Monday 24th March

We had the heating go at my house in Walton, it was repaired, then a few weeks later it went again.  I called the heating guys who did the repair.  Answerphone; and they didn’t call back.  Apparently the owner was away on holiday and no-one else bothered to read the machine… Anyway I got British Gas in and I bought a whole new boiler, which despite costing a fortune, at least gives me a two year guarantee.  My partner has an annual maintenance with British Gas, and just before it was due, the boiler stopped working.  Worse than that it started leaking badly, which meant we had to have the water off too.  It took three days to fix.  Luckily we had a house with a new boiler to go to.  Then a few weeks later the electrics went.  I managed to fix that one.

Last week, returning from a funeral I found the thermostat undone and in pieces, and again no heating.  The boiler was again not working.   It was dark so I couldn’t turn off the power but tried anyway, unsuccessfully to rewire the thermosstat.  Then chcking the boiler I saw it was out of water.  There are two taps under the machine that have to be turned towards each other and it fills up with water.  Hooray, at last hot water.  But because my partner assumed it was the thermostat which was now unwired  we had no heating.  She bought a new thermostat the next day, but it was a different model and there were three possible connectors for two wires.  Despite tutorials on You-tube we were none the wiser.  We tried a few combinations but no success, so as a desperate measure we tried to re-assemble and re-wire the old thermostat.  I don’t know how many times I went downstairs and switched the power on and off but eventually we got it working.  We are now sitting here waiting for the next thing to stop working…