The
Runaway Boiler
As
most farmer know there’s nowt like going to a good sale, be it farm sale
dispersal sale or a general furniture sale. The sale I am describing is a
furniture come house clearance sales rooms which took place once a fortnight.
When
we moved to a larger farmhouse in the 1980’s we went regularly to this sale
room as larger brown furniture would be knocked down at next to nowt, If I had
not put my shilling on it, it would have been broken up for scrap.
Well
then it got round to what did the sale room do with all this furniture that no
one wanted, and asked could I have it for the collecting, they readily said
yes. So every other week the day after the sale I went down with my cattle
trailer broke up the wardrobes tables chairs into so called flat pack and
filled it to the roof.
You
see at home I had one of these large wood burning boilers, one big enough to
take four small conventional bales and regularly burned oilseed rape straw
which was rapidly running out. Some of
this furniture was far too good the break up and some found its way into our
front rooms.
At
this point I might add that when the full heating was first put on in the old
farm house, after a month the whole staircase came loose from the wall and had to
re-fixed, that due to it being dry and shrinking so much.
On
this one day when I had stoked up the boiler with this light dry and brittle
timber before going in for tea, and by then it had gone dark, we had just
settled down in our arm chairs, the radiators started to rattle and gurgling
being red hot with very hot water, I took not too much notice though the misses
she was getting jumpy.
Upon
going outside across the yard to the boiler, the boiler house was enveloped
with steam, not unlike that of the Royal Scot locomotive about to pull out of
the station. I looked in and the draught flaps on the front of the boiler were
closed but the huge pile of thin red hot coals inside would not cool down and
the boiler was running on “latent” heat.
I
installed the whole system a couple of year before, so I knew what the problems
could be. I was warned not to install a plastic header tank way up in the loft
above the boiler, as a “runaway” boiler like I had that night would melt and
soften the plastic down to look like a flat Christmas balloon. Fortunately I
had taken heed and installed a galvanized tank and the vent pipe from the top
of the boiler hooked over it to blow off the steam. Another thing I was warned
about as well was not to put a plastic ball cock, got to be a metal one, this
again I had done as they too would collapse.
It
was blowing off steam in a spectacular fashion so much so that the cold water
feed through a slow ball valve could not keep up with replacing water that had
boiled off. The force of the steam hitting
the water splashed most of it over the side of the tank. You may have seen folk
in these cafes putting a cup or a teapot under the hot water come steam tap to
heat the coffee or tea, blowing and gurgling, well this was the same but a few
hundred time bigger
Inside
the hot water tank, the cylinder, that had two coils to transfer the heat to
the bath/domestic hot water system and to try to alleviate the overheating we
turned all the hot water taps on in the house, there again that ball valve could not keep time with what
we were running off the cylinder.
Still
it kept boiling and the water pump that circulated the water to the radiators
was on the flow side to force the water up round eighteen rads, there would be
too much faffing about bleeding radiators that would have a vacuum if the big
pump was drawing water from the rads to force water back to the boiler.
(Are
you following this, if not read it again and concentrate more.)
It
was not till I checked the pump that I realized that the pump was not designed
to pump steam, liquid it will pump very hot but boiling it was useless.
When
things cooled down and the steam receded I was able to assess the fact that no
damage had been done, the house stayed too hot all night, it was a winters
night, and into the next day. I stoked up the boiler but to only to half what I
had stoked it the night before. As time went on we had trouble with some of the
rads in the house only feeling hot in less than half the surface area, we tried
bleeding them to get rid of the air but three or four of the biggest radiators
still not working properly. So come summer when we did not want heating on I
took the rads off and took it outside onto the yard only to find it was full of
rusty silt obviously blown in there from the boiler getting into too much of a
sweat on. After they were swilled out thing went back to normal and was careful
not to over fill it with brittle dry thin timber that burned in the boiler like
a blow torch.
During
a foot and mouth period we burnt the odd dead calf and the odd dead sheep, I
remember the sheep burnt for three days first laying her on and between two big
oak logs, being such a fat old ewe, the tallow ran down out of the front vent
forming a tall candle stalactite, or is it stalagmite, ar dunt know, one forms
up and tuther forms down, well this one formed up from the boiler house floor
into a tall pyramid, if had thought at the time I should have hung a piece of
string from the boiler vent flap to make a wick good enough to form a
spectacular large replacement candle for the vicar at church. (But I dint know
how to get rid of the dead mutton stink)
During
the period we had the boiler there was the fuel crisis and the Dutch elm
disease which coincided quite well where we had a lot of mature elm trees to
cut up.
Eventually the old farm buildings on next door
farm across the road from the boiler house came up for barn conversion, and the
folk who moved in did not like the wispy wood smoke that came from the chimney,
by now I was careful not to burn anything that would make smoke if the wind was
in that directions, god know how they would have coped a few years before.
I
did not know that they objected to the slight smoke, and without me knowing
they rang trading standards, who, sent a man with a clip board to sit in a van down the village road a hundred yards
away for four whole days monitoring the smoke emitted from my boiler chimney.
The
upshit (or is it upshot) of it was that I had an official letter banning me
from using the boiler from immediate effect. However the boiler now getting
old, I had repaired leaks in the floor of it below the ash line and it was
getting beyond repair, so I installed an oil boiler in the house and paid good
money out for fuel and a fuel tank, a very depressing experience.
So
the old farm house that I moved out of has now being renovated and in order to
re-plaster the walls all my owd radiators were taken out and a new system
installed. Bet it wonna ever get the owd house as hot as what we had it.
Quotation -----
Wit is brushwood; judgement is
timber; the one gives the greatest flame, and the other yields the most durable
heat; and both meeting make the best fire.
Overlung
