Sunday 4 November 2018

The Heater Instructions


Inadequate instructions annoy the hell out of me. I was trying to programme a new electric heater yesterday and became intensely frustrated. 


"Set the Mode to P," it says, "the numbers 1-7 corresponding to the days of the week from Monday to Sunday."

The natural assumption then is that 1 is Monday - that is until you realise that while there's a way of setting the time, there's no way of setting the current day as a reference point. The logical inference from that - after much head scratching - is that today (the day of programming) is 1 and not Monday, giving the lie to the literal instruction of the manual.

Then you have to programme each hour of the day, each day of the week. While this isn't too bad if using a preset, it's a nightmare if wanting the anti-frost setting, which doesn't register as anything against the hours axis, as the power is too low to show a telltale, and the entire weekend is anti-frost setting, as are the weekday evenings - ergo you are programming blind.

It took about an hour for Hay and I to figure it all out - and if you get a power cut, which we get quite a lot, then all programming is lost and you have to reprogramme the whole week.


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