It's amazing! whenever there is a snap of cold weather, problems with central heating immediately begin to rear their ugly heads.
I play the organ at the church pictured above, which is a lovely old church, with a lofty ceiling inside it, and consequently the heating needs to have been on for two or three hours before the floor level of the church begins to feel warm, particularly during the extremely cold weather.
We have an oil fired heating system, which is fitted with a frost stat. This means that whenever the outside temperature drops below freezing, the heating automatically starts to run. At least that is the theory behind the frost stat! On three of the last four Sundays, when the frost stat was supposed to have kicked in it simply blew the main fuse and hey presto! there was no heating running. Sitting in the church felt a bit like sitting in the freezer of your fridge!
On three occasions a heating engineer has been summoned (I think from Northants!) and he has now decided that the problem lies with the fact that when the temperature drops below freezing and the frost stat kicks in, the oil is thicker that usual and so the motor, which should feed the oil to the boiler in the heating system simply doesn't turn straight away consequently the fuse blows!
Pipe organs are very susceptible to extremes of temperature and twice in the last four weeks I have had notes stick on and continue to play whilst I have stopped playing them. The resulting sound is something similar to out of tune bagpipes...... There is a wedding in the church tomorrow and I dread to think what might happen, as a visiting pianist is coming to play the organ for it!
If the frost stat has blown the central heating fuse again, and the organ sounds like a set of badly tuned bagpipes it could be a memorable occasion!
No comments:
Post a Comment