Day 821 Leaking

7th November 2019

There was more snow on the ground, the cold snap was causing the leaves to fall even without a breeze.

Kelli noticed a damp patch on the floor in the furnace room. There was drips of water dripping from a crack in the plastic casing.

Kelli made a call to the maintenance company noted on the furnace cover, whilst I went on-line to investigate the problem.

Everything seems bad when you don’t know the cause. Was it the heat exchanger, would we need a new boiler? I went down every worm hole trying to reassure myself that it wasn’t serious.

The furnace was a high efficiency model which created a lot of condensation and that was what I was seeing. There was a part that collected the water before piping it to the ground. The plastic tank had a crack in it, so I placed a dish under to collect as much water as I could and waited for the repairs man to arrive.

Eventually a van turned up and I explained the problem. He shone his torch on the dripping area fiddling with the pipes causing the damaged area to break off. Now instead of a small crack there was a bloody big hole.

He explained that it had been repaired before, and it needed a new part.

What were the chances of that?

There were alternative places to connect the pipes to drain the water, but the large hole needed to be filled.

He went off in search of some epoxy putty whilst I worked on some furniture bits in the garage.

He returned with some material that is mixed together in the hand and then applied to the part to fill the hole.

His boss was trying to find a replacement part, but in the meantime the temporary patch would stop the leak.

He advised me to wait about three hours until the putty had fully cured before turning on the furnace back on.

After the allotted time I switched in on, nothing happened. The pilot would try to ignite the gas but the furnace would not fire up. I read all about possible causes and was fully up to speed on lock-outs but I could not figure out what was wrong.

Kelli was poised to call the guy out again, I went through the start up process again just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten something.

Still no success, so the engineer was summoned again.

The same guy turned up again, he resumed the position on the floor in front of the furnace wiggling things and muttering into his phone. I didn’t stand over him, I just left him to it. After half an hour or so the boiler burst into life. He had to fit a pipe into the area he had filled earlier as it had something to do with pressure sensors or something or other. Anyway the system was working again, so hurray for that.

Just before bedtime, I checked the repair again, there was a drip coming from the pipe he had just fitted. He had left some of the putty, so I will look at it again in the morning.