When All Else Fails

We have an elderly widowed neighbour, who I occasionally help out with specific technical problems. Like many women with grown-up children these days, she has children who are always eaither out or too busy to help out. So she doesn't even bother asking.

Anyway her central heating went off today so I went over and re-set it.
She wanted it to come on a bit earlier in the morning. It has a Honeywell programmer, where you can set either the heating or the hot water to come on and off at three different times for every naffin' day of the week.
She showed me the instructions, which as many are these days, were printed in a tiny font which was almost impossible to read. (They do the same with serial numbers, don't they?)

So I put the model number of the programmer into YouTube and pulled up an easy to follow demonstration. Downloaded it on my laptop and took it over to her house and was able to fix the problem.

 

I was thinking back to the heating timer that we had in our first and second houses.

It looked very similar to this one but I think it had a boost button which gave an hours water or heating.



So much simpler to the one we have now which can have 5 events per day, different daily, different weekdays/weekends or 7 days the same. I have it set for morning and evening, same every day - the same as the simple timer in the pic does - just with more stress to program.

 

Mine's the basic timer that comes with the boiler. A 24 hour clock. Same mechanism as cheap plug socket timers. Set for when you want it to go on and off as many times as you like. So much less to go wrong.
Ours comes on at 7.00am and off at midnight, 'cos we're rarely in bed before 1.00 a.m.
We really control everything by the thermostat in the hall.

This is the neighbour's programmer.




Needless to say the boiler was a British Gas installation. You can't get a more expensive supplier.


Anyway, if their boilers are so good for keeping houses warm, why's that naffin' Wilbur the penguin never seen without a coat, scarf and mittens indoors or outdoors?