I know this is a cheesy shot – let’s face it I think anyone who is trying to do a PAD and has access to a real fire will do a hot grate shot sooner or later.

However, this shot follows on from yesterday’s shot – it’s more free stuff.

As you’ll know if you’ve been here for long, we moved our fire and had its back boiler hitched back up so we could get our fireplace doing twice the work for no extra effort or money. When we light a fire, our hot water gets sucked through the back of the fire and heated. It’s fab. Not only does it heat the water, but there is a radiator in the bathroom that also get heated too.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed how the water stays piping hot for a long time so we decided to turn off the boiler and only heat water through the fireplace. For the last week, we’ve had the boiler off and the water coming through the fire has kept us in hot water until today, when I’d run the washing machine a couple of times and we both wanted baths after some particularly mucky stuff. There wasn’t quite enough so we had to put the boiler on for an hour to get us back up to speed.

The point of this is that this means that for the most part, we’re now heating our water effectively completely free of charge given that firstly we have the fire lit anyway and secondly that we’ve been burning wood from the garden on the fire.

I like that a lot. By the time you add in the fact that it’s carbon neutral, whereas if we heat the water with the boiler we’re burning fossil fuel to do it then I’m really rather chuffed.

Last year, I was having a depressing evening in a Travelodge - anyone in the UK will know how miserable that is. Despite that, I worked hard for my shot.