Yet again I have been remis with the blog. Sadly on the 2nd of November our black and white tom cat disappeared from outside our garden gate. He has been known to stay out the odd night but not if the weather was at all inclement. In General Practice you are taught to observe yourself with patients to see if there are things you are missing. I felt very much like that for the following 10 days. On one hand driven to look for him, make flyers and posters, with a constant concern that he was in trouble, on the other realising that little of what I did would make any difference yet getting an understanding of why people are driven to just look in the next place or put up another poster in case that is the one that leads to the answer. With this comes hope. It feels almost like gambling with incredibly high stakes. In this case none of this had any effect, I found his body on the 12th lying in the trees near our house. He had a wound to his side as if he had fallen onto something.
Meantime I have been making the most of the weather when it was kind and clearing and mulching beds. Don't get me wrong my garden is not one of those fastidiuosly tidy ones, it has areas for wild life, but there is still some clearing to be done to allow plants the best chance over the winter. With this I mulch the beds as I go, again to give them a better chance of survival.
Last night, when the heating came on the radiators didn't heat up. When we went to check the boiler there were no pellets in the chamber. The pellets were still part way up the door of the pellet store, but when we knocked on the door they fell to half way down, we then had to cautiously open the door and allow pellets to fall inot a bag. All then became clear. The augre that takes the pellets to the boiler is static and collects pellets from the centre of the bottom of the store. The idea is that the pellets fall in from the side to this point, and they generally do. Clearly, at some point recently they had stopped so there was a big crater around the augre and mountains of pellets around that. So were raked the mountains into the crater so to speak and off went the boiler. It reminded me that no matter how convinced we are that alternative heating such as pellet boilers is the way ahead it still isn't as easy as gas. Though when your gas boiler stops working you do need to wait for an engineer and worse still if Russia cut of our gas pipe line through it's neighbours. Maybe raking pellets in the cold isn't so pro
Meantime I have been making the most of the weather when it was kind and clearing and mulching beds. Don't get me wrong my garden is not one of those fastidiuosly tidy ones, it has areas for wild life, but there is still some clearing to be done to allow plants the best chance over the winter. With this I mulch the beds as I go, again to give them a better chance of survival.
Last night, when the heating came on the radiators didn't heat up. When we went to check the boiler there were no pellets in the chamber. The pellets were still part way up the door of the pellet store, but when we knocked on the door they fell to half way down, we then had to cautiously open the door and allow pellets to fall inot a bag. All then became clear. The augre that takes the pellets to the boiler is static and collects pellets from the centre of the bottom of the store. The idea is that the pellets fall in from the side to this point, and they generally do. Clearly, at some point recently they had stopped so there was a big crater around the augre and mountains of pellets around that. So were raked the mountains into the crater so to speak and off went the boiler. It reminded me that no matter how convinced we are that alternative heating such as pellet boilers is the way ahead it still isn't as easy as gas. Though when your gas boiler stops working you do need to wait for an engineer and worse still if Russia cut of our gas pipe line through it's neighbours. Maybe raking pellets in the cold isn't so pro
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