Roads to Joy

Life has felt rather fraught, over these past two months, and joys have mostly been subsumed in fretting. So it’s a delight, finally, to share some resolutions to some of these infrastructural, if prosaic, challenges, and to be looking forward to new creative projects.

Considering that the ancient Romans had wonderful spas, indoor plumbing, and hot water at their beck and call, it’s not surprising that with today’s engineering advances we should rather expect such things to work. But there’s been teething issues, more of the gnashing variety than felt comfortable. Toward the end of August, we entertained a team of plumbers and electricians who removed our oil furnace and replaced it with a pair of Air Source Heat Pumps. The work was expeditious, tidy, and successful.

But while the house was in chaos (upstairs floor boards lifted to reveal conduits for the 500m of electrical cables; removal and replacement of almost all the radiators; shed contents evacuated and stored under the veranda roof), we decamped to our campervan, Harry Hymer, with Kali cat for some peace and quiet. All was well, until Harry’s boiler decided, after 27 years of service, to stop igniting. So we were without hot water both in the house, and in the campervan, at the same time.

Eventually, by the end of the big work week, heat and hot water were restored to the house, and we resumed occupation therein. What we would do about the heart of Harry Hymer was another ongoing and compelling challenge that would need to be resolved at some point before we could venture out on the road again. But our initial delight with our new household hot water system gradually and persistently turned into dismay as idiosyncracies developed with its delivery.

We finally threw our hands up in despair and called the installation company back to try to figure out the problem of hot water insufficiency. Prompt arrival of an engineer and laboured diagnosis of the issue gave us some hope, but that was immediately dashed by a hiatus in securing the apparently faulty component, and after the assessment, a complete absence of hot water in our lives. Fortunately, we now had another crucial resolution in hand.

We’d been apprised of an enterprising electronics company, some four hours drive down south, which was highly recommended for repair of boilers like Harry’s. If I could get the boiler out of the tiny cupboard (I could!) and take it down to the workshop, repair could be attempted on a no-fix/no-fee basis. And the delight when the gas line solenoid opened, after the engineer replaced a faulty diode on the boiler’s ‘motherboard’, was palpable — I felt the ripple run from my stomach to my throat. More joys awaited: I would have to install the repaired boiler back in the cupboard after I got it home safely.

Just in time, and with rather intensely bated breath, we fired up the boiler. And . . . it worked! Hot air blew out of the ancient ducts, and warm water poured from the taps, and even more importantly, out of the campervan’s shower. So we coped, in a kind of patient delight, with our camping safety solution, while we waited for our home heating to be fixed.

The second heating engineer who arrived some five days later said that alarm bells had rung for him when I reported that contrary to the first guy’s instructions, I could not get the hot water cylinder drained, as it re-pressurised whenever I turned the tap off. ‘There’s a compromised mixer tap somewhere,’ was his comment, and we set to to investigate each of the fiver mixer taps in the house. The kitchen sink was working perfectly; the upstairs sink too; the digital shower mixer was not mixing hot and cold inappropriately; the downstairs bathroom sink was fine. That left only the new shower mixer: if, for some reason, the hot water system was being infiltrated by cold water from the mains, that could explain all of our problem with supply.

And then, the minor miracle: the engineer turned the thermostatic tap on the shower tight to ‘cold’ and forced it just beyond, to feel, as he reported, a kind of ‘clunk’ which felt like a seating of the thermostatic cylinder into position. To our great surprise, the pressurised ‘hot’ water in the kitchen sink stopped running — the hot water cylinder was no longer compromised.

The engineer drew us a diagram, illustrating how the plumbing had been short-circuited by the unfortunate mixer tap debacle, but we were already feeling quite thrilled that the problem had been resolved.

So, after all the fretting, and all the worry (which in the grand scheme of things was scarcely worth getting our knickers in a twist about, but which caused us considerable consternation nonetheless), we’ve found joy in the resolution of persistent challenges.

More importantly, with my mind beginning to clear from the ongoing fug of worry, a new resolution to the challenge of what to write about, in a new novelistic project, has opened up to me. Perhaps that’s the most important joy of all.