h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Noticed last night at 8pm. Of course can't get anyone out today, although a local guy who's done work for me before has said he'll pop in tomorrow afternoon sometime. I don't hold out hope it will be fixed.

Luckily I have enough lapdogs to keep me warm on the sofa and in bed, but being without hot water is HORRIBLE and it's not very welcoming to come back to a cold house.

A few winters ago, a friend of mine told me that the family next door were living in his house. They had come over in the middle of the night a couple of days earlier after their central heat broke. He told this tale heroically. I just looked at him incredulously for a few moments.

This is on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Our low temperatures were in the 40's Fahrenheit. I might be able to understand their need that first night considering their baby, but what kept them there after that? Why didn't they just go down to store and pick up some electric heaters and blankets?

Heck, when I was a kid we turned the heat off at night and the first one up turned the gas space heater in the living room on.

These people thought they would freeze to death.

heck, when i was a kid...

well, actually not...
but when i was a young parent
when my in-the-middle-of-the-livingroom coal stoker broke down
in the middle of a colorado winter
and whilst waiting for the new ashley wood heater to be put in...
i kept us warm with a wood burning cook stove
which also was in the middle of the living space

i used scrub oak
and filled the woodbox next to the stove after loading it
put on my lightest weight pjs
slept as far away from the fire as possible
without a blanket

when i got cold
i woke up
and went and refilled the cookstove
which had just gone to nice coals

i was a zombie after 3 days but it kept the pipes from freezing

Just moved in during the night?? Last night wasn't too bad actually, I had turned the small heater my parents left me off at about 8pm, then nodded off for an hour. Wasn't cold when I got up, so finished some work and went to bed. Sheets were a bit cool, but I moved the dogs around to warm different bits up for me.

Not even too bad this morning! I usually have my heating off at 9pm anyway, then it goes on about 6 to help me get out of bed! There have been nights that I was too hot and threw my legs out of the duvet. I'm glad it didn't go during the bad snow of last year. It's nice and mild here, although the extra layer I'm wearing about the house (basically a blanket with a hole in it) is getting in the way a bit.

Yep, banged on his door at 3 am.

They're lucky he let them in!

Welcome to the club - although we do have an immersion tank for hot water

3 Visits by British Gas so far has yet to fix the problem as they keep turning up with either the wrong replacement fan for out boiler- or when they get the right one it's already broken

Thank bod this isn't last winder

That's what I was thinking! We were walking without jumpers today it's so warm! I got hot in my thermals...

There is an immersion heater, but it didn't work last time, so didn't bother trying this time round. Plumber said they usually rusted!

last winter our heating broke and it was totally horrible. We came in the house and left on our coats and hats, and when we wanted to watch TV we all huddled together wrapped in blankets until the guy could come out to fix it. Luckily we had limited hot water because it was the pump to the heating system that was broken, but it wasn't very hot and not very much.
(at one point it was 3°C in our living room)

*Pictures Mina getting hot in her thermals*

*Faints* ::THUD:: ©®

Our heating consists of an open fire, which warms the living room and the bedroom above it quite nicely, but not our bedroom. Fortunately it's a small room, so two adults and a large dog soon heat it up enough.

Have you not thought of moving bedrooms?..

Not sure what temp it is in here, I'm pretty sure it's toasty warm. No heating, but it's so mild here, keep the back door shut for a change, keep a thermal mug full of coffee and make sure I've got a dog on my lap. All sorted.

We'll see how it gets when the sun goes down. Not that I've seen it today of course.

*quietly clears Gosho out of the way before someone trips over him*

>Have you not thought of moving bedrooms?

Err, I think my parents might object to our kicking them out their room...

Ah. I didn't realise you still lived at home with your mum.

Me, Mum, dad, Peter and the dog. Full house.

My leccy went off once (in the winter, of course ) when I was living in Lancashire. No heating, no lighting, no hot water, no cooker. I couldn't even put the kettle on, and I was too skint to be able to spend the evening in the pub

I won't bother you with the long-winded and farcical story of how it went off and how it took three days to get it back on , but the only way I could keep warm was with a small paraffin heater in the smallest room - the bathroom, and placed a pan of water on top of it to boil. It took forever, but it was just about the best cup of I ever had

I went to bed very early those three nights. Luckily I had a battery radio so I could listen to John Peel from 10pm until midnight

You should pay your bills on time.

The plumber came at 7.30 last night, bless him! The fan had seized so I had a rather expensive squirt of WD40 and it seems to be working now.

This is probably the reason they tell you to have the boiler serviced every year. I haven't had it done since I bought the house, before that the council did it, so I guess that's about a decade!

He said it could last 6 months or 6 years now.

I'll see your power outage and raise you with Welsh Water taking 3 days to repair our local water main a couple of months back. Power off is one thing - not even being able to have a drink of water for several days is another (let alone wash, cook, clean up etc.). They did post 'water bowsers' around the area but oddly they were nearly always empty by the time we got to them

Our forebears would think we were all a bunch of softies these days - how hard must life have been without power and running water? (Of course one can still look at Africa).

I'll see your Welsh Water story and raise you the story of Norweb (I think it was Norweb back then) cutting me off and taking three days to put the power back on.

I came home from work on Monday evening to find no leccy. In them days (1980) there was no after hours service. You could call an emergency number but you wouldn't see anyone until the following day. They said they'd send someone out, when would I be at home? Well, I work and I can't take time off, but the place I work is a five minute walk from my flat and I come home for dinner ever day between noon and 1pm, how about then? What's more, the meter cabinet for all the flats is in the the entrance hallway so the leccy man doesn't even need to get into my flat.

I come home on Tuesday - no leccy Call the emergency number again, they'll send someone out on Wednesday, what time will I be at home? I tell them the same story about working three streets away.

I come home on Wednesday - no leccy I call the emergency number again, they say the leccy man looked at the meter and found that my leccy had been switched off... and left it that way! They'll send someone out on Thursday.

But this time I call them on Thursday morning when they're open and tear them off a strip. Turned out someone had called them on Monday morning and asked for the leccy to be switched off at my address And they couldn't have made the connection (no pun intended) that someone living at an address where the power had been requested off was asking why the power was off? They said they'd send someone out on to put it back on. At least they got that bit right, and when I got home on Thursday night I had power again.

Yeah, we might be a bunch of softies compared to when there was no running water and you could switch on a light or the cooker or a kettle, but things back then were set up for how life was back then, so it might not have been as difficult as it seems at first. All the things you needed, like candlemakers, water wells, fuel suppliers etc were much more abundant and easy to find because they were daily necessities. Nowadays we have different daily necessities.

Like electricity boards and water companies who don't up at every opportunity

Blimey, I bet you couldn't get compensation for s**t like that back then either...

And I thought it was just since privatisation that the incompetence had set in.