Plumbing the depths

Last night was fun. I've posted before about the shonky quality of the pipework in my house, but that was all winter freeze-associated, I don't know what triggered last night's water torture.

And water torture it was; it started out as the drip-drip-drip of the classic Chinese method but thanks to some help by yours truly, it rapidly graduated to out and out water-boarding.

Note to any "But water-boarding isn't torture" apologists reading this. Yes it is. It was certainly torture enough for the Americans to charge Japanese soldiers with war crimes for performing it on US servicemen during world war two, so what's changed since then? Don't give me that "post-9/11 world" nonsense either; it's all an excuse to do things in direct contradiction to our society's moral values whilst hiding the hypocrisy behind a fig-leaf of spin and weasel words. If you are going to torture people, at least have the moral courage to admit that's what you're doing, instead of sounding like a six-year old making excuses for why their baby sister has a black eye.

Aaanyway, plumbing.



Last night, I heard a horrible drippy sound coming from inside a pipe run in the kitchen. I'd heard it once or twice before, but never quite this drippy so I did the sensible thing and took a claw hammer to the wooden ducting the pipes run through.

Smashy smashy!

After Hammer-time stopped (90's parachute-panted rapper references are still cool, right?), I found two water pipes running through the duct, one of which was notably wet, with drips of water coming from up high. The U-clip thingies that held the wet pipe had mostly rusted through and about one drip of water dripped down the pipe every couple of seconds. Up near the top of the pipe where it comes through the ceiling, there's a golf-ball sized lump in the pipe and the drips are forming there from some kind of pinhead leak.

Interesting fact: If you are on the dole and need plumbing repairs, better hope you don't own your own home. If you do, better hope you can swim, because it turns out you can't get any kind of help fixing the leak, but you can get cavity wall insulation or a new boiler. Hooray!

So what did I do? INTERNET!

After a bit of a root round, INTERNET tells me that one way to fix a leak is to cut out a piece of hosepipe, slice it open, wrap it round the pipe, attach jubilee clips... oh forget it, too complicated and it won't cope with the funny golfball lump. What's fix number 2? EPOXY PUTTY!

Epoxy putty is great stuff. You knead the two magic plasticine-like sticks together until they change colour, then shape in into whatever you need. After about ten minutes, it's as hard as steel!

Strangely, B&Q doesn't sell epoxy putty, and I'm not going to the ScrewFix Direct trade-counter, as that's full of real plumbers who will laugh at me, so instead I go to Halfords, because car types use epoxy putty too, apparently.

I don't know, I only fix computers, not cars.

Eventually, I get home and apply the putty. Infuriatingly, although it'll dry underwater, it won't stick to something that's wet. The golf-ball lump becomes a tennis-ball sized lump as I slap on more and more putty.

No use. Leaky-leaky.

Next comes the gaffer tape. Maybe if I wrap everything in loads and loads of gaffer tape, it'll stop leaking?!

No such luck. By this point, the leaking is getting a lot worse, with two or three drops a second.

I start to panic. Aside from anything else, I'd found out that the golf-ball lump was actually a soldered or "sweated" joint where nineteen-seventies cowboy plumbers had joined the old nineteen-thirties lead piping to the new copper piping they were fitting. If you get a modern actually good plumber to look at that, they *by law* are required to strip out the lead piping and replace it with copper. Of course, the homeowner is also required to pay for it all.

I peel off all the gaffer tape. The big blob of putty simply falls off the pipe and the golf-ball now has a visible crack in it that is starting to leak big-time.

I panic big-time too. Turning off the water supply turns out to be impossible as you need a special key to open the cover on the mains water supply because some idiot didn't bother to fit a normal stopcock inside the house.

Next idea is PVC insulation tape. I stick it on the pipe above the leak where it's dry and wrap it really tight, slowly winding it down over the leak, past it, then back up and down until I run out of tape.

So far, the dripping has stopped. Hooray!

And that was my day. Tomorrow, I shall be going out to buy some maaagical tape that slowly merges over time into a big solid lump of silicone, like Pamela Anderson.