The Boiler Detective

This is almost exactly how it looked

On Monday mornings our boiler stops working. How does it know? Has it been programmed to make the worst day of the week a little bit worse by making the house cold? I’ve tried asking for help with it, but once reset it seems to come back to life. The fault code is as enigmatic as the sphinx. And it is hard to mend something that isn’t broken. The worst kind of bug.

Anyhoo, I’ve figured it out. It turns out that Sunday night in our house is also “have a soak in the bath” night. The rest of the week we have speedy showers, but on Sunday a hot tub is in order. And the bathtub and the boiler share the same downpipe. When the bath is emptied the huge surge of water overwhelms the pipe and causes the to back up into the condensation drain for the boiler. The boiler doesn’t like this, and shuts down. And we wake up cold on Monday morning.

I’m going to get the plumbing looked at when the boiler is serviced. We are still going to have baths, but I’m tempted to 3D print a flow limiter to put in the plug hole so that the bath drains more slowly.