“The boiler alarm has gone off”
Not normally a statement to worry me too much, Tony, our maintenance manager, is a heating engineer by trade and we know our way around the system quite well by now. What caused a little more concern was that I had this message at about 1.15 in the morning!
Mike wasn’t sure what he needed to do to rectify the problem so I made a couple of suggestions and said to call me back if they didn’t work. 15 minutes later Mike is back on the phone so I decided it would be easiest and less disturbing to my wife if I were to get up & go in to see what the problem was.
When I got in to the hotel we went and had a look at the boilers - everything had cut out, red lights everywhere and the pressure / filler unit on the end beeping at us. It quite often used to think it had insufficient pressure so I didn’t take too much notice of the flood alarm, after all we couldn’t see any water in the boiler room and no guests had rung down to report a leak. I rebooted the unit and we went upstairs for a cup of coffee while it got back up to pressure.
Afer a while we went and checked it but it still didn’t work. We tried a few more things to get it all going but decided it needed a bit more time to fill up. After a further period of time I decided that we really ought to have a look around just to see if there were any problems as the unit should have got back up and running by then. Thankfully we didn’t have too far to look - a pipe had been repaired in the linen room next door to the boiler room, thankfully Ronnie had used the wood that Tony had got to repair the floor so I could see what was what. There in the corner was a horizontal fountain coming out of a 4 inch heating pipe. I was in a way glad I’d found it but would really have preferred something simpler!
At this point I decided I needed some more help so rang Tony at home. By this stage it is about 3.00 am, Tony suggested I try to drain the system down as this would then stop the water gushing out into the foundations. I found the valve but in my ignorance treated it as a tap and kept turning it around, trying to open it fully! Still, this meant I did have a spanner so I tightened up the nuts on the joint that had leaked which did work and stopped the water.
Next job when Tony came up was to get the boilers going again, with our new system it is very simple to shut of the heating side and just have hot water. Once we had this shut off and the leak stopped we were able to get the control panel restarted and the water heating up. We kept an eye on it for a while (another cup of coffee) and decided the water had all got back on track. We decided it wasn’t safe to trust my repair work so we left the heating off (why do these things always happen in winter?) and get the engineers who had done the work back in the morning to do it properly.
I quickly wrote a letter for all the guests and left these for Mike to put under the doors and left for home, Tony was able to get away too. When I got home I was as quiet as I could be and slipped back into bed, Val hadn’t stirred at all. Then she asked me in a very wide awake voice if we’d managed to fix it all! Luckily she hadn’t been awake all the time I’d been out.
We were all fixed and the system filled and vented by the end of lunchtime the next day so all back to as near normal as we ever get here!
