It wouldn't be Christmas without a home-maintenance crisis...

So we spent yesterday puttering around the house, reading, cooking, watching the dogs sleep, and staying indoors because it was 12°F outside. Suddenly I heard a ticking noise, quite regular, about 2/second. I figured it was probably a radiator warming up, but thought I should check anyway... and there was water dripping from the living-room ceiling onto the living-room floor. I pushed the leather sofa out of the way, ran to the kitchen and grabbed a bowl to catch the drips, and ran upstairs to see where it was coming from. I didn't see any puddles on the bedroom floor, but there was a pile of dark sawdust near one end of the bedroom radiator, and it appeared that there had been water damage to the parquet floor tiles around the radiator (2-3 feet horizontally away from the place where water was dripping from the living room ceiling. About this time the dripping from the living room ceiling slowed and stopped. So we went back to our reading, somewhat nervous that the ceiling was going to fall in.

( the gory details )

The "right" answer is probably to replace the whole radiator, as we did in the spare bedroom as part of its renovation two years ago: modern radiators are smaller and work better than these 50-plus-year-old ones. But that's not happening for the next few days, probably not the next few months. And I was planning to put in an electric heat pump anyway, on the theory that they're more energy-efficient and don't generate CO₂, much less CO, inside the house, and they double as air conditioners.