Okay. This is what the control panel looks like on our boiler. I would have been perfectly content never looking at this damn thing, much less turning any knobs or pressing any buttons. Boilers are awesome! (I thought.) They heat the rooms about 10000x better than the crappy electric heaters we had in Seattle. One of my nightmares about moving to England involved living in a tiny little house in Dorridge (well... that part is true), non-stop rain, and wearing jackets inside. I hate being cold. After Jeff moved in the primary questions on my mind were these "is the house cold? do you feel the need to wear socks inside? do you wear hoodies to bed?" I was pleasantly surprised. Radiators keep the little house quite cozy.
Everything was going well until I woke up to some strange gurgling. I leapt out of bed. Truly, I did. I am paranoid. I'm sure if I had alerted Jeff to the gurgling he would have replied,"what gurgling?" He never believes me, even when I tell him I think someone vomited outside our front door or a cat widdled in the grocery store. "You think everything smells like vomit or pee", he says. Hmph. It's not my fault I have a very sensitive nose and highly developed hearing. No one is going to ralph outside my front door without me knowing!
Anyway, the gurgling DID happen and I ran downstairs to check the boiler control panel. Ah ha! The pressure (read in the gauge at the bottom right) was down to 0! Easy fix for that - just pump some more water in the system. I added water until the dial read 2 bar and went back to bed, satisfied with a job well done. The next morning, I checked the dial again. Um... 0? I guess I can put more water in...
And so it went. We began topping up the boiler multiple times a day, otherwise the pressure would drop so low the boiler would shut itself off. With the temperatures dropping below freezing at night we had to continue heating the house somehow or we would face frozen pipes. I even started timing the drop: we were losing all pressure in about 5 hours. You know what this means, don't you? All that water had to be going somewhere. Basically, we had sprung a gigantic leak. Of course, gigantic leaks tend to make themselves pretty obvious. After hours (literally) of googling "Vaillant combi-boiler pressure dropping rapidly" we finally had to admit that we did indeed have a leak. And if you can't spot the leak it is most likely under the floor. Under the brand new hardwood floor. And, of course, how can you find the leak without ripping up the entire floor?? I began to feel intensely jealous of people who posted on boiler forums (yeah, they exist and yeah, I've been to them) with geysers in their living rooms. Hey! Don't complain! AT LEAST YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR LEAK IS!!!!!
We prowled about the house, listening intently for the sound of leaking water and snapping at the dogs for click-clacking around and making it impossible for us to hear anything. Jeff may or may not have mentioned the word "sinkhole" as we filled up the boiler for the umpteenth time. I took this opportunity to flop around (you know it!) and moan "whyyyy is this happpenningggg to uuussssss!"
Finally, we called in the big guns. All that googling had produced something heretofore unheard of to us: leak detection. You guys.... they use THERMAL IMAGING to find leaks. It was like the army (a one person army consisting of a supremely hunky Welshman named Barry) was in our house looking for leaks. Anyway, we found the leak and Barry fixed it up with very little damage to the floors. Hubba. Hubba.
We naively thought we were in the clear until two of the radiators stopped working. Two radiators stone cold, while the rest are piping hot. You have got to be joking. The good news: the pressure is staying steady! I can't even contemplate the bad news right now.
PS We finally had the rogue lock fixed. The locksmith tried to explain to me what had happened, but when he mentioned it was the first time he had seen this in 11 years (!!) of being a locksmith I sort of tuned out and became embroiled in a bitter internal debate concerning the possibility that this particular locksmith only takes 1 job a month so he doesn't really know what he's talking about and the (more likely) possibility that our house really does hate us.
Also, the kettle broke this morning. Bollocks.
