I’ve got my stove to keep me warm?

Another wet and windy day here and no exciting news to report. The builders are bitching about the electrician and plumber, and with some reason.  They disappeared this afternoon saying they were going somewhere for an hour and then vanished.  There is much digging out of floors to accommodate the central heating pipes to be done, and this is holding everything up.  The floor levels might have to be raised a tad to save breaking into more  armoured concrete but we shall see what that means in reality, later.

The house looks really wrecked at the moment, not helped by the atrocious weather. Tomorrow we have asked our architect to bring an energy consultant around.  The size of the radiators and the capacity of the boiler to deal with showers and heating has become an issue.  Once installed they cannot be changed and so the calculations that we have made (with the help of t’Internet), those of our English plumber, those of the Italian plumber and now some points that have been raised by my cousin who is an architectural technician, made us call in the cavalry.  It will cost a consultancy fee but in the long run will save money by not having a system that is either too small and therefore working at full capacity all the time, or a system that is too grand and costs more.

The other question we have had to resolve today is which log burner to choose for the sitting room.  The builder needs to know so that he can install the flue. Many stoves are simply too big and will not work effectively if they are run very low.  Similarly, if they are too powerful and hot we won’t be able to get into the room and it might ignite next door’s sofas!  Who knew?  Most web sites can’t even cope with rooms as small as ours when calculating.  I did find a lovely enamel stove company, based in Turin, that do sweet little stoves (see picture) but when I asked how much they were I thought they had made a mistake with the zeros.  But no, they are the most expensive stoves on the planet; so back to the drawing board and we will keep looking.

It is tempting to just choose a Scandinavian one as what they don’t know about cold weather and keeping warm, probably isn’t worth knowing. But we need them to have a local agent rather than shipping something from Ultima Thule.

All in all, a bit of a boring way to spend the day though and tomorrow’s weather forecast isn’t much better.  Tonight we had a lengthy thunderstorm so we hope that clears the air.