Turning up the heat
It’s hot out today.
In fact it was hot yesterday and for a couple of days before than and it is expected to get even hotter tomorrow, which will be nothing compared to Friday.
Now I should explain that we Irish are a little bemused at weather like this. We are used to clouds and rain and shit like that. Hot dry spells are distinctly abnormal here. Anything above fifteen degrees and we start to sweat. With temperatures expected to rise above thirty, we are sweating a lot, particularly as it is quite humid as well. Naturally everyone is piling down to the beaches where they will lie prone in the sand all day and then suffer agonies from sunburn.
This year will doubtless go down in history. It’s not going to be remembered as the Disnification of the village or indeed for the pandemic. No, this year will be remembered in hushed reverential terms as “that very hot Summer of 21”. Us Irish are very weather aware because we have so much of it.
For some strange reason the village and ourselves have suffered from some power cuts recently. The first one came one evening just as I was finishing cooking the dinner. It meant the rice was a tad al dente but luckily edible. It was a curry so we ate in the darkness until the power came back on. After we sat and complained about the heat. It was really becoming unbearable which is unlike us as we are normally heat tolerant [apart from Herself who is cold intolerant]. Any we sat there with the sweat pouring off us and muttering about the curry being too spicy [which it wasn’t] when I suddenly realised what was wrong.
Our central heating has a default setting. For reasons best know to some twat in the design house the default setting is ON. So we had been sitting in the middle of a heatwave and the central heating was running full blast. Shit! I switched it off and we began to cool down to a mere sweat.
We had another power cut the next day. I was in the middle of cooking again when there was a blip. The lights just barely blinked and I realised that there had been a very brief cut, just long enough to reset all the timers. Fuck! Then it went altogether for about twenty minutes. I made a dash to the central heating and switched it off. I blame the Disney mob who are working around the clock fucking up the village.
The central heating is now permanently switched off at the mains. I’m not going to be caught out again. I’ll switch it back on when we return to normal winter temperatures.
Next week?
Here in my little piece of north central Oregon we are looking at a high of 80 (F, of course). I will leave the conversion to you. As far as heating goes we have a pellet stove so that makes things a tad simpler as we have two choices, on or off.
Doesn’t your heating have a thermostat? At the very least it can simply be turned down to a level which means the heating won’t come on in hot weather. Or does the boiler also heat your domestic hot water, and there is no proper isolation between the two functions? In that case it’s normal to have a motorised “Zone Valve” to direct the boiler output to which ever circuit is needed, The “3 Port Mid Position” versions can fail such that all 3 ports are open, and then you’ll get heating until the storage tank is up to temperature.
Has there been a run on portable air conditioning units in the electrical stores? Together with the air conditioning units in commercial premises, perhaps they are putting a strain on the supply?
I suspect that Murphy down the road just bought a Tesla and plugged it in, thus exposing how utterly unprepared all national power-grids are for the shit-storm of demand that’s to come. Get used to it, the lights will be going out all over everywhere soon.
Those horrible brief power cuts are a real nuisance. All the clocks messed up, the computer seems OK but crashes later, the broadband needs resetting, the sky box malfunctions, the cctv that I look after for our village hall gets screwed and occassionaly our mains trip switch clunks off – great if we are away. Mind you yesterday our water company showed their planning credentials by chosing the hottest day of the year to work on the supply main, thankfully the supply didn’t go off from 11am to 5pm as threatened although no doubt all the taps will suffer from sand in the seals for the next week.
Come winter house gonna have to decant those Molotov cocktails and return to form.