"Oh god," I said to John Paul when I got to work. "I just left the immersion on for three days running."
John Paul staggered backwards into the wall. "Three days?" he said. "Three days running?"
The general Irish rule for heating the water tank is no longer than 15 minutes: enough to fill half a luke-warm bath and isn't that good enough for you. But three days? Three days running?
Anna looked up from her desk grimly. "You do realise that using the immersion costs around 10 euro an hour?"
Ten euro an hour! I did a quick, wild calculation in my head. That's over two thousand quid!
"Maybe you should call the ESB?" said JP, seeing my panic, but I shook my head. This isn't about the electricity board anymore, John Paul. Unfortunately, this is now about the imminent end of my relationship. So I wrote to Quentin Fotrell, the Agony Uncle on the Ray D'Arcy show instead.
Dear Quentin
I moved in with the love of my life at the weekend, which we are both very happy about. However, I'm afraid that this is all about to come to an abrupt end.
Last Sunday night I switched on the immersion for a bath. This morning I took a very hot shower. The immersion has been on for almost three days! Have you got any idea how much this will cost, how I can tell the love of my life, and when I should tell him? Now? When the bill arrives? Or never and hope for the best?
I thought about contacting Des Bishop, but really what good would that do? Please advise me Q, you're my only hope.
Yours,
Clean but Forgetful
Dear Clean,
This is, indeed, an Irish obsession. Along with leaving the iron or cooker on. I am more obsessed with the latter. I once went on holidays and, in the taxi on the way to the airport, I thought, 'I think I left the cooker on...'. On the plane heading towards New York, I feared, 'My cooker will be pretty hot by now.' On top of the Empire State Building, I looked out over the glorious Manhattan skyline and suddenly, I was knocked back to reality as I remembered the cooker. I stood on a mountain in Vermont, losing myself in the blanket of white snow, and thought, 'My cooker.' I felt a knot in my stomach and my face burn with fear and not-knowing.
My point is: Des Bishop's observation about the immersion, and yours, and my fear of leaving the cooker on when I go away is really nothing to do with either piece of equipment. It's a way of not enjoying the moment, finding something to get The Fear over, when all else is fine and dandy. Forget about the immersion. If the bill's a little high, so be it. He'll never know it was you. If he finds out, do what I have done, get a booster button. You press it once, and it stays on for half-an-hour, then goes off automatically. Come clean, if need be, and tell him it's your gift for a happy homelife together.
Yours,
Aunty Quinty x
As usual, I felt reassured by Quentin's advice (yes, alright, it's not the first time I've written to him). But I still felt horribly worried about the financial repercussions: no bubble-bath is worth over two thousand quid! So I called the ESB, where a very kind-sounding lady kept me on hold while she worked out an estimate.
"Hello?" she said, after what seemed like an hour.
"Hello," I croaked, with a lump in my throat, two thousand quid for a bubble-bath suddenly seeming like a pretty good deal.
"Leaving the immersion on costs, on average," she said, breaking the news to me as gently as she could. "About 20 euro a week."
Ahhh brilliantly written - smile on me gob this morning :D
ReplyDeleteIt's been pointed out on Twitter that the opening of a second pack of something while there's still a scraping in the first is highly offensive to Irish people too: milk, jam, toothpaste...
ReplyDeleteSeeing an almost empty bottle of ketchup stood on its head and draining into a full bottle is not an uncommon sight either.
Allan I find that a lot of people open the new milk, jam, toothpaste etc but in a move that's meant to appease the more traditional folk in the home they don't throw out the bottle/tub/jar with the scrpaings in.
ReplyDeleteIt's a move that says 'I respect your traditions but I don't understand them, especially as that milk has turned manky'.
Excellent!
ReplyDeleteMost immersions have two switches, one marked 'sink' and the other marked 'bath'.
ReplyDeleteIf you have yet to encounter this you should know that the 'bath' one is purely ornamental, do not ever turn it on. It's there to lend a certain balance and proportion to the switching unit.
Yes, in Ireland you can have a perfectly adequate bath using the 'sink' switch.
smiling here and up there with the immersion is not being allowed to go to the next layer of the tin of biscuits until the top one was gone!!!
ReplyDeletePhew. I was having palpitations. Same in this house. My Mother is worse - always washes up the same plate. mug etc - turns into screaming banshee if you have a cup of tea then have another one a few hours later out of different cup while the dirty one languishes in the sink!
ReplyDeleteJohn Paul did ask me if it had been set to 'sink' or 'bath' and I said I didn't know, I just stick my hand into the hot press and fumble around until a red light comes on. Cue more staggering backwards.
ReplyDeleteAm still laughing so I just had to post this.. (hope it links ok)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.hairybaby.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage4girls&product_id=1171&category_id=6&category_parent_id=2&manufacturer_id=0&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=26
Bought by me for my sister Rols (she spat out her coffee in work when she read this blog)
She knows why...!
Ahaha brilliant post Annie
ReplyDeleteOh stop Annie girl I'm in the knots! Me father's nerves to de gone if someone leaves the immersion on for over 13 minutes!
ReplyDeleteThis is excellent. I like the implied triple sin: "Tea? No, thanks. I'm off to London to get an abortion. But I left the immersion on so I can take a nice hot bath when I get back."
ReplyDeleteI'm still laughing at the abortion/tea thing. Is that bad?
ReplyDeleteThank you for a great story well told, and for the reminder (oh so รก propos on my birthday) that it's often a choice to be unhappy. Left my pedometer on the nightstand today and now I don't care! :^)
ReplyDeleteThe recessionary 70s and 80s in Ireland were spent trying to solve The Great Immersion Thermostatic Riddle, it may even have made to a higher maths paper in the Leaving Cert. If you have to put the immersion 'on' a few times each day, is it actually cheaper to leave it 'on', from morning to night, rather than be switching it 'off' and 'on' several times?
ReplyDeleteAt home, when I was a kid, we had a dual immersion, but when we used to go spend our holliers with the Granddad in Ballybunion, he had only the old-fashioned kind and he would throw a wobbly every time we turned it on. It became his obsession, sneaking around after us and turning the immersion off, which we'd discover when we lowered our arses into a freezing cold bath. Then my father had a brilliant idea - he re-wired the immersion switch so that it appeared it was always off, and then we all legged it home after the holiday, leaving the Granddad with the bill. Such larks.
ReplyDeleteBahaha! Deadly post Annie.
ReplyDeleteHahaha great post, very funny and so true!!
ReplyDeleteI once left the immersion on for 3 weeks thinking them lagging jackets around the tank in the hotpress was marvellous for keeping the water so hot!! The outrage it caused so many people, people who didn't have to pay the bill, fucking mental we are!!
I miss the sink / bath switch. I have storage heating at the moment and the water heater has a mind of its own.
ReplyDeleteWhen is the ESB bill due to arrive?
We were NEVER allowed to put the immersion on barring the regular time slots dad had set for approximately two minutes each morning and evening. Surprised he didn't put a lock on the hotpress actually (hotpress - the subject of another bonkers post, eh?).
ReplyDeleteWe did, of course, stick the immersion on lots of other times for things such as hair-washing, going out, fun. Then we'd forget to switch it off; he'd get the bill; blow top. Repeat.
The other batty thing Irish people do is refuse to let you use the tumble dryer. Ever. Despite having one. For show, or something. Ah sure just wait for a good blowy day and it'll all dry in three seconds flat. Right so. But how would you get your goth crushed velvet top dry in time to go to the student union, eh mother?
Oh, giving away too much now.
In my day the Immersion Police would have come out and made you take a bath in freezing holy water to hammer the point home.
ReplyDeleteGood times..good times.
Annie,
ReplyDeleteMaybe giving Connor one of these as a moving in gift might help
Mine keeps me sane :-)
At least it saved you having to bludgeon the ESB.
ReplyDeleteExcellent! Love the Irish fear/awe of the immersion and its ability to claim your kidneys in payment. If my father turns on a tap anywhere in the house, and it is ANYTHING above bone-chillingly cold, a look of sheer panic washes across his face and he breaks into a cold sweat. This fear is closely followed by an Olympic-standard sprint to the hot press to check if "one of ye left the immersion on again". Of course, the man himself is genetically incapable of committing such a deplorable act.
ReplyDeleteAlso love the fact that we have had a dishwasher for 15 or so years at home, yet my mother steadfastly refuses to acknowledge its existence, using it merely as a surface upon which to store dog food and shoe polish instead.
Genius post, Annie, I love it.
ReplyDeleteYou could have called it The Immersion-cy :D
I love this.
ReplyDeleteMy sister left the immersion on overnight a while back and my Dad almost cried when he found out.
I'd rather tell him I'm pregnant than tell him I left the immersion on :P
Leaving the immersion on? Very serious.
ReplyDeleteWatch this to realise just what you have done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52bna-tn_dY
Thank you for sharing all your immersion stories. Who would have thought a domestic appliance could provide such drama?
ReplyDeleteI told Conor I'd left it on that very same night. I started off with "now don't be cross..." and he immediately looked alarmed. "Or alarmed!" I said.
Ha! Love this!
ReplyDeleteSomeone mentioned a lock on the hotpress? Well my Dad got a lock for the gas boiler so that we couldn't put on the heating when he wasn't there!
When we got the central heating first, way back in days of yore, we were all excited about lashing on the rads and having steaming hot showers until Dad took it upon himself to install a lock yoke which only he had the key for! So he allowed us 15 minutes of heat and hot water in the mornings and about 40 minutes in the evenings. If it snowed.
It was probably our own fault, cos before he got the lock, he'd barely be pulling out of the driveway before we'd be putting on all the radiators and huddling on top of them. We thought we were being cute by turning them all off again about 40 minutes before he returned so he never realised what was going on. Until he got the bill. Oh that was a day, let me tell you.
After that, he got wide to us.
He also installed a pay phone in our house as the bills were astronomical. The cute hoor.
A payphone in the house!
ReplyDeleteIn a kiosk?!
Ha ha, that's hilarious. When my parents had central heating put in, most of the radiators were purely for show. The kitchen radiator was on during the day, then switched off in the evening when we all moved into the living room. On no account were any radiators EVER switched on upstairs. I slept in the corner box room and used to get dressed under the covers in the mornings. One morning I found a pair of knickers actually frozen to the condensation on my bedroom wall. My mother laughed it off, sure that was no excuse to turn on a radiator for feck's sake.
ReplyDeleteYes, a payphone in the house. Not in a kiosk, unfortunately, at least that would have been cool, but at the bottom of our stairs.
ReplyDeleteIt was a big grey box yoke and whenever you dialled out or rang in it made that 'beep, beep' high pitched tone so EVERYONE knew you were on a payphone. The SHAME of it!
My brother though, the master of crime, 'found' the key to the money box in my parent's bedroom and copied it, so for a full month we used the same 20 pence coin to make calls to our heart's content!
And then the bill came in.
Ructions does NOT begin to describe it. I think in the end the folks went back to a regular phone and got an itemised bill and basically haunted the phone to make sure we weren't on it all the time.
They had to go to work at some stage though, the poor bastards!
This was priceless and brought back. memories of the time when I shared house in Cork with several people, two of them non Irish (me and a guy from Australia). The bathroom was a disgrace and the immersion produced so little luke warm water that I usually heated up several pots and the kettle to fill the bathtub to a bareable level. When years later we pooled our resources and installed a shower we discovered that the landlord had adjusted the water tank and the immersion so that only a small amount would get heated - because he "knew" that us foreigners would "waste" hot water...
ReplyDeleteThis post inspired me to do a an experiment with my immersion heater and a real time energy monitor. Some hard numbers and pretty pictures :-)
ReplyDeletehttp://jdesbonnet.blogspot.com/2010/07/leaving-immersion-water-heater-on.html
just came across this one sitting on the couch with the other half. He said he left the immersion on for 8 years when he lived in his flat. Not sure I can see him in the same light again. The horror!
ReplyDeletehahaha i love this post! even i was thinking at the start..jaysus three days!!! ah the immersion, one of des bishop's finest moments!
ReplyDeletegreat post and i second conan with the sink button. Bath is extreme decadence!
A non-certified immersion heater thermostat from an unknown manufacturer might overheat and cause the thermostat wire to melt, which is a common problem and one that can lead to dangerously overheated water and even electrical fires. So better be responsible in choosing the best one.
ReplyDelete