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.

One water pump scavenged from the scrap yard....

....has saved us about 50 squids in addition to a roll of copper pipe donated a couple of years ago by a friend, and "viola" as they say in France - another stage of the plumbing is done.

Looks very complicated and that is because it is. It is set up so that the bathroom radiator always takes priority over the other rads, and also has been plumbed to allow for thermo syphoning - but we don't know if it actually will or not - hence the pump.

While Brendan was doing this complicated set of pipework I have to admit that I ran away to my studio, knowing full well that the only help I could offer today was the cleaning up afterwards.

So I got on with some more bags - guess what everyone is getting for Crimble!!

Thank you for the belt donations - the first ones are being used for bag straps today.

A cat's life for me

With the weather still grey and sleety, the cats are refusing point blank to go outside, although poor Mr Pink here is being gradually pushed off his perch by the two naughty kittens (they all seem rather keen on the new cushion covers I made the other day).

My bathroom looks like this

- as you can see plumbing still underway, the living room wall has had several large holes drilled through it for the heat exchange pipes -

but no end in sight yet.

I think of all the things in the world to dislike, the thing I dislike the most is plaster dust, so fine and white and dusty, it gets everywhere and is a complete horror to have to clean up, hopefully that bit is now over, just more patching up to do on the plaster instead.

So while Brendan nipped off to the docs and the supermarket after fetching Thea from school, I ran off to do something infinitely more interesting instead.

From plain picture frame:

- via glue gun, peacock feathers and tiny mother of pearl buttons -

to this:

Sunday's plumbing update

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.