Sulkyblue's Blog

I sometimes think livejournal has some sort of magic connection to higher powers¹, a few short hours after exploding at livejournal about my continued lack of functioning boiler and the incompetency of plumbers, it's all fixed! There's heating AND hot water! It's almost like living in the modern world!!!

Having spent god knows how long being mucked about by Permanex Plumbing (oh look they have a website with a toilet on it - how symbolic) it turns out the problem was the little sparky thing that sets the pilot light aflame. 5 minutes after boiler man from Alpha (possibly these people) arrived it was fixed. It then took him an extra 10 minutes to sort out the pressure imbalance Permanex had had me create to prove it wasn't their problem). All good. All in warranty. Less than 2 hours from me phoning them to it being fixed.

I celebrated with an extremely hot shower and walking around the house with less than 4 layers of clothing on. Then I went to lunch and Starbucks with my brother.

I now feel I can get on with my life. I'll get on with that any minute now ;0)


¹ which I don't actually believe in but am willing to reference for the sakes of a poetic sentence or heartfelt swear

There are incidents and events that happen in every person's life, you can't avoid them forever and sooner or later you'll run out of luck and have to deal with them as best you can. Friends and family who have been through the trauma before can offer advice, those that have thus far avoided it sympathise out loud while internally they are thanking deities that it's not them. But at the end of the day, you just have to soldier through it as best you can, doing what you need to do to survive.

I'm in the middle of one of these traumas at the moment, it's become the focus of my entire life and all other plans have to be formed around it only after considering every way in which they might effect the development and eventual resolution of this problem.

My name is Lorna and on Monday 5th November, my boiler failed.


The technical details involve something about gas pressures being insufficient to keep the pilot light on. Apparently when the boiler was installed (a lovely combi unit thingy that is capable of supplying blisteringly hot showers and doing the washing up at the same time) the plumbers commented that the gas pressure was only just within the operating window and suggested doing something technical, messy and a little expensive. This wasn't done, but as the months passed from July to November the gas pressure dropped steadily and the boiler got more and more temperamental about switching on until on our return from Devon this week, it stopped turning on completely.

So now we're completely without heating (which I don't mind as I don't switch it on when left to my own devices anyways) and hot water (which I mind considerably moreso) and I'm left waiting for a plumber to appear. I flat refuse to have a cold shower, I got stuck with one a couple of weeks ago when the boiler had a sulk and words just cannot express how unpleasant it was. So today instead of going to the pub for the evening, I'm driving over to my dad's flat at Heathrow just in search of hot water. Fortunately my dad is actually at the flat, so I can combine the trip with dinner with him, but I would almost certainly make the 1/2 hour drive anyway, just to have a hot shower. I sense I may be making the journey several times...

The other issue of course is that we have to get the plumbers in. Luckily I'm an unemployed slacker at the moment, so at least no one has to arrange time off work. But I still have to sit around the house and wait for them. There's a number of things I'd like to plan (ranging from exciting trips, through lovely lunches to really dull opticians appointments) but I'm not doing any of that. Instead I'm waiting for the plumbers to schedule their visit, because sod's law states that if I book an opticians appointment, 5 minutes later the plumbers would ring wanting exactly the same slot.

Optimistically they'll come at the beginning of next week. 1 week without hot water. I can probably survive...

Meanwhile my housemates (one of whom of course is my landlady) are leaving for Thailand today. A completely unrelated point that I felt the need to add anyway.