Blocked Drains (by sarah)

The windows have been being repainted and bits being repaired which is nice except the rotting frames are just being hardened and repainted again :/ Which is what was done to them two odd years ago and now I can't open my favourite window anymore (the one I broke before as it was so rotten and Barbara insisted only the broken part be replaced - well she is paying). The frame is so rotten now I risk breaking the glass and stuff :/

Anyway apart from not having been told the guy was coming - I am very happy with getting fresh paint on stuff especially as fixed the bent metal window in the front that was letting a whopping breeze into the house (the one that Barbara had decided to jimmy open whilst we where evacuated to London in 2007 so that the cats could roam the house why we weren't here).

But he did manage to get bits and bobs in our drain outside the kitchen window - this is where all the kitchen sink and stuff drains out of a pipe into a grated hole in the floor. Now I tend to clear this drain every few weeks anyway as it has a tendency to end up with plants growing in it and leaf litter from the garden but obviously this is a bit hard for me at the moment.

Looking at it I thought it looked a little blocked so mentioned it to Al in the hope he'd get it cleared later in the day - I then forgot about it and put the washing machine on. I then get an irate Barbara at the door because we've obviously blocked the drain (probably with baby wipes) and it's all coming up through the manhole cover. Alaric comes to look and starts going on about rods and things and I'm like 'no the drain's just got a bit clogged so the water from the washing machine can't drain.'

We go back inside to find stuff to sort it - Alaric is arguing with me about it needing rods whilst I'm collecting gloves and a black sack. I'd told Barbara we would sort it, hobble back outside to find she's got a crow bar and is about to prize the cover off the manhole - which both her and Al were insisting the water was coming up through. I think I shouted at everybody and went and cleared the grill of a broken bit of paint pot and lots of paint flecks plus some leaves. The water instantly starts draining into the drain :/

I then get told that me and Al are irresponsible as we didn't stop the water and now there was soapy water draining onto some plants on the quay. As Barbara brushed excess water back up the gully bit to go down the drain. I then pointed out it was soap nuts anyway so shouldn't be too harmful and she agreed.

I was so hacked off at both of them. Especially as it wasn't even because I haven't been clearing it as regularly as normal. Alaric said he thought the pipes drained in under the ground :/ so what I was saying hadn't made sense.

The main issue for me was that I then ended up shaking with pain and walking and even getting myself out of bed was a no go for the next few days 🙁 I get so sad that I can see what needs doing and not actually do it.

Kestral (by sarah)

Albert the gardener came to say there was a kestral on the ground and the kittens stalking about and maybe we should catch them and put them inside before it got messy. Unfortunatly Alaric woke me up with this info which in my half asleep state ment that I though a kestral had attacked either Hydrogen or Helium!

So I rushed outside with towels and what what not and got annoyed at dad for stopping to put cheese away before going out with the teatowels I'd thrown at him. Anyway it turned out to be a juvinile (I assume from the family roosting in the trees along the stream.) And Hydrogen had chased it into Barbara's garage :/ We flushed the cat out and caught the kestral which didn't appear to have anything wrong with it - Alaric had thought its wing was broken but after a lot of faffing and three adults chasing it. Alaric threw a towl over it and I scooped it up!

I then took it up to the top of the paddock as Dad and Al rounded up all cats and put them inside so they couldn't follow. I put it down gently and because I was wearing chunky monkey gloves I had a little look at it. It seemed fine just scared and the painter had said to me he thought it had flown into something.

So we are assuming it is dazed and scared - it's hidden itself in the gazebo/summer house so I left the door open and continued my calls to it (Al kept informing me that they only respond when trained but it definatly responded when I made noises like they do when they fly. On to of that it came out and sat on the grow bag and looked at me - then I called again and one of it's parents answered.

We have left the door open in the hope that it was dazed with collision and then chased by cat and humans and then bundled in a towel :/ It's mother is calling it and hopefully it will be able to fly up and join her.

If not it will probably still be in the gazebo when we check later - at which point we will catch it again and take it too the vets 🙁 I know we probably should have taken it straight to the vets but if we do that and its only dazed then we've sperated it from it's family.

However one issue came up with all of this - the towel got hooked up on some splintering old boards in the garage which Alaric says are asbestos 🙁 So me and the towels ect... where covered in asbestos dust. I stripped and showered and Al put everything in the washing machine. I am hacked off though as I've already paid for one lot of asbestos to be removed from this place and the whole lot could have all gone at one >:( And I asked if there was anymore!

Electricity bills and heating (by alaric)

We changed electricity supplier recently, which is great, but the downside is that I've just noticed a bounced direct debit from NPower (the old one) for £661 on our joint account, to clear our remaining balance 🙁

We were paying a regular direct debit of £130 a month, which we tried to keep to by not being wasteful with the hot water (electrically heated) and by rationing the use of the fan heater (which at 3kW costs just under 50p an hour to run, which at the planned four hours a day comes out to £60 a month, the rest being our normal 'summer' power consumption)

I've no idea how we've gone £661 over in the past year 🙁 I can't find my old workings, but I know my estimate of our summer power consumption involved a lot of guesswork, and I was uncertain as to how many months of the year we'd run the heater for... but it looks like we won't be able to afford to run the fan heater at all this winter; thankfully, we've managed to plug a lot of the draughts in the house, and I'm going to try and arrange secondary double glazing (be it nice sheets of plastic mounted properly... or bubble wrap pinned to the window frames), so hopefully we'll be able to get by with the coal fire downstairs, which normally gets through something like £5 worth of coal a day.

I'll be more frugal with the gas heater in my office, too - last winter, it was used to great effect (especially once we'd managed to close the warped window properly so there wasn't a huge draught), but the office is a high-ceilinged room so a lot of empty space has to be filled with warm air before I feel much of it. I budgeted for one £15 cylinder a month, but we ended up using one about every ten days, from memory.

By comparison, Sarah's electric blanket only uses a sixty or so watts, and keeps her toasty warm all night! Which just goes to show how much of the heat from a room heater goes to heating the walls and air, rather than heating us. I need to get some time to refit Sarah's heated jacket with a cable to plug into a plugtop PSU so she can be kept warm without needing to get through batteries like they grow on trees...

You can’t get the staff these days! (by alaric)

We've got houseguests over, and we left them at home while we went for a walk in the countryside.

However, when I got home, I found they'd decided to go to Tesco many hours previously, and had gone off leaving:

• Jean's rabbit outside in his run
• The shed unlocked
• The front door of the house wide open

When asked why, they said "Oh, Barbara (the next door neighbour, my aunt) was around"...

Had it not occurred to them that Barbara might decide to go out herself, and is not supposed to be responsible for locking up our home? Or that Barbara might not actually take it upon herself to guard our open doors from passing opportunists, and sit watching, but might have her own things to do?

sigh

Heating an old house (by alaric)

Sarah feels the cold keenly, while I can usually just put on some more warm clothes to deal with British winters. But even I was finding it hard to work in my home office when the temperature went below ten Celcius; fingerless gloves still let me type, but numb fingers increase my error rate, and the pain is distracting.

Part of the problem was that our house is draughty. There were a lot of gaps in the window and door frames, through which daylight could be seen; when it was windy and rainy at the same time, the wind blew rain in through the frame of the large window in my office.

So step one was to fix these. The large office window, it turns out, is somewhat curved, so when my brother in law was visiting, we screwed extra handles to it, pulled it properly closed with levers wedged in the handles, then did up the bolts at top and bottom to force it to stay in shape, which fixed a large source of draughts.

Then I want around a few other choice places, adding draught excluder strips where I could.

Next challenge was to increase the heat. We had only one real source of heat in the house, a wood/coal burning stove at one end of the house. Since it's a long thin house, this was little help for me in my office, right at the opposite end - but it didn't even make enough heat to keep Sarah happy sitting next to it, so she would often use the expensive electric fan heater to keep her temperature up, much to my concern (for if we can't pay the electricity bill, things will quickly become rather unpleasant).

Now, the grate in this fire was rather small compared to the size of the fire itself. The grate had only sides and a front, so had to be pushed back against the firebricks in order to not spill coal out. This meant that air coming in through the vents would tend to rise over the fire and up the chimney, taking heat away without imparting much oxygen to it. Even then, it would slowly wriggle forwards over time, spilling ash and coal down behind, until it came too far forwards for the ash shovel to be pushed underneath it, meaning the fire would choke itself. But as it moved forward, the effective volume fire increased, with a notable improvement in the heat output - even though the fire at the back would be starved of air from beneath, as it sat on a bed of ashes.

While rummaging through piles of random bits of metal lurking about the place from when we moved in, though, I found an iron grating that I suspected might be able to fit in behind the existing grate, enlarging it. Sure enough, it did - and it fitted so perfectly well that I suspect it was actually meant for it. Suddenly it was possible to have a large bed of coal in the fire, with air coming in through the vents from underneath it and being drawn up through; this led to an awesome increase in heat. However, it led back to the same old problem - we now didn't have room to get the ash shovel in underneath to take ash away. And so the fire would slowly choke itself with ash.

So I ordered two metres of 25mm square hot-rolled mild steel from Hindleys, my favourite home-engineering supply house. When it arrived I used my angle grinder to chop off two lengths of the stuff, then used them as spacers on either side of the grate to lift it up an extra inch.

And now the fire's awesome. I can easily get it so hot that it becomes mildly terrifying, an angry yellow glow emanating from the air vents as it roars away, the radiated heat unpleasant to be too near. A few days ago, it actually melted the plastic crates we store our newspaper and kindling in, purely by radiation.

But it's still rather cold in my office.

So we decided to spend some money on the problem, as it was in danger of harming my work. I went down to John Stayte Services, a local purveyor of awesome things. We buy our coal from them, but they also sell propane, butane, related accessories such as heaters and Sievert torches, workwear, and animal feed. To my delight, they had a deal on; a shipment of gas heaters had been damaged due to the shipping container being broken into by illegal immigrants who built a home on top of them for the duration of the voyage... so they were selling a slightly dented heater, along with a cylinder of butane, for £89 when normally a heater alone would cost more than that (and a gas cylinder £50 or so as an initial outlay).

I set it up in my office, lit it... and over the next few hours, the temperature rose from ten degrees to about twenty, with me correspondingly shedding layers of clothing. Since then I've been running the heater on low power, and the temperature's stayed around seventeen degrees; with the stones of the building having been warmed up, it's now not taking much heat to keep it nice and warm.

And so, I can proudly state, for the first time since we moved in, it's actually warm enough at home that we are turning down heat sources so as not to be too hot!