After installing the new fire,
the Panadero Dublin, it was time for the next stage in the heating/plumbing refit.
The original plan had been for Brendan to create a boiler from stainless steel that would be mounted within the fire bin, but on his weekly trip to the scrapman (I think he has a not so secret crush - not on the scrapMAN but on the scrapYARD itself), he found a large coil of 8mm pipe, so decided to reshape this into a heat exchanger instead.
This should now fit into the fire with the minimum of effort, a two hole, two bolt affair. At this point it is safe to say we have no idea how efficient it might or might not be. The whole project is an experiment. Well the winters are long here and it is best for everyone's sanity to have something with which to occupy your time.
Having lovingly fondled and shaped his heat exchanger and after a brief-ish interlude involving a Peugeot engine swap, it was back to the plumbing.
After some debate on the sitings of the radiators, we decided on an internal wall for the one due in my office. Mostly because an internal wall retains more heat into the house, and the only other available place would put it under the office window, where I currently sit, but that is an external north facing wall, so some furniture reshuffling will have to take place.
Yesterday saw the radiator fixed to the wall, and the first tails of piping running across the floor to the bathroom below.
I should say that heating my office is a secondary priority.
The whole point of the new fire is to heat the bathroom, which currently has - or rather had - its own wood burner, which we never lit. The priority is to install a radiator fed from the living room wood burner, which we do light every night, to heat the bathroom, but not knowing how efficient the boiler or heat exchanger may be we have run the second radiator to the office in hopes of being able to heat both rooms even if that does mean turning off one radiator so that the other one can get hot and not being able to have both running at the same time.
In addition I have benefited from a new shelf for all my junk because the system requires an expansion tank, to allow it to boil and for the system to be topped off. Another of Brendan's scrapyard finds this - an old kettle - looks more decorative than a plastic tank anyway.
My office is currently a few piles of files, shoe boxes and other assorted oddments scattered across the floor, in anticipation of the plumbing being finished some time this week, hopefully Thursday which is another national holiday.
Might be worth mentioning that our internal partition wall is so thin that when Brendan was drilling the holes for the shelf brackets he managed to drill right through into the bedroom, so another bit of fixing up required there too.
The bathroom fire is now just an ornament, bereft of its flue pipe, and has revealed the garish fact that the floor below it did not get waxed and treated when I did the rest of the floors in July, but the up side is, I can now reclaim the large piece of marble it used to stand on as its hearth stone, back to its rightful place in the kitchen as my dough board for bread making.
