Water problem fixed

Our “home serve” guy turned up this morning and he was amazing. He didn’t want to disturb our bricks on our patio if at all possible. He managed to get his hand in to the stop cock and with the help of a torch and eventually my tweezers he got all the bits out through the narrow space.

He put the new tap on and it still didn’t work. He said he had never come across this before and he was rather perplexed.

He then listened to the water running at the stop cock at the end of our neighbour’s drive and said that it was much louder there. He then did what three water board men hadn’t done and lifted the drain cover on our neighbour’s drive. The water was running through the open pipe like a river.

Running water in the open pipe inside the drain

It’s difficult to see but the red colour at the back is the pipe and the white shine is the running water. This showed that the water was running from outside our neighbour’s house towards the road.

The guy then prodded the soil on their side of the fence and water immediately bubbled up and ran down their side of the fence.

Water coming up from our neighbour’s side of the fence

Water running down our neighbour’s side of the fence

At this point the guy said that he would need to lift our neighbour’s flag to get to the t junction which was where he was sure the leak was but he would need their permission. We had taken their phone number that morning so we called them. Once he had their permission he set about lifting the flag which had been fitted by “dot and dab” so was easy to lift.

At this point I had to go and deliver my lunches. When I returned at lunch time it was fixed. The neighbour’s slab was back down and didn’t look any different to before.

The pipe

This was the section of pipe that the guy cut out.

The offending hole in the pipe

This was the hole that had caused all the trouble. We were so relieved that the problem had been fixed without causing any damage.

The guy said that there was no point in damaging our patio to fix our stop cock as we can use the one at the end of our neighbour’s drive if we ever need to turn off the water. It turns the water off to all four houses. Ours may never have worked so he said to just leave it be.

We were so lucky to have had a guy that really cared about causing as little damage as possible. He said it is always best to look at the drain first and we feel a bit cross that the water board didn’t do this.

We are just so happy to have it all resolved and no damage is really an added bonus.