The stove continued

Today, a fortnight after our ‘never-before’ problem with the stove, I had a call from the local technician. He called himself  ‘the stove technician’ so I had some trouble working out who he was.

It turned out that he had had an email from the manufacturers of the stove who somehow knew we had a problem.

Our trusted technician had had a bereavement, I found out, but his co-worker promised to call us back and never did. I guess he was the one who told the manufacturers.

The error alert on the stove control panel

In any case, assistance (if it can be called that) took a long and circuitous route. Each party undoubtedly introduced its own delay.

My point here is that if you lie down and do nothing in Italy, no-one responds in any reasonable length of time. As far as any of this lot were concerned, we were a fortnight without heating.

I in fact got our regular plumber/electrician to have a look at the stove and he got it going again without any new parts that same evening.

Which was good, though almost certainly not the end of the story.

This evening one of the ‘common’ but nonetheless unnerving faults occurred again: AL HOT PEL (the ‘hot’ and the ‘pel’ flashing alternately). It means: ALARM – over-heated something. For ‘something’ read flue, burner, water, pellets etc as appropriate.

I have to unscrew a button and re-arm a sensor. There can be a delay of several hours before the sensor is ready to re-arm, but fortunately this time it didn’t take long.

Problematic stove

The cheapest heating fuel in these parts is wooden pellets made from reconstituted sawdust of either softwood or hardwood or a mixture.

The pellet stove

In a specially made stove, a hopper is stoked with the pellets which then drop at the required rate into a burner. An attractive orange flame can be seen through a glass window but no ashes escape and the surfaces are never too hot to touch.

When we chose our stove 4 years ago, it was about the only model that could heat a 100 square metre room and the water for a swimming pool. In fact it was too cutting edge for its own good.

It has given us a fair deal of heat over the years, but also an inordinate amount of trouble. Practically every Error Alert in the book has occurred at one time or another.

It has flooded the floor several times.

The company which manufactured the stove and, until the guarantee expired, was responsible for its defects, refuses to speak to ‘members of the public’. Requests and complaints have to be conveyed through specially contracted technicians, and for a long time they were unable to find anyone to take on the contract in the area.

When they did find someone, he ‘fixed’ the stove for us and almost as soon as he’d left, a valve ruptured and we were sprayed with evil-smelling boiling water shooting out in all directions.

The only technician who seems to understand our stove  is the one who installed it, and he lives over an hour away with travelling expenses to match.

A brand new Error Alert occurred this evening. I finally managed to reach a co-worker of our trusted technician; he guessed that the water temperature sensor has packed up.

It sounds expensive and I’m sure it will be. Meantime we have to huddle round our infra-red electric fire.

Preparing the house for winter

We finally managed to get a plumber to replace our copper guttering which means that there should no longer be a constant stream of rainwater running down the face of the house from the dove-cote balcony. We had a few short words, first, though as the guttering was initially about 15cm short of the eaves it should have lapped under. Any rain, therefore, would have merely gone around the guttering and straight down the walls.

The guttering was organised by the painter whom we had given up on. No fault of his but we had made it a condition of his work that he organise a plumber to do the guttering – the last thing we wanted was two different contractors and two different lots of staging/scaffolding.

As always, our decorator went round in a whirlwind. None of his men seem to move particularly fast but turn your back for a second and they’ve done another wall. The house wall area is around 415 square metres and there are 25 windows (it cost a fortune to double-glaze). One coat of sealant on top of our fading and deteriorating paint and then two top coats of high-quartz, exterior quality emulsion in glorious pink!

It was a relief to see our repairs disappear under the new paint. If we had to sell in a hurry, the crack signs would upset a lot of buyers – unjustly so since the root cause was that the house is built on two separate foundation grids and they settled differentially when the house was constructed; six or seven years ago.

The new stove is gobbling up the pellets although now we’ve got everything automated, we use less with the fire on 100% of the time than we did when it was being switched on and off manually. It is a brute of a thing and cost us the best part of 4,000 Euros. It gets through 3 sacks of pellets every two days (4 Euros a sack) but in return it heats up the underfloor heating of the long-room (100 m2 floor area), the radiators, the water for the shower and the water for the indoor swimming pool via a heat exchanger. Unfortunately there is still some work to do on it and neither of the two side panels have been fitted on yet.

The insects and such are beginning to look for a winter home. Yesterday Damaris fished a drowned scorpion out of the indoor swimming pool and I killed a queen hornet in the long room too. Either would have been ‘fun’ to stand on.

The gardeners are coming less frequently now that the weather is turning. Although there is a lot to do, the colder temperatures make it less appealing and they cancel at every opportunity. They are a group of Moroccan brothers who alternate at weekends but have a tendency to take liberties – eg if it is raining where they are, they don’t come despite the fact that our microclimate is very often different to that in the valley where they live and it is commonplace to drive up the hill and out of the clouds (like on a plane) when going to our home.

We’ve bought a few more plants – climbers mainly – and these need to be planted this weekend. I can see Damaris struggling to do them if we get abandoned again.