Meditations on boilers and condensers

A brief meditation on what makes Irish appliances different from US appliances: First the vacuum cleaner, or "hoover" as it's called here.  As in "I've been 'hoovering' the house". We have a dyson cannister-style machine with the cyclone sytem.  Supposed to be awesome at picking up animal hair.  Sadly it seems to be nearly useless at picking up regular old dirt.  Did I mention that our rental house has off-white carpet in nearly every room including the stairs? It does.  Rob has threatened to buy a new "hoover" just so that I don't have to be annoyed by this supremely un-sucky machine for two years.

Now on to the so-called "drier". It is not indeed a drier, but is actually a drier/condenser.  Unlike our US driers that vent the moist air out of a tube, my drier actually collects the water coming from the clothing and puts it into a plastic doohickey in the base of the machine that I must empty each time I use it.  Not that big a deal if this complicated machine actually worked well, but sadly, it is rather ineffective.  Thus my new love for the clothes line in my back yard.  It's amazing how fast the laundry dries out there on a day with no rain. Doesn't even need to be warm for it to work.  Super cool.

Now on to boilers.  We have two ways to get hot water in this house.  One, an electric water heater called an "immersion" unit upstairs in the "hot press" or linen closet as we yanks like to call it.  This electric water heater is far too expensive to run all the time, so when we want hot water, we turn it on and...wait about a half hour before we have it. Should we make the mistake of leaving this bad boy on for more than a hour the water will melt the flesh from your bones.  And if you don't wait at least 20 minutes then a lukewarm shower you will have.

I promised to discuss boilers, well we have one.  And radiators in each and every room of the house.  Some big, some small.  When the weather turns colder (which it already has started to do) we turn on the boiler and set the timer for when we want it to pump hot water into the radiators.  We adjust the radiators in each room for comfort and the extra becomes our hot water.  I think.  And if we mess too much with the radiators we will "unbalance" them - whatever that means, and we will need our neighbor Darren to come over with his rad key to "bleed the system".

So, there you have it.  Some of the weirdness of my existence as a housewife in Ireland.