Loving leftovers and plumbing finished

The best thing about making enough food to feed an army you get lots of left overs, and then you get to eat them instead of cooking a meal from scratch.

Which is a good job really because I had to feed the starving hero today - the heat exchanger works! We have a warm bathroom!

First of all he had to drill holes in the new fire - a bit stressful this, buying an expensive new fire then making holes in it.

Then the heat coils were installed inside and the copper pipes pushed through then attached to flexible hoses to feed through the living room wall to the bathroom to be connected to the pump.

To fix the coils securely a bar has been run horizontally across them.

Here they are inside the top of the fire box.











Complete with flames!

In an attempt to make the whole system automatic, another of the scrapyard finds comes into play, a thermal switch, which should activate the pump at 35°C with another on the return as a safety backup which trips in at 60°C.

But that should mean that we can throw a couple of logs into the fire and safely leave it overnight knowing that the pump is going to kick in and not just leave the water boiling in the heat exchanger.

Here is the very technical test to see that the switches work - one hot mug, one cold mug.  James May and his man lab have nothing on this!

There is also a mains powered override switch to turn the pump on and off should the thermal automatic switches not work.

So we are all watching the thermometer with eagle eyes - how many degrees difference is this new system going to make.

Here is the new bathroom layout, fire removed, radiator, and towel rail fitted.