Lyra's Travels

Thursday 24th January 2013
I've mentioned several times in this blog of the troubles we are having with our Hurricane Heater. In case you aren't familiar with the story I will just say that over the last few months the compressor in it has been becoming noisier, and recently the temperature of the radiators has been dropping. This drop usually means that the air filter needs cleaning/replacing, and the combustion chamber also requires a bit of a clean out because  it's been burning rich and dirty.
I've done both several times now to try to get the temperature up, but to no avail. I suspected that the noisy compressor wasn't pushing enough air to atomize the fuel properly, resulting in all the aforementioned problems.
Monday night it finally happened, there was a sudden dramatic change in 'the noise' and the heater stopped. Out with the back up fan heater (we don't have a solid fuel burner) and get back into bed.
In the morning I clambered into the engine hole and took off the cover plate to see what had occurred. It was fairly obvious, the vibration had finally overcome the mounting plate and it had sheared off leaving the compressor free to jump around like a demented kangaroo.
A call to the dealer and they arranged for an engineer to come out, but not until Thursday.
Today he arrived and after a cup of coffee dived into the job. Confirming what had happened he produced a new compressor, the new model, which hopefully is much more reliable than the last design (of which we have had 2 in 2 years). After about 3/4 of an hour we were once again purring along, the radiators getting hot, and Cath saying "Is it running? I can't hear it".
The quietness is wonderful. It isn't exactly silent, but certainly an improvement, and the rads are getting much hotter now.