When Tom was originally in doing the plumbing back when we first mover in we discovered
that 1) the stop cock was in a super inconvenient location under the front door and completely seized and
2) whoever last did the work decided to go with a strange combination of lead and
copper.
Everything inside the house was now copper but the main supply from the meter was still in lead. With everything now dug up, this was the perfect chance to make our house 100% COPPER (aka regular unleaded). This sounds a lot more exciting than it really is....
I asked Michael to dig us trench to access the old pipe expose the old piece of lead. It had definitely seen better days and looked bit like a grass snake that tried to mate with a live power cord.
The plan was for Tom to then come by and install some 25mm blue polypipe and relocate the stop cock to somewhere more accessible like where the old gas meter used to be.
The problem was torrential rains. The kind that we don’t typically get in London. The kind that can really screw up even the best of plans. So on the Wednesday it rained and it rained and it rained …
Our trench eventually became a moat. Cool for castles, but not cool when you want to replace a pipe under the house.
So Wednesday was a wash (quite literally). Tom also ended up being swamped (yes, pun intended) on another job and couldn't make it anyway – a good thing as he would have needed SCUBA gear to finish our job
So things had to wait until Thursday. Tom came by and ran the new polypipe into the house and put the stop cock a much more accessible place - pretty much where the gas meter was before.
So now we have Evian spewing out of our taps with enough pressure to run a small hydro station (this may be slightly exaggerated). But at least we can shut off the water without having to stick our hands into a hole in the ground out front of the house.
With pipe in and the moat drained things were finally ready now for the walkway and driveway to go down.
No comments:
Post a Comment