What a day!

Up early hoping to get lots done. Sitting room nice & warm as tiled stove burnt all night, in to the kitchen for 1st coffee of the day & froze in my tracks literally - no floor heating! Checked our 2005 built wood pellet central heating - FAULT! Quickly grasped handbook, pressed the buttons on the controller & quickly found the problem. Electric overload on the pellet screw. Probably a blockage & no big problem. Went through all the steps the display told me to do but to no avail. Long story but located the problem, dismantled the part & shot 50km down the motorway at 200 kmh in -6°C driving snow, to get a spare part from the manufacturer. Very luckily got two very helpful technical guys who wanted to find out why the part failed and brutally set to work, until they managed to open the thing up. (I tried with force but didn't trust myself to use brute force). The mechanism had completely seized up due to soot which probably got sucked in through a stuck valve. They had never seen anything like it. They fixed it at no cost (2 men over 1 hour plus my help) & then told me a new part would have cost 900 Euros!!! They even stayed on after the office had closed. Shot home in the dark, started the topless tractor (no glow plugs), got a bale of haylage from under the snow as the horses had no more feed, back in the house, rebuilt the central heating & at 11:00pm sat down for toasted cheese & a beer, exhausted & cold but knowing it would soon be warm.
Blip is of the office building of "Rennergy", an enviromentally orientated small business who produce several wood burning heating systems as well as PV & solar warming. The office/works are in the middle of nowhere close to Buchenberg. Its 300m higher than us & one notices it on the 2m snow marking poles stuck on the side of the road. The ones in the photo are smaller as it's a private drive.