Luckily it was cold enough tonight for Laura to turn on the central heating. This was completely independently of me wanting to turn it on just to play with it.
How fantastic that we can heat our whole apartment with the press of a button? A very small and inconveniently located button buried in the hot-water cabinet.
Actually, "hot-water cabinet" does not adequately describe this cupboard. It is chock full of machinery and equipment. Given a sufficient supply of uranium I am certain I could build a pretty sophisticated nuclear reactor in there. There's boilers. There's pumps. There's stopcocks, temperature probes, cut-off valves, regulators, thermostats and timers. It even needs a diagram, stuck to the back of the door, to explain it.
But even with the diagram, I have no concrete picture about what is happening. The complication is that, according to a pamphlet from the gas board, our apartment complex has some kind of power plant which generates... I guess heat... which saves lots of greenhouse gas emissions and makes it all very energy efficient (I'm sure this completely negated by the fact we have NO recycling AT ALL!!!). So I would have thought that if we have this power plant, then we'd get a supply of hot water to use for water and heating. But if we did, we wouldn't need a boiler, with an expansion cylinder and all manner of other equipment for heating. And we wouldn't need a timer which controls when our hot water is heated.
So I'm quite confused and it's driving me a bit mad, because I have a need to know how things work. Brent?
But it is great that we can hit the "+1 hour" button for the central heating and it comes to life. Hot water surges through our radiators and the whole apartment becomes warm. And then it switches off, and the radiators keep radiating. For free like (needs to be said with Dublin accent).
Ahh.
Labels: central heating, Dublin
