Three layers, two fan heaters and €12 a day on coal – how I’m surviving my life in the deep freeze

THE central heating went on the blink just before Christmas, and not for the first time either. It did the same four years ago and, just to add to the mayhem, the fridge/freezer went out in sympathy. On both occasions, it was my turn to host the family for Christmas Day – Sod’s law and all that – with a few of them also staying over. Naturally, I panicked at the prospect of us sitting down to turkey and ham while wearing scarves and mittens, before sending them off to their respective beds looking as stoic as Captain Oates leaving the tent.

My single-storey house was built in 2005, so you might imagine it would be well insulated. It allegedly actually has a B energy rating, which is absolutely baffling. Every wall, external and internal, is plastered breeze block, and they act as conduits for the cold, allowing it to seep into the bones: Simon Rattle would be jealous of their conducting skills. I hardly need point out there is no corollary benefit in summer.

Immersion

I live very close to the beach and I swim a lot in the good months, and because I didn’t want to be hoovering sand out of carpets, I foolishly decided that all the floors would be either wood or tile. Let’s just say I seldom walk around barefoot.

The attic insulation was miserable, so after my first icy winter here I paid to have it redone with Rockwool, which I seem to remember cost more than Axminster.

The finest feature, the one that sold me on the house in the first place, is a ceiling in the living area that reaches 21 feet at the apex, but that also means there’s a lot of space to heat. If I’m away for a couple of days, I arrive back at this time of year to an internal temperature of eight degrees. When the heating works, it basically inches the mercury (or at least the modern digital equivalent) up by one degree an hour, so it takes 14 hours to get to where I like it, a decent 22 degrees. Once there, it at least maintains the heat, and the house actually feels cosy, but until that happens, I mostly shut myself in a small bedroom I use as an office. I keep an electric heater running, and when I have to nip to the kitchen or the bathroom, I look like an Inuit, layered up in a thermal vest, a T-shirt and a fleece.

When the heating stopped working, I had to rely on the immersion for hot water – and, of course, you know what happened next. Every time I switched it on, it tripped the fuse box, and the only comfort was that at least I still could shower because that heats the water all by itself.

I thought I’d be able to work it out. My late dad delivered home central oil for Maxol all his life and also was handy tinkering with heating systems (the matrons of Foxrock and Killiney always were grateful to Mr Nolan for restarting their burners, though only in the most literal of senses, I hope), so I’ve always known how to do that, and bleed radiators and all that malarkey, but to no avail this time.

I called a local heating contractor and he came around within hours. The immersion was the easy bit. The element in the tank was stripped bare by the hard water in my part of the world, and easily replaced. The boiler was fine and he initially got it started but, almost as chillingly as the cold itself, he tut-tutted and said: ‘She’s not telling me what’s wrong with her.’

Bills

It turned out the burner was on its last legs, but he did some sort of patch job that mostly kept it going over the holidays. Sometimes it would shut off, and I’d have to dash outside and open the boiler housing to manually restart the system, which wasn’t fun at 10pm in a howling gale and driving rain. And, almost the very second I hooshed the last of the family out the door the day after St Stephen’s, it sullenly sat down for good.

I stayed home on New Year’s Eve and lit the fire, with a fan heater going at the other end of the room and a blanket close to hand if I needed it. The heating guy came back and installed a new burner and one of those Wi-Fi gizmos linked to a smartphone app that means I now can switch the heating on and off from anywhere in the world and arrive home to a warm house.

At least, that was the theory, but he wasn’t entirely happy. The heat wasn’t getting to all the radiators and so he changed the pressure vessel (a red drum that looks like a lozenge) and that sorted the problem out.

For two days. Oh, and €500 all told for the parts and labour to that point.

Life for the past month has left me looking like Bert in Mary Poppins, a sooty shadow of my former self. On nights when I want to escape the office and actually watch television in the big room, I light the fire around 4pm and turn on the fan heater too. It’s habitable around seven, and annoyingly really comfortable only just before I go to the bedroom, where another fan heater I picked up in Lidl for 15 quid has been running for an hour, and the electric blanket has been set to Donald Tusk’s special place, hotter than hell. This already has been reflected in my electricity bill, because the one that arrived last week made my eyes water.

The fire swallows up about €12 a day, and I’ve bought half a dozen pairs of thermal hiking socks, despite the fact the last time I hiked probably was when I was a boy scout.

Firelighters

The guy came back and it turned out the valves on every single radiator had to be replaced, but I wasn’t going to be around, because I had a couple of days booked to go see an old friend in Copenhagen. I had great fun but it seemed like the gods were having another giggle, because it was freezing there. On Monday night, I bravely – foolishly – decided to sit outdoors on a canal boat tour of the Festival of Lights and drank a cold Carlsberg and practically had to be chipped off the seat when it ended.

And, of course, I came home to a freezing house.

The heating guy – well, two of them now – returned yesterday and to be fair did Trojan work. They replaced the remaining valves and forced air through the system with a compressor in case there actually was an airlock, which genuinely is the most likely explanation, but at the time of writing, no joy. Some of the rads are hopping, some are tepid, and others cold.

So I’m sitting here in the office, with the fan heater on again, and my three layers, and my hiking socks. I’m heading to the shop soon for more firelighters, kindling and coal.

I’m thinking of Storm Erik, which should be in full swing as you read this, and hoping in an oddly manic way it rips the boiler from its moorings and dumps it in the Irish Sea, just so we can start from scratch.

The worst part of all is that I’ve yet to see the bill. When I get it, I reckon the chill that goes through my heart will be the final sucker-punch that sees me off.