The other thing that happened yesterday was that our air-conditioning cut out, we think about 4.00 p.m. It was 42 degrees (about 107 F) at the hottest part of the day and we had been running all the rooms. I had just added the bedroom.

We thought it was the same problem as before where a part had to be replaced and took ages to arrive. We set in motion a backup plan (packed up to go to stay with Mum) and then switched everything off. We had rather a hot night again, though it did cool down in the morning. I set up the little evaporative cooler when I made our cups of tea.

Then, we switched on. And it worked. Such a relief!

The lesson learned is that for such extreme weather we need to try to not overuse the system. Today we were out until about 2.00 p.m., and had closed up the house and put down the blinds everywhere, and it wasn’t too bad when we got home. We switched on and it has been working this afternoon. We have closed the studies and the bedroom and switched off those rooms. We have always done this in the past when using the system to save electricity, so I don’t quite know why we were so blasé about it.

Of course, we are having about a week of extreme temperatures, although I notice that the maximum temperatures have been revised slightly downwards for the next few days.