So today we finally wired in the WarmChurch controller into St Faith’s church in Newton Longville. It’s properly connected to the mains wiring of the church (and while I was at it I properly wired in the central heating boilers which were previously on a plug at the end of a flying lead).

The controller itself is the grey box at the top with the wireless sensor controller below it on the left and the USB power supply on the right.

The mobile data connection came straight up and began talking to the internet.

Here you can see the web page that you see by default when connecting to the controller. The inside of the church is only just a bit above the outside temperature although the humidity is a little lower. This is all to be expected. Once a few temperature and humidity readings are reported we will start to see the graphs.

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.

The first system is close to being installed at St Faith’s church in Newton Longville.

This Sunday we had a typical case of the sort of thing that Warm-church is designed to avoid; the person in charge of the heating (me) forgot to adjust the time clock to switch the heating on for the Sunday service. When the choir arrived for their pre-service practice the church was decidedly chilly. Quickly switching the heating on gave a bit of a boost, but there were mutterings…

We’ll start with the mains wiring: a new spur off the main power ring for the controller, and while we are at it wiring the boilers into a new spur as well, rather than having them plugged into an ordinary 13 amp socket.