Heating our French barn
We’ve been living in the barn for almost three years now, and very pleasant it is too. By way of keeping warm we have oil central-heating, installed whan we did the renovation, and a woodburning stove added a little later, in an effort to save the world and spend less money.
The principle is straightforward. We set the central heating at about 19 degrees, then when we use the woodburner, that should stop the central heating from running, as soon as it is warm enough. When we can’t be bothered to light the stove, or during the night, the central heating leaps into action.
There is also a temperature monitor on the outside of the barn, which decides whether the heating needs to be turned on or off if the external temperature changes dramatically.
Unfortunately it has never quite worked as planned, and we have never seemed able to control the temperature very well. During the night if it is cold out, we wake up in a hot sweat, and if it is 16 degrees out the heating turns off and we are also at 16 degrees.
We asked our heating engineer about this last year, and after looking a bit bewildered he said that there was a switch that ’someone’ had forgotten to turn on behind the boiler that had caused the problem. It was the end of winter and we didn’t really use the heating after that.
Now it’s cold again, we turned the heating back on, and…exactly the same problem. Deciding not to spend the winter alternating between tropical and arctic conditions I called in the plumber and the heating engineer. They spent about two hours prodding and poking at the panel where you input the settings, looking a bit like a child asked to fly an aeroplane across the Atlantic - i.e. completely clueless.
Then suddenly a light dawned. A computer setting that turns on the temperature monitor in the house was turned off (rather, the engineer had never turned it on). So anything at all that we tried to change - or more exactly have spent the last two years trying to change - could never have any impact whatsoever. It was always the ‘external’ thermostat that was controlling our heating. The hours we have spent raising the temperature, lowering it, setting it on minimum because we were going away for a few days, none has ever made the slightest difference.
Why had it never been turned on? Because he had concluded that, because we had two forms of heating - the woodburner and the central heating - the woodburner would ‘confuse’ the thermostat for the central heating, so better to leave it off. Thus of course defeating completely the whole reason why we had the woodstove in the first place.
When we have been burning wood, we have been increasing the temperature, but not causing the central heating to shut down - so just making ourselves overly hot and paying for two forms of heating at the same time.
Good news is, apparently it should all work fine now. And meanwhile we will look for someone else to perform the annual service on the boiler.
