The boiler coughed again last night. One of those deep, metallic clunks that makes you hold your breath to see if it’s going to finish the cycle or die on the spot. It’s been doing that since I moved into this flat, and every time I hear it I wonder if tonight’s the night I end up with cold showers and a furious call to the landlord.
This thing must be twenty years old, maybe more. The sticker with the model number has peeled off, and the instruction manual’s long gone. It hums like a fridge and rattles like a washing machine with loose coins inside. Half the time I think it’s going to explode, the other half I think it’s laughing at me.
What makes it worse is walking past the new towers down by Diagonal Mar. Glass boxes, shiny banners, “eco-friendly living” plastered across the hoardings. They’ve got boilers you can control from your phone, apparently. Heat pumps with acronyms I don’t even recognise. And yet inside my so-called “traditional” flat, I’m trying to coax hot water out of a relic that should probably be in a museum.
That’s the part that makes me laugh and swear in equal measure. All those WSB14 promises about retrofitting, efficiency, transformation — ten years on, my neighbour Pepi’s plugging in space heaters, my boiler’s rattling itself into early retirement, and the city’s housing stock is still a patchwork quilt of ancient systems nobody maintains properly.
I do know there are grants and programmes. Spain’s got them, and so does the EU. The Instituto para la Diversificación y Ahorro de la Energía puts out guidance on efficient heating, replacements, subsidies. I’ve read the leaflets. I’ve even filled in a form once, then gave up when they asked for paperwork my landlord laughed at. That’s the other truth: tenants don’t get to make these calls. Landlords don’t want to spend unless they absolutely have to.
Meanwhile, the boiler clunks along. At three in the morning you can hear it echo through the stairwell like someone dropping weights. Pepi bangs on my door sometimes, convinced I’m “breaking pipes.” I’ve explained it’s just the old beast firing up, but she shakes her head. She wants it gone as much as I do.
The irony is that sustainable building isn’t about futuristic towers — it’s about this. It’s about whether people like me can get a hot shower without the system rattling the neighbours awake. It’s about whether Pepi can warm her flat without burning half her pension. It’s about the thousands of old boilers and heaters scattered through Barcelona, limping along, churning out bills and emissions in equal measure.
I stood in the kitchen last night, listening to the clunk, and thought: this is what WSB14 never touched. Not the lived stuff. Not the appliances bolted to damp walls in ordinary flats. They wanted transformation at scale. What we needed was maintenance, repair, and landlords who’d answer their phones.
I’ll probably keep coaxing this boiler for another winter. I’ll keep dreaming about heat pumps I can’t afford. And I’ll keep walking past those shiny towers, shaking my head at the gap between their marketing banners and my reality.
If Emily ever comes to visit, she’ll probably laugh. “Dad, how do you live like this?” I’ll shrug and say: same as everyone else. With patience, with swearing, and with a boiler older than some of those towers they’re so proud of.
