6976/19496
The boiler we had installed when we moved in to this house four and a half years ago has given us a good ride. It’s twice tried to kill us with carbon monoxide and then kept breaking down on the coldest Fridays when Ernie was a baby and plunging our house into freezer like temperatures with little to no hope of getting an engineer out.
It’s behaved itself over the last three years and I’ve had it properly serviced a couple of times, the last time maybe six months ago.
Today, just as the weather got cold again, it stopped working and flashing an error message and we have to go through the whole thing again. It’s not so bad this time as the kids are not babies and we have a real fire and a woodburner so we can keep some of the house warm. Although we seemed to be out of hot water, the boiler magically reignited briefly during the afternoon and gave us a full tank. But then it all stopped working again and it was a cold old bedtime.
We have hopefully persuaded an engineer to come out to us tomorrow morning, but my inclination is to attack the boiler with a hammer and destroy it so that it can’t cause us any more hassle. When a machine in your house has already tried to kill you a couple of times, it’s hard to go back to a place where you trust it and can relax. We are Carbon Monoxide alarmed up to the eyeballs (and to be fair that issue was a problem with where our nightmare builders had placed the flue), but if this wasn’t such an expensive piece of kit then I might cut my losses and just replace it with a non-cursed boiler.
I worked in front of a roaring fire, so all was not so bad, but I felt great pity for the people who lived in this house 300 years ago who would only have had this method of heating, in this very draughty building. And what all those ancestors who lived in caves or mud huts. Fucking Hell, we have it easy. Never mind that the human race will come to an end soon, the advancements we’ve made are incredible and at least we should go out nice and warm. At least until the ocean swallows us.
This time the problem is (for the moment) just an annoyance and I am not sure that it’s just a coincidence that it happens when it’s icy outside (the boiler is in an old coal cupboard outside on the outside of the house), but an estimated six breakdowns in four years is probably a bit on the high side for a brand new piece of equipment.
I am the cursed man who was gifted all the free energy he could use, but had no way to get it into his house! That’s a Twilight Zone episode right there.
Four years ago it felt like were being punished by God, with all the things that were going wrong and a tiny new baby in the house getting gassed or frozen (and pretty much everything the people who did up our house turned out to be deeply, and in some cases practically criminally flawed), but today it was annoying that we couldn’t warm up in a hot bath (though magically the boiler worked briefly and the kids were able to have a normal bath) and that it was a bit cold when we got up in the night to do a wee (not together).
If God is punishing us, it’s a very half-hearted attempt.
