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It's a brand new, from scratch (no copper or radiators in the house) installation.
Ongoing for 2 weeks now, up to 5 guys working here - a bit of a mammoth project :-)
The only viable option was oil-fired (no gas in the village), though we looked at ground source heat pumps (not enough land), pellet-burning stoves (not enough storage space and few UK fuel suppliers as yet) and LPG (ridiculously expensive).
The oil tank's a 1000 litre double skinned, 7' x 5' x 2' green plastic monster (the smallest they do) and had to be lugged by four workmen and me up the neighbour's garden, over the barbed wire fence into the field, then back over the fence into our garden because it wouldn't fit through the house or down the passageway and I didn't want to spend £1000/day for a crane to lift it over the house. It is not lightweight.
Neither is the condensing, high efficiency, oil-fired boiler (600 lb deadweight) which the delivery man handily left at the bottom of the path.
This now lives in what was the outside toilet (cleared out and painted) by dint of using wooden ramps and three copper pipe rollers (with wooden dowels inside to prevent collapse) to get it up the step and through the front door, thence upon a cardboard and dustsheet sledge and three of us slid it down the hall and through into the kitchen.
Yea verily and aha, 'twas then levered up on to three 3"x2" beams acting as a bridge betwixt the back step and the privy and lo! the same rollers served again.
Well, it was a bit of a saga - glad I didn't have to haul it here from the Preseli Mountains ;-)
The pressurised 50 gallon, twin 12KW heat exchanger (one for the oil boiler, the other for the solar panels going on the roof - planning permission, er, permitting) hot water cylinder lives in the - also cleared and painted - outside storage room next to the boiler, along with a lot of pipework.
Meanwhile, (well you did ask!), the oil tank needs a platform to live on, a foot larger than the tank itself and surrounded by a concrete firewall a foot taller than it to prevent the thing catching fire if the fence it's next to should ever ignite %-/
So a section of bank between the outhouse and the rest of the garden has been cleared of debris and excavated (by hand, and electric jackhammer) to accommodate the platform.
Something like 4 tons of chalk now lives in bags on the patio - we've enough for our own henge. The good news (for us, not the workmen) is that 2/3 of the height of the bank is solid chalk, with about 18" of earth on top of it which means putting a retaining wall up across the whole width is going to be less of a problem than we thought (it only needs to hold back 18" of earth rather than 5') - but that's a whole other project.
One of the steel-reinforced concrete firewall posts cracked after being set into the ground. There are three of these in holes dug a further 12" down through the chalk and 6" into the bedrock which underlies it, around the platform.
Incidentally, the firewall is only on two sides - fence and garden - the third side is the back wall of the outhouse with its window now being bricked up and the fourth side is open.
Anyway, the knackered post meant they had to dig out and replace it which involved re-excavating its posthole previously filled with "postcrete" - fast setting very hard stuff. Ever tried drilling concrete out of bedrock? I gather it's not particularly easy.
The guys have done all this with very good humour, and everything's about halfway finished now.
Here's a few photos - I really ought to blog this properly when I get a moment.
     
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simon
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