More DIY

We now have a panel heater in our hall. Installed ourselves … just so as those of you who gave the Mister grief for getting the guy from Placemakers to cut our door draft strip instead of just buy a hacksaw know!

It’s one of those Econo-heat panels that supposedly pumps out an even temperature at a cost of 5 cents per hour making it the most efficient form of heating. We had it going yesterday evening and I think it’s going to work well.

I do have a couple of criticisms about the buying/installation process (surprise surprise). Firstly the buying. Good informative website, *slightly* difficult finding the retail outlet and when we got there the sales woman wasn’t that knowledgeable. It was one of those open-to-the-public-only-because-we-have-to small showrooms in Ngauranga that sold a few different models of heaters. We pretty much knew everything we needed to know from the literature and working example in the showroom (snaps for that) however when I asked the woman if it was designed to be left on all the time and safe to leave it going when we weren’t home (yes, yes am definitely my father’s daughter) she said “Oh yes. It’s very safe – it’s a good heater because it’s really safe for pets and kids.” Ahhhh, OK. That’s not exactly what I was asking – she looked rather aghast when I re-asked in terms of burning the house down, overheating because it didn’t have a thermostat etc – turns out she didn’t actually know. Sigh. For now we’re going to use a timer.

Then we got it home, opened the box, got out the instructions and were very disappointed that it didn’t contain “4 wall plugs, 4 screws, 4 grommets, 4 screw caps” – it only had half the bits! However upon closer inspection it seemed that they had updated the bits to be 4 all-in-one plastic things acting as the wall plug and grommet and 4 what looked like long plastic nails acting as the screw cap and screw. No instructions for how that whole thing worked – instructions were for the 16-bit method. Arrrggggghhhhh! As someone who spends their life writing help and instructions for how to use a product I was horrified! However we figured it out, drilled monster holes in the wall and hoped like hell that when we pushed the plastic ‘nails’ through the wall plug things that they would spring open and grip on for life. Seemed to work and the heater is solidly on the wall!