Failure is the Key to Success

After about an hour and a half, I got heat back today. The heating system drain and valve replacement was very straight forward. It took a little longer to get the air back out of the system, but the good news is its all working again. At least if the motor on the valve fails again, it wont involve draining the system; the new valve, a Honeywell V4073A, has a replaceable motor.

The homepage of my website is now laid out using Style Sheets rather than tables in the HTML. I will gradually convert the rest of the site across.

As the weather is having a cold snap, it only follows that the 3 position valve on our Central Heating system has become faulty. If the system needs to heat water, then it works fine, however if we need the heating on, then the boiler and pump don’t start. As a work around, if we need a burst of heat, we have to run the hot tap to empty some of the water and so cause the new water to be heated, at the same time the heating works.

I found and ordered a replacement valve on Ebay this morning, and when I got home found that the seller lived in town. I emailed him to see if I could collect the valve, but before I got a reply, he delivered it to save the trouble of posting. Definately the quickest turnaround I’ve had, 10 hours from order to delivery.

I’ll fit the valve at the weekend, hopefully it won’t be too cold until then.

Went to Dunstable’s Tudor Festival this afternoon. It was cold, but dry. We did the children’s Tudor Treasure Trail and managed to get all 18 answers and stickers in the 2 hours before it had to be returned. That was a result as we got all 3 prizes.

It seems that last Saturday, not only did we introduce new guppies and white cloud mountain minnow to the tank, but we also introduced white spot. We only still have 2 out of the 6 guppies and both of those are covered with white spot, one of the dannios is also showing signs of irritation.

We have been out to the fish shop this afternoon and the tank has now been treated. We have to repeat the treatment every 48 hours until the spots are gone and then for a further 48 hours.

I visisted the ICT suite again this afternoon to look at some reported problems. When I visited the Friday before half term, I confirmed my plan to deploy the Maths-Whizz software onto all of the computers. As this was only working on 3 of the computers it had been reported as a problem. The software was installed on 19 of the remaining 25 machines.

The software for the Digital Creators wouldn’t install on the computers without an error, but installed fine this afternoon.

We also installed the Science Assessment software on another 2 computers, which should allow the assessments to proceed quicker.