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

I do have water. What I do not have is an electric shower: I have an immersion heater. That means that if I want hot water for washing (myself or anything else), I need to turn on the immersion and wait about half an hour. In theory. For the past few days, it's been acting up.

Last night, I turned on the immersion and went and lay down while waiting for the water. It was late and I was tired and didn't feel like doing anything else. Well, I fell asleep. When I got up in the morning, I stuck my hand between the gap in the insulated jacket around the water tank to find the temperature inside to be, well, mildly tepid. Something has clearly gone wrong with my immersion.

Since I (a) was late for work, and (b) didn't have the heating on so the house was cold, I decided against a shower. I could do with one. I'll need to talk to my landlord on Monday. Perhaps in the meantime, I'll pop round to my parents' house to wash.

TRiG.

For about six months during the 1980s I lived in a flat with a fireplace and a back boiler. Up until then those were six of the best months of my life because I'd never lived in a place with central heating. As long as the fire was lit there was no need to worry about the expense or the waiting involved with turning on the immersion - there was hot water all the time One of us could have a bath, and by the time we'd finished the tank was already full of piping hot water again, and for free What bliss We'd had one like that when I was very young - I remember the coal-burning stove in the kitchen and the copper pipes snaking in and out of it. It sat in its own little alcove with a stovepipe going up into the ceiling, like a miniature Aga, except there was no hot plate on top. Councils used to install those as standard for a while when building new estates. It was just something they felt tenants should have.

But if you're of a particular age, and probably background too, there's something special about the act of (and I wish we had a fanfare smiley) 'switching on the immersion'. We had an Ascot for hot water in the kitchen, and if you wanted hot water in the bathroom washbasin it'd have to come from there or the kettle, but switching on the immersion was a thing of some importance. It only happened once or twice a week, and it meant... bath night

Kids didn't get to switch on the immersion. Oh no, it was far too important an operation. Mother or father only. And much consternation if someone forgot to switch it off afterwards

Then the wait. Half an hour if you're in a hurry, but give it the full 60 minutes if you want a bath hot enough to boil a lobster and filled to the brim. I can clearly remember the smell of a bathroom full of steam and heated with a paraffin lamp, and the feel of walking out of that cocoon of warmth into a freezing cold hallway in the middle of winter.

And mother was most put out when the tank got lagged. It really messed up the efficiency of the airing cupboard Although I can't quite see how, bearing in mind the thing was only on for a couple of hours a week and the water tank was directly above it, open to the air.

Then I moved into a flat with... my own immersion Come home from work on a Thursday night, cook dinner, switch on the immersion and look forward to spending at least an hour soaking in the tub with the NME I'd picked up from the newsagents on my way to work that morning. Oh my. I even turned down an impromptu date once because the immersion had been on for an hour and I was just about to run my bath

I think I've just had a Proustian moment

I hope you can get it fixed soon, and without too much expense.

What a beautiful journal, TRiG - it gave me a Proustian moment, too. In our house, it was always called the Immersion Heater. Never "the immersion" - it was important enough to have a surname

We had it timed to perfection: half an hour was long enough to give everyone a good warm bath. If you left it on for much longer than that, some of the water turned to steam and created airlocks in the pipes and you couldn't get any water out of the taps. You would get a bollicking for leaving the Immersion Heater on for Too Long, and the said bollicking would last until the airlock cleared because money doesn't grow on trees.

You drew fresh water for each bath? Blimey, your family was posh

Ah yes - that holy of holies, the red switch of the immersion heater. It was saved for special occasions in our house because we had a Rayburn which (I think) played a part in heating the water. I remember staring at that red switch if I went to the airing cupboard for a hanky or a teatowel, wondering if it really was so difficult to switch it on.

We called ours 'The immerser', which thinking about it now sounds like some kind of Doctor Who baddy. Same sense of importance and rarity and ours took about an hour to be hot enough for a bath. As older kids we were allowed to switch the red switch, but only after asking and with good reason. One room was heated with a gas fire and that was that.

There was an electric ceiling type heater in the bathroom, but I can count on one hand how often it was used. Energy costs were a concern even back then. In fact as distressing as recent energy price rises are, heating a home has always been an expensive business I think.

You're right, especially if it was electric heat. The flat and then house I spent my first 20 years in had (both built in the 1950s and on the same estate, in fact on the same road) with a fireplace in the living room, the flat had the aforementioned stove in the kitchen, and one of the bedrooms in the house had a fireplace too, although remembering where it was situated I can't imagine where the double bed would have gone if it was used.

And that was essentially it for heating the place, plus the immersion for hot water (the Ascot was an after-market add-on).

I remember hearing stories about how people who were living in flats and houses with electric underfloor heating, mostly in the late 60s and 70s I would guess, couldn't afford to switch the thing on because it was so expensive to run.

I think people have just got too used to being too warm all the time. We never thought anything of putting on an extra pair of socks and a jumper when it was cold, then it would be a cup of tea, and then if it was really cold and Dad agreed the heating went on.

We weren't poor, but we weren't wealthy and it just made sense not to use the heating unnecessarily.

I used to love the smell of the airing cupboard. Warm, clean towels.

My first flat had an immersion heater (not an immersion, that's what I did when I got in the bath) but no heating. It was a victorian three storey café on Ramsgate seafront, that rarely was warmer than 5C. Used to put a cal or gas heater in the bathroom for 30 minutes to take the chill off.

Eventually I'd leave the flat 45 minutes early and shower at work.

One year we had no water as the pipes had frozen, and with intermittent freezing and thawing, the café's marble floor flooded and froze. Made getting to the flat treacherous.

Our very own ice-rink.

Hope you get it sorted, TRiG.

MMF

I remember the winter of '63 when EVERYTHING froze over . We had to pile all our washing on a toboggan which we pulled to a neighbour's house up the road who for some reason didn't have frozen pipes. There are (black and white) photos of us knee-deep in snow with a basket of washing and a packet of Fairy washing powder on the top. (I think my Dad hoped we might get money for it from the advertisers. I don't think Fairy washing powder exists any more.) Other photos show us holding up pyjama trousers frozen solid from the line. How we laughed!

I think the whole system was so dangerously frozen that the immersion heater was definitely not allowed to be used, in case the pipes had burst.

Not long after that, the lagging came.

Yeah, the lagging always comes last.

I'll get my coat.

I've been racking my brains trying to remember how we managed for washing, but at that age, I probably didn't care about it much. Will ask my mother.

I mean washing ourselves. Was trying to get back on topic.

One of the other things that councils would provide as standard issue when the estate where I lived was built, was a copper. A round tub on legs which I think hooked up to a gas tap, or it might have been electric, and all up and down the road on a Monday morning (because Monday is washing day every bit as much as Friday night is bath night), coppers were fired up and clothes were boiled to within an inch of their life, put through the mangle, rinsed, put through the mangle again and hung out to dry. Anything that couldn't be boiled was hand-washed in the sink, then mangled.

That's how we managed for washing

Getting back to Sho's post though, that's a very good point, and there's more than one way of looking at the heating issue. The issue of people who are in 'fuel poverty' and can't afford to heat their home has been coming up a lot lately in the news and around social meeja.

If those people heat their home the way most working class homes were heated when I suspect most of us in this conversation were kids - only one or two rooms with a source of heat such as a fireplace or gas fire, and maybe a paraffin heater to keep the chill off the hallway or landing and for heating the bathroom - then I think it's scandalous that a country as advanced as the UK should be in that position because although it's very nice to have central heating and constant hot water, and to be able to walk from one room to another in comfort, only heating one room - the living room - and putting up with the cold when you leave that room is a very efficient, flexible and relatively cheap way to get through the winter. A lot of us did it for our entire childhood and we're still here to tell the tale. Some of our parents might not have even had that.

If, however, people can't afford to heat their homes because their homes have central heating, that's a different kettle of fish because now they can't be so flexible, although I suppose it's possible to turn off all the radiators bar one or two and the hot water part of the system but I don't know if a) that's going to reduce the fuel bill significantly and b) if it's a good thing for the CH system.

It's taken away their control over how they heat their home, relative to how it used to be, and the only analogy I can think of right now is the way that control has been taken away from the person who wants to work on their car but they can't because cars have almost become computers now, and you can't fix a car without the necessary diagnostic software. Which is out of the hands of the average car owner of course so you have to take it to an accredited mechanic.

I don't want to start straying into conspiracy theory stuff here, but control over what we do is, bit by bit, being taken away from us in ways like this so that we have to spend money to get something done which, in the past, we might have saved money on by doing it ourselves, or having to spend more money that we don't want to by, for instance, running a house-wide expensive CH system instead of just a gas fire or buying fuel for a fireplace.

Any road up.

Homes aren't being built any more in a way that makes that kind of one-room heating possible because they no longer have chimneys, and a substantial number of those that were have by now been fitted with central heating and the fireplace blocked up, preventing it being used either as a fireplace or as a flue for a gas fire. I know that the houses on my childhood estate had central heating fitted... before so many of them were sold

But you can still get around it, I guess. In the late 70s I lived in a flat - the one I sat in the bath reading the NME in - whose only heating was storage heaters. I couldn't afford to run them on the money I was making so I bought a paraffin heater and used that. And it's also true that the insulation standards of homes being built now are far higher than before. There was none whatsoever in my childhood home, and it had metal frame windows which were incredibly good at conducting heat out of the place and caused oceans of condensation. Considering how cold those places were in the winter I'm surprised there weren't hundreds of burst pipes every year.

So Sho's right in one of those can't-see-wood-for-the-trees ways that seems so obvious once someone points it out. People managed - for centuries and millennia - to get through the winter before our attitude towards comfort changed, and only in the past few decades by the look of it. It's wrong that people can't keep their home warm through the winter because fuel bills are so high, but maybe it's not only for the reasons being stated by the pundits and the outraged.

Phew, sorry Trig, I seem to have hijacked your thread

And I won't even begin to start talking about the two winters I passed living in a delivery van with no heating whatsoever once the engine was switched off

If anyone wants to continue discussing the more political aspects and leave this conversation to what Trig might or might not have started it for: F50359?thread=8305661

It's an interesting topic.

I have, recently, been living mainly in shared houses, which are usually kept quite nicely. In a couple of them I had my own shower. I didn't in the last. All of them had electric showers. So it was rather odd moving into a place with only one way to heat water, but it was fine while it worked. I also have storage heaters for heating the house itself, but I've bothered with them only twice so far. I've decided I don't really need them. If my fingers get too cold to type, I can (a) switch off the computer, wrap up, and read a book instead, or (b) head into the office and use the computer there. The office is upstairs above shops, and is at a livable temperature at all times.

Anyway, here in Ireland fuel poverty is also an issue, but all senior citizens have free travel. I saw a report in a paper the other day about gangs of OAPs spending their entire time going on day trips, because trains are warmer than their houses. It's an inventive solution to the problem, but it does suggest that "the system" is severely broken somewhere.

TRiG.

I think (and hope) Gosho that we are heading back out of that situation with these new houses that are entirely self-heating and, as you say, through better insulation are requiring considerably less heating.

There is also a great movement towards knitting. At least, here in Germany there seem to be lots of wool and little kits for knitting socks and woolly hats, gloves and scarves available in the shops - people are re-learning skills for making things to keep us warm in the traditional way.

For what it's worth.

those Passive houses are brilliant - I really wish we could afford to build one. (if only because you then don't have radiators so you aren't restricted as to where to put your furniture)

The best house I ever saw for that, I think must have had some kind of under-floor heating... made the place seem to be a lot bigger than it was, with no radiators on the walls one can dream