Heating in the Manor has evolved somewhat.

Originally the house consisted of a two-floor house with two foot thick granite walls. Heating consisted of one open fireplace. Not very efficient.

The first job was to improve that fireplace by ripping it out and installing a new hearth with piped underfloor draught and an underfloor ashcan. It was a little more efficient but not much.

Then my father and myself built the extension which more than doubled the total floor area. That was heated by a Rayburn cooker in the kitchen which did the cooking, heated the water and provided some warmth in the extension, but not much.

Some years later the Rayburn was modified to burn Kerosene. It was less labour intensive but didn’t do much for the heat.

At the turn of the Millennium I took over. The Rayburn was ripped out and replaced with a far more efficient yoke that looked like a wood-burner but ran on Kerosene. We also installed radiators in all the rooms [did you ever try running copper pipes through two feet of granite?]. That theoretically heated the whole house but it had its flaws. The burner didn’t have the wallop to heat all the radiators at once and had to be manually lit every morning.

Then we installed a high efficiency oil burner in the garage, while keeping the kitchen one as a backup. At last we had proper heating that could actually heat all the radiators and had an automatic control.

Then a fucking rat chewed through a pipe under the floor. That cost a bit to fix. The rat was executed.

We then decided that was a cold spot in the kitchen as the fire there wasn’t being used. An extra radiator was fitted and that sorted that.

The heating now comes on automatically to its programmed time. It heats all the radiators until they are too hot to touch. So theoretically everything is fine.

Except that it isn’t. It has a couple of weird foibles. Sometimes the upstairs radiators don’t work, but that is down to crap water pressure here. But occasionally the radiators on the bathroom and lobby don’t work. They’re on their own little spur and are currently stone cold despite the boiler running perfectly. It’s not an air lock as they will probably be fine tomorrow. I haven’t a clue what causes it. They just have a mind of their own.

There is also a leak somewhere in the system and I don’t know where. This causes the pressure to drop and I have to manually open a valve every few days to re-pressure the system. If I forget, the system becomes very noisy and the kitchen radiator will lose efficiency. So I have to pressure, bleed the kitchen radiator, pressure the system again, bleed again, carry on bleeding and repeat until all air is gone and the pressure is back up. That’s a tedious business but it’s not like I don’t have any spare time on my hands. Anyway they’d probably have to rip up the floors again and it isn’t worth it.

It’s working perfectly now except that the bathroom is cold.

It’ll probably be too hot tomorrow.

Footnote [about an hour after scribbling the thing above]: I have just been into the bathroom [as one is so frequently inclined] and the fucking radiator is too hot to touch. I had done nothing at all to the system.

Strange?