Week 110-111 - Heating in the Residential Area

The big biomass boiler, which I have now named Vlad, or more accurately his full title: ‘Vlad the wood DESTROYER!’ as that is what he does best, was installed along with all the 1^st fix for the heating system and has been running heating the bottom floor of the building for nearly a year now. So what we’re really talking about here is putting the radiators in the flat.

Which is fairly unexciting in itself and I would of just wrapped up in the general 2^nd fix of the flat, however with most things in ‘the makers mill’ we’ve done this the hard way, so I thought we would have a short section for it.

I decided that we just couldn’t have cheap pressed steel radiators in the flat, I wanted some cast iron. You can buy either brand new or fully refurbished cast iron radiators ready to install easily from many places, however we don’t have enough kidneys between us to afford them. So I hit eBay to see what I could find....

The good news is I managed to find enough old reclaimed cast iron radiators for the flat and the gallery and only paid about £50 each for them, the bad news is now I had to find out how and then do the refurbishing of them ourselves.

First they were all sand blasted to remove the old paint, crud etc. and flushed though with clean water. Then we needed to remove all the old bushed and valves and refit for our modern system. We’re only doing the radiators for the flat at this stage, not the gallery, so we are talking about 6 in total for now.

Basically in each corner, top and bottom of the radiator there is a bush, or you could think of it as a threaded bung/stopper. These were all corroded and or the wrong size for our system, so we had to take them all out and replace them so each radiator had attachments for flow/input and return/output (at opposite corners), bleed valve and blanking.

Essentially all this really is is removing 24 (4x6) bolts and putting new ones back in. In reality this turned into a 24hr period were Graeme and I waged war on lumps of metal and very nearly lost. In the process we broke spanners and bent scaffold bars we were using as pivots – it was kind of hardcore man!

Next they needed repainting, which was fiddley as….. well fiddley. ‘Nooks and crannies’ SO MANY ‘nooks and crannies’

All but one of the rads need separate feet to stand on, which either weren’t included when I got them or were completely knackered. Partly as a cost saving exercise, as new feet cost about £40 a pair, and partly as I thought it would look good, I decided to make they little oak feet for them to stand on.

All prepped in was time to install them. This meant carrying them from the workshop, up two flights of stairs to the flat. I cannot stress this enough, these things are HEAVY. Like shockingly heavy!

Honestly this isn’t me being a wimp here….. how the hell are these things so damn heavy!?! Ive made a terrible mistake; we’ll never get them all the way up there! Will the floor even take it????? ARRRRRRRR!!!!!!

So we’ll just skip straight to some pictures of them in place and plumbed in shall we? Pretend it never happened. There’s no photographic evidence of it anyway, so what can you do. However I would like to say thank you to Richard Sharp who helped me in this task – does your back still ache as much as mine mate?

Above have been living room and main bedroom radiators, the bedroom one having its own feet rather than the oak and being extra deep

There are two of the little ones in the hallways and one more large one (above) between kitchen and living

And finally a long slightly shorter one, that just for good measure, in my infinite wisdom decided we would put on the mezzanine in the 2nd bedroom - apparently I either just love lifting heavy things, or I didn't think it through.