Every so often in life you discover something that you realise you’ve had wrong for years. In this case, I called on a friend that I’ve written about before who’s a plumber that lives nearby, and helps out with renovation projects that crop up from time to time.
The other day I gave him a call when we woke up and discovered that we’d got no hot water, which is always a slightly unpleasant experience when you step into the shower. First of all, you never get to the end of that normally brief period of ten seconds or so waiting for the warmer water to make its way to the shower head, and secondly, you realise you still need to get rid of your morning stench to go to work. I started with a British Gas checklist on my phone, but had no luck, so having wandered down to the kitchen, our I saw the dreaded Vaillant boiler f22 error code, something that I’d heard people on our estate refer to before. As we live on an estate that was built around ten years back, it’s no great surprise that things are beginning to need attention, and boiler failures seem to be a common gripe at present!
Even more unfortunately, I soon discovered that my friendly plumber couldn’t help me, as he’s not a gas fitter. I had been under the impression that plumbers tended to do boiler repairs, but apparently its actually more the other way around – those that have the gas safety training do the odd bit of pipework to save getting other people in for relatively small jobs. It make perfect sense when you think about it – I’d just been under the wrong impression for years.
Luckily for me, he knew of someone who could help. His mate the gas fitter even pointed out that the F22 error wasn’t necessarily something that needed a call out either – he talked me through the process of putting water in the system using two valves under the boiler and everything was back up and running in five minutes – 20 minutes later the water was hot enough for a much more enjoyable shower!
So, in the end it was two bonuses – firstly the hot water taps worked as labelled, and secondly, I’m no longer asking plumbers to mess with gas – I know now that it’s not only unlikely to be something they’ll do, but also illegal unless they’re trained and registered!