Brr! It's cold in here

The title is in reference to my heating which has annoyingly decided to stop working and when I came home last night the house was absolutely frozen, this morning waking up wasn't much better!

Annoyingly the hot water works, but the central heating doesn't - Great. After some diagnosis (my heating system really isn't that complicated), it's a problem with the 3-way valve and one of the microswitches in the actuator isn't working so it doesn't turn on the central heating when signalled to do so. Yay. :( Dad came around early this morning and dismantled it and he's in agreement that's the fault so I've ordered a replacement valve/actuator (£55) which should arrive tomorrow... but we're not sure that we'll be able to fit it.

Technically it's pretty easy, 3 pipe connections and some wiring, however you're really supposed to drain all the water out of the system before doing this which we don't to do, so I might have to call out a plumber to actually install it. Not sure yet, we're going to look at it on Saturday possibly. In the meantime I found a way to "trick" the system by increasing the hot water temperature so the boiler comes on and increasing the pump speed so the radiators fill quickly, but this only lasts a short time as can't keep the hot water at such a high temperature and it only works when I do it manually (i.e. cold mornings/coming home at night) Boo :(

On the subject of coldness, here's some pictures I took last week when we still had some snow and it was insanely foggy at the same time:






It was really bizarre, you could look out into the fields and there was "nothing". It was really hard to tell where the horizon was and where the snow stopped and the fog started!