D’oh!

Graham from Mintlaw Stove Installers came out yesterday to sweep my chimney and advise on stoves. I liked him – a very straight-up Yorkshireman, quickly found the way from the inside of the stove to the chimney (more than I could!) and made a neat, swift job of sweeping it and handing over the usual certificate for insurance purposes. He measured up the alcove the stove sits in, searched all over the stove itself for a maker’s name (I’ve never found one either) and then inspected the little grate and chimney in my bedroom.

In summary, the bedroom chimney isn’t worth restoring as a working fireplace, but as a decorative feature it’ll be fine and I’ll get the top of the chimney sealed and a cowl fitted. The stove in the lounge is probably a 25kW and should be very capable of heating the house – and why don’t I try keeping it in with some coal and slack overnight, before looking at spending thousands on a new stove?

Definitely d’oh!

He also suggested I check the radiators for sludge build up, which comes out as radiators hot at the top but cold at the bottom. I fired the stove up and packed it full of wood last night, got the radiators really good and hot, and sure enough the bedroom and office radiators were hot at the top, cold at the bottom! The lounge, kitchen and bathroom were all fine, equally warm top and bottom.

I’ve thrashed through the situation with my brother Martin, who came up to visit this weekend, and we’ve agreed I’ll try a sack of anthracite and a sack of slack and see if I can keep the house warm through the night with those. I can still save the wood ash for the compost through the day – I just need to empty the ash twice a day, that’s all, and separate the coal ash from the wood ash. Once the coal ash has sat and weathered somewhere out of the way for a bit I can use it for making paths (cinder paths), so it’s not completely useless.

If I can keep the house warm overnight with the current stove, then we’ll replace the radiators with new ones, which will automatically involve flushing the system and de-sludging, then we’ll replace the bath with a nice big shower tray, waterproof the bathroom walls and move Mum in.

I already have a Hive smart hub which was a free gift from BT when I signed up for broadband from them, so we’re going to fit smart thermostatic valves on the new radiators, which means I can control the heat through the house from my phone or iPad, or put them on a schedule to warm bedrooms up before bed and shut them down through the day (and do the opposite with the other rooms, of course), or even couple the valves to smart thermostats to manage the house’s heat distribution that way. I’ll also put in a motion sensor in the hallway outside Mum’s bedroom door that’ll turn on the hall light if she gets up in the night, to make sure she’s not stumbling about in the dark wondering where the light switches are, and I’ll put a simple alarm on the front and back doors so I’ll know if she goes wandering outside in the dark.

Technology has its uses.

Tomorrow I shall find a local coal merchant and acquire a sack of coal and some slack, so by Tuesday morning I should have some real progress to report to the family.

The horses still haven’t bothered going into the field – they’re perfectly happy in the barns and yard and devouring hay endlessly! I’ve been comparing feed schedules with my sister Katrina and I’m gong to shift mine to two feeds a day, to match her Rhapsody, and she’s going to move Rhapsody’s evening feed from 6pm to 4 pm, so when Rhapsody arrives here on her holiday later this month, all the horses will be ready for their feeds at the same time. Rhapsody doesn’t eat hay, though, and she has terrible manners towards other horses (the foulest horse language ever seen, according to Katrina – but then she folds if another horse challenges her on it) so she’ll be in a paddock on her own rather than joining the Herd.

It will fascinating to watch Dancer’s reaction when she sees the first other bay mare she’s ever encountered..!