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How much wood would a woodchuck chuck..

Posted: 05-07-10

Wetback improvements. Leaking things. Towel rail-tails.

We've been in the house almost two weeks and things seem to resemble something like normality. I fitted the cat-door so now Dexter, Lily and Polly no longer need bother me each morning by pooing in the litter tray 3 feet from my breakfast. They can do it in 3 acres of litter, being as it is our section almost totally comprises sand.

We managed to bag a house-lot of 2nd-hand carpet from TradeMe the other week. I cut them into sections that would very roughly fit the main areas of each room that we're currently using (The other 2 bedrooms are chocca with our stuff right now) so the inside of the house looks a little "bitty". However, some of our existing "farmhouse"/"homestead" style furniture goes so well with this, the place already has a style of its own. Add to this the Rayburn, antique light switches and the areas of bare floor, and I think we rather like it just the way it is.

So as part of my, very roughly, thrice weekly chores, I need to provide fuel for "The Beast". The Beast eats wood like I eat Tasia's baking, the only difference being that The Beast has no teeth with which to dice with extraction.

She takes a basket of wood in an evening, two baskets on a Saturday or Sunday but we only have three basket-sized containers to take the chopped wood at present.

What this means is, I chop wood pretty much every other day. I have set a schedule however that at last light on a Sunday - providing the weather's good - I'll spend about half an hour chopping enough to fill all three containers - which by my calculations should last until last-thing Thursday night.

But I'll have to get back to you on that.

It is obviously by virtue of the fact that the Rayburn provides us with hot water, heat for our radiators and the ability to cook with her, that she needs a lot of fuel. I have heard from fellow Rayburn owners it is likely to take a season to get to know her for there are several heat-controls and heat-related variables to get just right for optimum burning and heating before you can successfully pilot her.

The threshold for running the rads is variable by means of a digital controller, however at a lower setting you gain the benefit of warmth, faster, while possibly sacrificing a halfway decent shower later.

Currently, hot water takes up to two hours to get up to temperature in the Rayburn's wetback and that's before it arrives at the cylinder using the natural principal of heat rising. This doesn't mean we have to wait 2 hours to take a shower - we have an incredibly efficient and insulated cylinder which holds its heat for days - what it does mean though is that the radiator pump will not cut-in until sufficient heat rises to the cylinder from the boiler pipes. An idea I had is to see if there's a way of hooking an extra, smaller solar panel into the Rayburn's boiler, just to take the edge off it (The boiler is fed with stone-cold water straight from our storage tanks) this would mean less heat energy is required of the fuel once burning to get the boiler up to temperature, and pertinently, less time to get that heat to our rads.

I spotted our cylinder was leaking small droplets of water the other day. I got worried by this. Ever since we lived in a 1900s Brooklyn cottage, and regularly being awoken by water peeing onto the bed during a storm, have I suffered a phobia of water on the wrong side of the roof.

It turns out it wasn't a faulty cylinder at all but the solar feed into it. It just needed tightening.

We still haven't got our towel rails sorted though.

They're supposed to run off the cylinder itself, unlike the rads which require the Rayburn to be running. They do however have a controller and an isolating switch which cut-in the pump at the appropriate times, however no matter what time I set the controller to start the pump, it never actually would.

So I set about investigating this in the attic and found a thermostat to add to the equation. I've figured - with advice from the system's designer - that unless the heat of the pipe to which it is clamped is up to the temperature set on its dial, even if the digital controller is programmed on, the pump won't run. So imagine my delight when I thought I'd sussed it by discovering the pipe it was attached to would only be hot, if the pump was running - a catch 22.

I moved the thermostat to a hotter pipe nearer to the cylinder and tried again.

Nothing.

I set the thermostat right down to 20 - surely that would do it .

Nothing.

Then I looked at the thermostat and noticed a little brown wire hanging out of it.

That could be it aye?