a warm front

So my landlord has had a new boiler installed.

I have discussed before in the blog that I now have a heater in my bedroom / living area that's connected to my landlord's heating.  It's proven quite useful and has saved me a considerable amount in terms of electricity cost.

It's not completely removed the need for me to use my own radiators, not least of all because obviously I have no control over it.  A good example of this is that I get up quite early (about 6:30 now but more like 6:00 when I was on contract) but my landlord doesn't, so he doesn't have any need for the heating to come on until about 7:00.  That therefore means I have to have my radiator on for about half an hour and then the landlord's is effective for the half hour before I set off for work at about 7:30.

Anyway, he's gotten a new boiler fitted because the old one is apparently not up to the job.  I'm not sure if my radiator made it more obvious, but apparently he said it's not been very good since it was installed.  He reckoned it took a lot of very careful fiddling with to get right and was very sensitive.

However, the problem form my point of view was that this was going to take the hot water out of action for a couple of days.  I'm not sure why it was a multiple day job, but it was, so he told me that Monday and Tuesday there would be no heating (I'm pretty sure he'd actually been hoping that by now the temperature would be enough not to have it on anyway) but also there's be no hot water.

My hot water is obviously supplied by the landlord's boiler too and in terms of things like hot water for washing up this was no great issue, but showering would be impossible.

Now to some degree I don't quite understand this as there is an immersion heating in the hot water tank, but my guess is that by taking the hot water out of the loop it meant they would need to drain all the systems, so there would be no water (hot or cold) in it to use.  Since my shower is a power shower without any sort of its own heating element, this certainly meant I couldn't have a hot shower, but probably meant I couldn't have one at all (no water).

His proposed solution for this was that he'd put a kettle in the corridor that joins me to his house and I could use that to boil water and "wipe down" instead.

This was not something I felt comfortable with (I sweat a lot during the night and my hair gets really greasy) so instead I took myself off to a travel lodge for the night.

It worked out okay.  I unfortunately forgot to take my earplugs with me so I woke up a couple of times in the night, but when I returned on Tuesday the boiler had been installed and was all up and running.  I also forgot my comb, but that was not such a problem.