So started the day off fairly early, considering I had the day off. Went to TLC and bought a new central heating programmer after working out the old one was fairly knackered. Got a rather nice Horstmann seven day one, dual channel for water and heating, all LCD, all shiny shiny. Parked up in Cotham and walked into town, it wasn’t that busy considering. Bought a new wall planner. Got back, had lunch. It’s still officially a Monday, so Chicken sandwich it was. Then walked the dog.

Then decided to crack on with replacing the programmer. So started with putting a big hole in the airing cupboard for the cable to go down. This was fine, except the original wiring centre appears to be mounted on some sort of batten and the existing wires are coming through it, so no way on earth I’m going to get behind it, so instead have to come out slightly above it and bring the cable out there, then surface mount it to the wiring centre. Anyway, got the back plate mounted and wired. Then tried to get the timer on, there was no way it wanted to fit. Removed back plate from wall, still no go. Then unwired it all, no chance. So removed all the slot connecting things, then finally it fitted. Turns out that it requires a huge amount of force to get the damn thing to close up and connect properly, so wired it all back again and gave it a big shove, now it was mounted. So back to the wiring centre, I just connected the earth, live and neutral and fired it up, all appeared to be working fine. I used six core and earth cable. Every core was black apart from the earth, but each was individually numbered on the insulation sheath which was very strange. So then removed the old programmer wiring, which ascended somewhere from the kitchen and replaced with the new one. Then removed the old programmer from the kitchen and rewired all that behind a blanking plate. All appears to be working fine, so programmed it up.

My other new gadget arrived today, which is a dual thermocouple temperature reader. This basically means you can clamp a sensor to both flow and return pipes and it will give the temperature differential. I’ve got this at the moment stuck on the A/B outlets of the mid-position valve. Even though it’s going through the internal motions I’m still not convinced it actually works at all, I’m getting very little differential between A/B when it goes through the three modes. I think I’m going to whip the mechanism off the top and check that the valve under it is going through it’s full range of movement. Certainly the spring arm seems to be shot on it.

And there we go, that was my fairly productive day. Christmas day tomorrow. It’s still a Monday though, so salad as usual. I may have a glass or two of wine though.