Today I had a maintenance guy from the gas company come around to replace our hot water meter. This is a periodic thing they do every 7 years for all customers, to ensure the meters are up to date and working properly. They gave me a window of 10:00-12:00 when the guy would arrive. Of course, there was no sign of him until almost 12:30. Then it took half an hour to do the job. Meanwhile I was hoping that Scully didn’t suddenly need to go out for a toilet, as I would have had to ask the worker to leave while I took Scully out. I don’t want a stranger in our home while nobody else is in here.
But Scully was fine, and after the guy finished replacing the meter we went out for a walk. The morning was cool and cloudy, with heavy rain from about 6am to 9am. It cleared up, and by the afternoon it was warm and sunny, though not too hot. The next three days however are forecast to be heatwave conditions, with temperatures around 40°C across parts of Sydney.
There’s also the tropical low off Queensland which is expected to be declared Tropical Cyclone Kirrily some time tonight. It’s still tracking to hit Townsville, and forecast to dump over a meter of rain the next few days to a wide area still recovering from widespread heavy flooding.
I spent much of the day writing new lessons for the new week of ethics classes. I have split topics for the two age groups this week: Gift Giving for 10-12, and Employment for 13-15. I managed to complete both of them by mid-afternoon, which is really good going. I also cleaned up the laundry a bit since that’s where the hot water meter is, and threw out some old cleaning products that we were unlikely to use. So that felt pretty productive.
For diner tonight I made calzones, filled with broccoli, pumpkin, and ricotta. Topped with a chilli and garlic tomato sauce, they were really good.
New content today:
“Hot water meter”? Is that a natural gas meter? I’ve never run into that expression in my country. For one thing, most people here primarily use gas for heating the house, with hot water being a secondary use.
It’s a meter for natural gas usage, but it’s on the hot water pipe and measures how much hot water we use. The gas company charges for the cost of the gas based on how much hot water we use.
The water boiler is a communal one for multiple apartments in the basement, so this way they can split the gas billing out by how much hot water each apartment uses.
The only other thing we used gas for was cooking, and there’s a separate meter on the gas pipe into our apartment for that. But we recently switched to electric induction, so we’re no longer using any gas for anything except hot water.
Heating? We don’t need no heating in Sydney!
I’ve never seen a system like that in the USA. I’m going to ask one of our (I work for a natural gas utility) engineers if such things exist here. I doubt it, because of the way we charge for gas. The State sets a rate which we are legally required to charge, no more and no less, and it’s by energy capacity of natural gas, typically in BTUs.