My house, like I would think most houses, came with a gas boiler. It sorts heating and hot water. It was getting on a bit, and I figured I should replace it at some point in the not too distant future. I spent quite some time thinking about what to replace it with. It shouldn’t run on fossil fuels. A heat pump? That’s a lot of faff in a house from the 1840s. A hydrogen boiler? The infrastructure isn’t there yet. Infrared panels seemed the best option. So I trialled them in three rooms. And they passed my test.
When my bank account had recovered a bit from the house battery I invited the company back to put panels in the rest of the house. And they would start on a Thursday. And two young chaps duly arrived. These were not the people who had come to have a look to check the possibilities, decide what should go where, and make a quote.
These men had a look at the list that had been sent to them, and tried to make sense of it. They also were not only wondering about where the panels would go, but also where the cables would go. That is the difficult bit! They did a lot of head scratching. They figured they would sometimes have to come from above. Lift a floorboard on the top floor, and guide the cables between the floorboards and the plasterboard. That would involve drilling in joists. And they thought it would take a lot longer than the people who had given me the quote had assumed. Oh dear.
This all created a slight complication. Given that my office already had infrared panels, I didn't expect them to have to be in there. I figured I would just have my little ivory tower in which I could work in peace, only sometimes coming down to make decisions on what should go where and how. But if they are lifting the floorboards in your office, you can't really work there. Bummer! But I picked up my computer, and what came with it, and relocated to the kitchen. It's not an ideal working place, but it does the job. At least there they would leave the floor alone.
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| Normally, the floor in my office looks tidier than this |
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| My improvised setup |
They also took over my newly empty conservatory. They wanted to store all the panel somewhere in my house. No reason to drive these around. They were thinking of the downstairs bedroom, but that would need panels itself. Better store them somewhere they wouldn't have to work. The conservatory!
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| No plants, but no space either. You can tell from the presence of the cat that this picture was taken along after the men had left. |
As far as the cat was concerned; she figured they had taken over the entire house. Men with saws and drills! That's not her favourite kind of people. She swiftly disappeared and only showed her face again when they were all gone.
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| Work ongoing in the living room |
The men also left twice to get extra supplies. Altogether, that first day they didn't get many panels up or wires tucked away. But they said they would be back a bit earlier the next day, and then they could get their skates on. At least they now had all the gear, and they knew what to expect. That would speed them up considerably! I hoped that would turn out to be true…
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