Thursday 10th April 2008

My Master has concluded that he is single handedly responsible for multiple breakdowns of heating systems over the years. Why has he reached this conclusion? We are without heating and water heating and for that matter water! At least when the system broke down in Belgium, it restricted itself to the heating, except when the pilot light went out. My Mistress in all her adult life has only had one other heating system breakdown and that was many years ago when my Master went to stay with her one weekend. On the other paw, my Master says he has had quite a number of such situations over the years. We have therefore isolated him as the common factor.

In the current situation it all started when my Mistress went to turn the washing off and found half a bucket of water on the utility floor. Not on the floor by the washing machine as you might expect but by the boiler. Further investigation revealed that is was coming down the plinth. My Master was poorly in bed, so it was left to my Mistress to go and get out landlord. Together they took the front and top off the boiler to find water spurting up into the air from a hole in a tube. Unfortunately, they could find no tap that isolated the boiler, just the one for the mains, although even then in nearly had to be the one for the whole road! Equally unfortunate was the fact that our landlord couldn’t get the heating engineer. So we are just waiting to see whether he can get and replace the part on the boiler that is leaking. I know I’m only a dog, but do-it-yourself boiler repairs do strike me as a recipe for disaster and although I can live with out showering, my Mistress is going to get pretty grouchy if she has to go without hot, or for that matter cold, water for very long.