The Quest Continues.

As you may recall when I first got here, I was freezing. It was only September and I worried about how I would survive the winter. As roommates we had decided to only have the heating on for a few hours in the morning and a few in the evening. I hated it. I was freezing all the time and spent my waking hours wrapped up in a blanket. My feet were like blocks of ice and I couldn’t even bear to be without my jacket. The only time I was truly warm was in the shower, where I would stand in the hot water until my feet melted and my blood warmed. This was no way to live. (By way of explanation, we have an old-school boiler and radiators in our rooms. The gas heats up the water, which flows through the radiators and gives us heat. Unfortunately, there’s no thermostat to regulate the temperature; the heat is either all the way on or all the way off. This makes it quite difficult to maintain a very constant temperature in the house. It gets nice and warm and then very shortly after turning off the heating, it gets really cold.) So, we called the gas provider to see if there was anything we could do to keep the heating more even because to my mind having to reheat the house every few hours was wasting a lot of energy, whereas having it on more often for less time would perhaps use less. So the gas company told us that the rate would be lower if we used a bit more gas. So we started leaving the heating on all day with the radiators turned down. IT WAS HEAVEN! Then the heating bill came and it was not good news. We realized that we’d been given bad information by the gas company. So we decided to go back to only having the heating on for 8 hours a day and I went back to wearing a blanket around all the time. We were a bit smarter about it and decided to heat the house up for an hour or so and then have the heating come on every 15 minutes for 15 minutes. We figured this way it would maintain the heat better. It was working perfectly until two days ago when the heating just stopped working. The pilot light was on, but the heat wouldn’t switch on. That also meant we couldn’t get any hot water. We called the gas company but they couldn’t send anyone over until the next day. That meant we had to spend the rest of the day and night without any heat. I was not pleased, but spent the evening at the Church building where the heating was working. I came home and got in bed as quickly as I could. The next morning the gasman came and fixed our heating. We had heat again and we rejoiced and I took a shower, which turns out was a good plan because last night, the pilot light went out. We tried multiple times to restart it and it would stay lit for a few seconds only. We were again facing a night of no heat. We called our landlord who is a tightwad and won’t get a new boiler despite the fact that ours is 15 years old and a piece of crap. He called the gas company and they came out today and tried again. We’ve now become quite good friends with the gas technician as we’ve seen him many times. I feel like we’re all on the same team against the landlord in our efforts to secure a new boiler. Anyway, he did some other things and hopefully that will do the trick. My great hope is that I will now be able to sleep without the fear of hypothermia.