Sunday 17th Nov (REALLY COLD)

Last night it got cold, really cold.  We had (optimistically) turned off the heating as usual at bed time and at 04:00 in the morning my head was so cold I got up to put a wooly hat on!  I checked the temperature outside and found it to be minus 4 degrees centigrade…………….back to bed then!

However………. at around 06:00 in the morning I heard a 'clunk' and the sound of water dropping to the ground from the van! (lots of water)…….. This turned out to be the heating boiler frost protection safety mechanism automatically operating and dumping it contents (10 litres of water) just before it freezes!

I checked the inside temperature of the van to discover that it was 1 degree centigrade! or to use a more technical term……BLOODY FREEZING!

Anyway……nothing I could do right then about it so back to bed……

Now it turns out that the air heating can still be used when the water boiler is empty but the boiler safety mechanism can not be reset (and the boiler refilled) until the temperature gets above 7 degrees centigrade (we were still minus 4!).  Also the cold water system had frozen so we had no fresh water that we could use either!

So we set off in the direction of Vichy trusting the weather forecast to be accurate when they said daytime temperature later of 10 degrees centigrade.

On the way there we found an Aire that had water on tap so pulled in and Katy started filling the main water tank with the watering can 10 litres at a time whilst I made some fresh coffee………….I checked the 'cold' tap and it was working now.  I also ran the pump a little to help clear the pipes of any remaining ice, Katy heard this and said that water was coming out of the dump valve under the van (which we kept open to avoid freezing up).  I said not to worry as I had only drawn 4 or 5 litres or so………

10 minutes later when a German van pulled in to get fresh water it was while 'communicating' to him that we would only be another 2 or 3 minutes that I noticed the water that we thought was coming from the waste water holding tank was actually coming from the boiler safety vent pipe!  This meant that all the water that Katy had spent the last 10 minutes putting in one side of the van………was coming out the other side!!!!

Ah well, to cut the (already too long) story short, we managed to reset the boiler even thought the temperature at this time was only 4 degrees and spend another 10 minutes refilling the main water tank and the boiler tank………….all's well that ends well !