STUCK AT HOME

Good news: Fix-it guy has shown up to (hopefully) fix our boiler and return us to the land of reliable hot water.

Less good news: We only became aware of fix-it guy's impending arrival last night when our ever-helpful landlord slipped a note through the door. Thanks to Amanda going into work a few minutes late, and my talking the boys into cutting our morning row short, we managed to get overlap and let the guy in. I'm now stuck at home, about as bored as possible...

Worse news: Last time I dared go downstairs, our kitchen looked thus:

.

Since then, I've heard two sliding noises, a CRASH, assorted banging, several assorted grunts of varying intensity, and the sound of running water. I'm scared to look...

UPDATE: Fix-it guy has finished cleaning scale out of the heat exchanger, which is what he reckoned was causing the trouble; sounds reasonable enough to me I guess, the heat exchanger probably needed to be cleaned anyway. I was pleased to see that he's installed a filter in the return line from the heating circuit as a general principle, but I can't see how that will help limescale on the other side of the heat exchanger. In any case, having made his repairs, burner is not lighting / lighting but not staying lit... Now, it could be that this is related to the problem we've been having all week (i.e., the burner lights, but then goes out and cycles on/off), but, wait, no, what passes for a "Boiler Engineer" in England has decided that he MUST have bumped something and caused this problem while he played with a totally unrelated component!!! I've tried to casually flip through the troubleshooting manual and leave it open to the page which describes the current behaviour (helpfully complete with a list of sensors to check) whilst I go upstairs and take a deep breath, but I doubt it'll do any good....