Eco Friendly Heat

Well we have the wood burner in situ after much buggering about by Messrs Bodgit & Scarper the builders...(Styled after the best Laurel and Hardy silent film stars all they needed was a piano and not a cast iron wood burner) quite obviously Mr Bodgit had a spirit level but had an epic fail in it's proper use because our flue is off at a jaunty angle there must be at least 2 or 3 inches difference off the level....or the wall is wonky but thankfully you only notice it if you stand side on to the fire...other than that it's fine..

Anyway we fired up the wood burner and the stove paint started to cure giving off a blue hazy smoke which I knew would happen but of course set off our "array" of smoke alarms, and of course being the Brabrook household nothing is ever simple....

Most normal smoke alarms have batteries as ours do but the problem was all the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are wired together into the mains and if one goes off they all go off as we found out when we removed the batteries after numerous resets failed to silence them and they still continued to pump out their shrill ear bleeding noise.... one is bad enough but when you have four of them pulsing away the noise is beyond deafening... to not be woken up by them would mean you were probably already dead... which is comforting to know that we won't burn to death or succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning but it will be a very rude awakening to say the least, which is no bad thing I guess....

Anyway the only way to reset these smoke alarms is to ventilate the house and keep resetting them until they fell silent.... so we opened as many doors and windows as we could and shared our smoke alarms with the quiet neighbourhood until they ceased...which took quite some time....

I've reduced our storage heaters to one on low and completely disabled the sullen one's because even after trying to drill it into her brain explain how storage heaters work (I could tell by the blank expression that it wasn't registering) she still thinks of it as if it's an "instant on" source of heat and fails to understand that she can't turn it off during the day/evening after it's been charged up the night previously.... so I've simply disconnected it considering she had to have her bedroom window open the other night to release the stifling heat it produces... which of course is a complete waste of money flying out of her window.....besides the house is plenty warm enough with just one storage heater because of its open plan style and if we get a bit cold we can fire up the wood burner....We aren't cold because since moving in there hasn't been a blanket in sight on the sofa ..... We haven't had our first electricity bill yet but I'm guessing it's going to be much lower than the £100 a week as it used to cost us....

Xbox boy is going for his second mock selection in a few days as he failed his first one, we've been trying to get him out running and generally getting fit for it but he seems to be alarmingly relaxed about it all, I've told him that passing selection just means you have the basic level of fitness required to START basic training, it doesn't mean you'll get through it....so scraping through (which he hasn't done yet, mock or otherwise) just isn't good enough. He has absolutely no idea how hard it is..... I've told him he needs to fly through selection otherwise he will find basic training extremely tough if not impossible ...Plus they won't keep putting him through mock selections forever, this is probably his last chance before they turn around and tell him to bugger off go away permanently because he isn't fit enough..... but my advice seems to be falling on completely deaf ears....hey ho not a lot more I can do really....