day’s work.

Bernard Gallivan
January 2019