With... 27 radiators expelling money into the atmosphere we have had to carefully think through our heating strategy.

The Old Bakery has a built in air filtration system. Cutting edge you may say. State of the art you might query. Wow, how sophisticated is that, you might exclaim. Well not very, I'm afraid as the 'system' is actually less of an Air filter unit and more a culmination of poorly fitting windows, doors and general holes allowing the mother of all draughts to build up and whiz past the back of my neck.

In all fairness this is a very old building. Claire and I visited the Norfolk records office recently to find out just how old it is and we managed to find written accounts going back some 260 years. We are sure that it is even older than that but the preceding years were all written in Latin, or as we called it gobbley-gook, so two Dyslexics trying to decipher that was like asking a bossed eyed man to thread a needle on a ship in the North Sea. So then we just gave up.

Anyway we would be lying if we said there were no draughts because there are but this is not necessarily a negative as they allow a fantastic up draught for the flues and the fires which kick off with a hearty roar. I say fires because we have just doubled our fire count from one to two. When we moved in we only had an open fire in the living room and we also had a wood burning stove at the opposite end of the room but this was not 'plumbed in'. Although it still had a fire set ready to light inside its tummy, a fire that had probably been laid by the previous owner and that had lain dormant for the best part of 3 years.

With the price of heating oil being so high and having a total of 27 radiators expelling money into the atmosphere we have had to carefully think through our heating strategy. Naturally we turn off all the radiators that we can but even then there must be a mile of pipework assisting the radiators to flitter away our hard earned cash. The furthest radiator from the boiler is some 100 foot away.
So after doing some sums we have realised that wood is comparatively cheap if we used it to heat half the house and the best way was to re-commission the wood burning stove. So I got my friendly builder back in and he discovered that our chimney was already lined and all he had to do was make some connections, expand the hearth and stick a chimney pot with a cowl on our stack. This was particularly fortuitous as whilst up with our chimney he found that the flue to the upstairs fireplace was completely exposed (a hole about 18" square), the heavy rain that we had suffered from this last year would have literally poured down the flue. This would certainly account for the damp at the top of the breast in the room. So he capped that for me with a paving slab from the garden.

Eventually the fire was lit and we stepped back, waiting with baited breath, to see if any smoke should leak out. Nothing, all clear, so then we really fired her up and soon a warmth started to infiltrate the whole area. Job done.


Now we had the final test, how would the stove perform when we lit the open fire at the other end of the room? There is a danger that there would be a conflict of air flows either suffocating one or causing smoke to seep back into the room. However there were no such issues and they both beamed beautifully at me.

There was only one problem, nothing serious but a dilemma none the less. Scribble, the poor thing, could not decide which fire to sit in front of. First she smelt the heat from the new stove (a little warily) then she trotted off down the other end of the room to check out that fire and after an umm and an arrrr she eventually drifted back to the exact centre of the room equidistant from the two fire places and slumped her tiny body down.

After a while she started to fidget and appeared unhappy then, clearly realising that being right in the middle does not give twice the heat, she gets up and returns to the old trusty open fire and balance was once again restored in the cosmos...

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