The first house I bought had two fireplaces.

That was it. Two open fireplaces to heat the whole house. This of course was normal, though not as posh as those huuses with a fireplace in each bedroom.

I decided to put in central heating. The only problem was that I knew nothing about plumbing or heating. Foundations, blocklaying, bricklaying, heavy carpentry and of course demolition were skills I possessed in abundance but not plumbing. I got several books out of the library.

I had to do everything from scratch including buying drills [all the walls were solid block], pipe bending springs, workbenches and of course loads of copper piping and radiators. I ripped out one of the fireplaces and dug down. I built a new fireplace with a back boiler and underfloor ash-bucket and draught. Pipes were clamped around the skirting boards and through walls. Radiators were mounted and it was a roaring success, though it was hard pressed to heat all the rooms simultaneously but we weren’t using the front room or two of the bedrooms so that didn’t matter.

The next house we bought only had one open fireplace. Strangely enough though it did have a boiler room built into the house which the previous owner had used as a coal hole. There were also cast iron pipes running under the floors but no boiler or radiators. I installed radiators and also a solid fuel cooker in the kitchen with a built in boiler. That worked to a fashion but the chimney was never right so the house was always full of soot and anthracite fumes. Not nice.

Then we moved back here to The Manor. Heating consisted of one open fireplace and a solid fuel cooker in the extension. The cooker had a back boiler with an output sufficient to heat the water but fuck all else. At that stage in life I decided my plumbing days were over so I called in a firm to install central heating throughout the house and to replace the cooker with a kerosene boiler that looked like a wood burner.

That was a bit of a disaster. The installation and plumbing were all fine and the system worked….. provided the wind was in exactly the right direction. If the wind wasn’t exactly right there would be down-draught that would fill the extension with fumes, while the vaccuum valves clattered and banged like a demented blacksmith. The plumbing engineer tried everything. He tried various cowels on the chimney and installed a couple of vacuum driven valves in the flue. Nothing worked and we had to put up with the fumes and the noise. On top of that, the boiler had to be manually lit and switched off.

In the end, we had had enough. We got the plumbing firm again and they installed a high efficiency high output boiler in the garage. That worked brilliantly. For the first time I could actually time the boiler to run automatically.

That was fine until the first really cold winter. There was now a gap in the house that had been heated with the old burner but that was now redundant. We got the plumber out again to install an extra radiator. He also fixed a leak where a rat had chewed through the piping. The rat is now dead meat.

So we’re grand now. The house is lovely and warm. It’s a pity the boiler controls are in the garage and not the kitchen but that’s a trivial inconvenience.

Also there is a leak somewhere in the branch to the new radiator which means I have to bleed it and re-pressure the system every couple of days.

I couldn’t be arsed to do anything about that though.