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Being an engineer means I can break things in my spare time too

Last Sunday morning I was emptying the ash from our wood pellet furnace — something I've done around 100 times.

A small mistake

It takes about 15 minutes including the 10 minutes it takes for the machine to switch off and on. This time, 10 seconds after switching it on, I realised that I'd forgotten to put the ash trays back in. That's a silly mistake but the consequences aren't too bad. The correct resolution is to switch it off, put the trays back in and then switch it on again.

The quick fix

That would take between 5 and 10 minutes though and I thought that if I was quick then I could just open the door, pop the ash trays in, close the door and be done in a few seconds.

The bigger mistake

What actually happened was that as I opened the door, a mechanism to clean the burner started to operate and a metal tray slid out blocking the door from closing again. Now I couldn't close the door and the cleaning mechanism was stuck mid-clean because the door was open.

The longer fix that didn't work

No problem, I thought. There's a service menu to allow you to operate various mechanisms manually. But that's protected by a password to stop idiots like me messing with it. I'm pretty sure it's a factory password so I searched the Internet to see what it is. Sure enough, it is the furnace temperature plus the letters "EST". I wasn't sure what that temperature was so guess 70°, then 60° and finally 65° which does work. After 30 minutes of poking around in the settings I'm not supposed to touch I gave up and resigned myself to calling an actual, qualified engineer the following day.

Solution appears from nowhere

I went out for a bike ride but this problem was niggling away in the back of my mind. On the way home it occurred to me that if I could fool the furnace into thinking the door was closed, it might reset itself.

As soon as I'm home I take a closer look and eventually find a little micro-switch. As soon as I press it, the furnace starts its switch-on sequence and after ten seconds, it retracts the tray and I can finally close the door properly.

Off and on again

Ten minutes later, and it was whirring away but still not heating any water. I switched it off and on again. This time it worked and our water started getting hot again.

Day job

The parallels with my day job as an engineer at Team Tito are strong:

  • Trying to do something trivial and making a simple mistake that isn't actually very serious

  • An attempt to fix it quickly that causes a much bigger one

  • Trawling the Internet for answers

  • Trying things I don't really understand

  • Coming up with the solution while thinking of something else entirely

  • Have you tried switching it off and on again?