What a Saga!

It should have been a good day, a day of celebration! Finally, the gas tank had arrived!

But that was only the start of the problems!

We had been told we needed to construct a cage for the tank to be housed in, for safety reasons. This was built at the back of the house by us back in November to the size we had in a diagram drawn by the installer. Guess what - HE GAVE US THE WRONG SIZE!!!!!

On one side, he's written down the size of the tank - not the size the cage needed to be. OK, it's only 30cms to short (about 12 inches for those of you that still work in 'old money') but it means more concreting, we have to take down the side of the cage with the door in, extend both sides, which means more posts with more fencing. So frustrating. It turns out that he had given us 2 diagrams. When he first spoke to Neil he drew one on the back of the promotional leaflet with the right dimensions. Then when we went into the shop to say we would go ahead, he drew us another diagram for us to take to the fencing place to order the posts, door, fencing etc - and that one had the wrong measuerment on - but that's the one we worked to.

So, OK - we can sort that. The next problem was actually getting the tank into the cage (it will fit, there's just supposed to be more room around it (30cms more!). We had been told to construct the cage, and the tank would be lifted in from the top. Only,the wagon with the crane is too big to bring down our dirt track and so it couldn't go in over the top. Step 2 - remove one side of the cage - well, it saves us some work when we have to rebuild it next week. We nearly put double doors in and were told it wasn't necessary - in future we'll go with our own instincts.

Finally, the tank was in place and they began piping it up. In the meantime Manolo wanted to check the cooker as he is doing all the paperwork for our gas installation. Again he had been at the house before we fitted anything and told Neil what was needed. Now, it needed doing differently. The gas pipe came through the utility wall to the back of the cooker, but here we need a regulator that can be turned off accessible in the kitchen so, they had to re-pipe along the back of the house, bring the pipe in through the wall and run it through the back of a cupboard. Actually, they have done a really good job, because they fitted it inside the cupboard that has drawers, and the drawers still work perfectly but the not so pretty regulator is out of sight, yet still very accessible.

At this point they left for lunch leaving us with no heating and no hot water and hoping they would be returning later. We felt it was a strong probability as they had left quite a bit of their gear here.

Sure enough, a couple of hours later they were back on site and carried on with installing the tank. Once installed, we have to wait for the paperwork to be completed (i.e. after the cage is corrected) and then it will take about 7 days to get the tank filled - presumably this is to allow Cespa time to request the money for filling from our bank before giving us €400 worth of gas, but at least we can see an end to the twice weekly trips to town to get our bottles changed.

Finally, they had finished the installation and just needed to reconnect the system to run off the bottles until the tank is filled. By now it was starting to cool down as the sun was rapidly disappearing over the hill. It would be dark in about half an hour.

All done, they checked we had gas to the cooker - and yes, the rings burst into flame instantly. But the cooker's gas supply doesn't come through the boiler, so when they ran the hot water tap - oh dear, absolutley cold, cold, cold!

That was the start of an hour of head scratching and re-checking. We knew it couldn't be the boiler as they hadn't actually done anything to the boiler and it worked wonderfully before they arrived. Eventually they tracked it down to a faulty regulator they had installed on one of the pipes in the utility. Did they have another? No, but they could get one from town. By now it was dark, cold and getting late. I told the engineer we would need to go home with him for the night as it would be too cold here. Now, I'm not sure whether he though 'this crazy english woman means it' but he told me he would go and fetch a replacement and return straight away, that he would not leave us without heating and hot water. And just to prove he was coming back - he left his mate here!

Half an hour later he was back and within 10 minutes the replacement regulator was in place - and still, no hot water, no heating. Now it was seriously testing everyone's patience. We got the manual out for the boiler and Neil started to look through what he could check on the boiler - the manual is all in english so the engineers couldn't really get any help from it. The gas pressure was tested, the flow was tested - all was fine.

Eventually one of the engineers phoned his boss and had a chat. I couldn't make out much of the conversation but I could tell he was really puzzled why it didn't work. After a few minutes he came off the phone and marched outside saying 'un momento, un momento'.

And sure enough, un momento later we had hot water and we had heating. It turns out the regulator on the tank has to be a single, but because we have 2 pipes coming into the house they had put 2 on and it was restricting the flow of gas through the boiler to an extent that there wasn't enough to light it. It had been a long day for them but they had made sure they didn't leave us without heating and hot water.

So, finally we have a tank. This weekend we will re-do the cage and hopefully before too long we will have a full tank of gas which should last us several months, and that will be another job to tick off the long list of things'To-Do!'