The joy of efficiency

Currently I rent the house I live in. If you've read the article I posted some time back on renting you'll realise that I'm not particularly happy with it either.

Well this weekend I found another reason to be annoyed at renting. This reason is the incredibly inefficient heating system we have and the fact that it doesn't even work properly. I found out exactly how bad it was when I got up on Saturday morning. First thing I thought I'd do would be jump in the shower and get dressed before sorting out the long list of things I had to do that day. I managed to get about 2 minutes of hot water before everything went a very annoying luke warm, which quickly turned to freezing cold.

This was the first sign that something was up. The second sign was when I went to put a load of clothes on radiators around the house that had just come out the washing machine. They were all stone cold, not even a bit of heat coming off them. I knew the heating was on because I had put it on about 15 minutes before for the sole purpose of drying the clothes.

At this point I decided to investigate properly. First thing I did was turn the heating system off and bleed all the radiators, downstairs was fine however upstairs had a stupid amount of air in all the radiators. At this point I thought that must have been the problem, so I put the heating back on and waited a while for the heat.

Guess what, it never came. So at this point I have a boiler that is going at full pelt because it's trying to catch up with the thermostat however it's not actually getting any hot water into the radiators.

When we first moved in the house over a year and a half ago we had a problem with the heating that was very similar. When it happened then, we had several contractors come out who said that the best course of action would be to install a new boiler and heating system. However there was one bloke who said he could get it working again by replacing a £20 part. I bet you can guess who got the job can't you. Anyway it turns out that the same thing had gone wrong again, it's basically some electrics that move some valves near the hot water tank to route the water coming from the boiler to either the hot water system or the radiators. Well it had broken again. Luckily you can actually override this control with a manual push switch, the only problem with this is we now have to manually govern our heating system to make sure that the radiators work and that we get hot water.

Obviously I'm going to report this to the letting agent once again and you never know it might actually get fixed properly this time, but the thing that really annoys me is we have been burning all this fuel to essentially heat up a pipe that is about a foot long between the boiler and this valve.

I think while the government is making all these plans for improving building regulations to make things greener they should also look into forcing landlords to make their properties as energy efficient as possible. After all if it was my own house I'd never stand for having such a bad heating system. I probably would have got it changed when the original problem happened. Just because I rent a house why should I have to put up with inefficient heating that I have no control over.

It's not like these people don't have any money, after all many people can't afford one house let alone be able to buy one to rent out to people too. So surely they can afford to kit it out with a decent heating system.