You might wonder why we overhauled the heating system in the first place. After all, you’ve got to figure that leaving things as they are has less of an environmental impact that refurbishing something. Well, this flat had a bit of a bizarre heating system, especially given its size. It had a combi boiler feeding the sinks and the heating system, but a large hot water cylinder with 2 electric immersion heaters that fed the showers. You find houses that have cylinders fed by the boiler (and often have back-up immersion heaters), but this was a little strange - and not that efficient. Couple this with a boiler that was going to need replacing at some stage in the not too distant future, we thought it was an appropriate time to put in a new system. Little did I know that it involved re-piping most of the flat to get it all working and to meet current standards.
So the plumbers descended en masse and managed to do everything in a matter of days. I missed the yellow gunk that came out of the hot water cylinder, which fed the showers (my builders thought it was disgusting), but I did catch the radiators being emptied:
I’m told that our new system shouldn’t ever end up black like that…
