In May, just as the system was about to be installed, two events took place:

• The church came up for its 10 yearly electrical inspection. It was deemed better to wait until after this was complete before installing the new heating controller.
• The heating system sprang a leak.

We have a wet heating system where we kept the original Victorian radiators and pipework but replaced the old coke boiler with a pair of gas boilers working in parallel. It’s a pressurised system and suddenly started losing pressure. A search of the building found the leak in the most inaccessible place possible, behind the safe in the vestry. The safe weighs about half a ton and seemed to have grown to the floor. Eventually our wonderful heating engineers said that they would undertake to move it out of the way if we cleared enough of the junk in the vestry to allow them access.

They turned up, shifted the safe far enough to get at the pipework, repaired the leak (the pipes were cast iron and couldn’t be welded) and put the safe back. By the time it was fixed it was mid August. No heating was needed until October and when it was turned on it was found to have lost pressure again. This time it was a faulty pressure relief valve which was fixed in mid-October.

Next week, we’ll be installing the Warm-Church controller. Watch this space.