switching back from solar to woodburner

Today the cold and rain proved too much. Even yesterday's optimism couldn't power the solar panel sufficiently to heat our water. Monsieur Morin, the local electrician, who I asked help advise on hideous electricity charges, looked at me in a perplexed way when I explained that after the hot weekend I had changed to the solar panel. 'But your house is cold', he said - a statement I thought unneccesary as I spoke to him in muffled tones from the depths of several layers of wool. (Monsieur Morin thinks we are a bit simple and possibly even deficient since he took our dishwasher away for repair and discovered an enormous rat living inside it). It was agreed, anyway, that some electricity might be conserved if I lit the woodburning central heating system again- a task that was mildly depressing as I had reconciled the daily loading up of the beast to the past now that spring had well and truly arrived. The present weather made me regret we did not look into a wind powered system to augment our electrcity. It was certainly sufficiently squally and unpleasant to imagine we could have sourced quite a bit of energy via that route. Added to this misery was the struggle to get the tax for last year somehow ordered. Amazing how many other things I managed to get done in order to avoid this task. I changed bed linen, vacuumed upstairs and down - washed the floor - made various important calls, tried to poke Teresa off her nest (the eggs are well and truly beyond their sell by date) and inspected the plants in the greenhouse. The fact that all my cucumber plants had been guiloteened by an avaricious slug made the day seem ominous. Where did all that lovely weather go?