Gas fire joins faulty appliances club!

Hot on the heels of our bagless vacuum cleaner, computer and cooker comes the gas fire. All those domestic appliances have broken down since New Year, and now the latest member of the club is sporting a bright red "danger" label.

The fun started on Friday tea time just after the fire had been lit. It is one of those fires with a glass front and coal and flame effect, and suddenly there was a loud crack which scared the cat, and which, on inspection revealed a large crack down the front of the glass.

We arranged to have someone come out to look at it, and when they arrived yesterday said they had never seen such a problem before! He disconnected the fire from the gas supply and stuck the danger label on and told us that someone would come along on Monday (tomorrow) to replace the cracked glass.

Last night the bulb in my bedroom ceiling light gave up the ghost after a few years, and has now been replaced by a "green" tubular bulb, so my room is the first one in the flat to have 100% green lighting (apart from the bathroom but that doesn't count because there is only one light in there and I have two!)

More on our domestic appliances

With the ongoing problems with vacuum cleaners we could well do without another of our appliances joining the unreliable club, but only a couple of weeks after the vacuum, followed by the computer, broke down, our cooker has now followed suit.

All seemed normal when the roasting tin was put into the oven for the fat to melt this morning, but when the potatoes which had been put into the fat to roast were taken out raw, and we discovered there was no heat in the oven even though it was switched on and the fan was working (it is a fan oven) it was not cooking anything.

So we are now spending tomorrow morning waiting for someone to come out and repair it.

The madness of domestic appliances

How many other people have domestic appliances as loopy as the ones we have? We have a fridge which rattles (it never did this before it was defrosted) and a hoover whose wheels drop off.

We never have any luck with hoovers - we have returned several to the shop in the past few years. The first was was going great until it started glowing. We replaced this with another, which went great until the wheel dropped off. So then we got another, a so-called upright, except that it doesn't stay upright it collapses and yes, you guessed it, the wheels drop off! Now we have to kick the wheels back into position all the time, it picks up OK but the wheels are maddening! We are on the lookout for another one but we don't know which type to get, I say I just want one which works!

And to cap it all the computer is playing up! The DVD-ROM drive and the CD-RW drive won't recognise disks, even though they open and close OK, once that disk is in they are unresponsive so it is going to be repaired next week.

Oh to have normal stuff!