Last night, when Brian was just finishing off outside, he received an error message on his iPhone stating that there was an issue with our boiler. After a bit of investigation on his part, he thought it may be because there were some pellets blocking the tube that feeds them from the silo to the boiler. He came in to update me on what was going on, and see if I had any ideas on what to do! The whole system appears, from an untrained eye, to be completely sealed, and not something I thought we should ‘tinker’ with. So I suggested we ring the plumber.

Luckily he was available and soon put us on the right track to try and resolve it over the phone. He directed Brian under the silo, really not an easy place to reach, but with a bit of wriggling he got himself in position. He could then see clearly which of the pipes was delivering the pellets. He needed to unbolt the pipe and clear the blockage. After rather a lot of ‘I hope this fixes it’ and a little pile of the pellets, which we believed were the culprits, he was soon securing the pipe back and I was switching the boiler back on to see if it was going to suck the pellets through.

Getting out from under the silo was not quite so easy, “Not to worry, I’ll get you out”. I grabbed Brian’s legs and with an almighty pull, freed him from his awkward position.

We waited a while to listen for the pellets to feed through, but although we did not hear them we were not getting any error messages. We headed back indoors and waited for any other errors. After a while Brian made a check on the boilers app, and we could see that the volume of pellets that had been used had increased by 4 kg. We let the plumber know, and finally settled into our evening.