New Grump of the Day

[Feltwell]

Grump of the day ... ... ... Aerial installers

Can I add please:-

Sky TV installers - specifically ones who drill from the inside of the house out, blowing the face off a brick in the process. (During a previous owner's tenure.)

Gas installers - who to save drilling a hole through the wall, break a pane in the cellar window to put their pipe through, then put Perspex back in cut crudely around the pipe.

[Flyfisher]

Simple jobs that turn out anything but.

One of our gateposts broke yesterday - the post supporting a 3.5m wooden 'field gate', so quite a lot of strain for well over a decade now plus it was only pressure treated softwood so it was fairly inevitable it would fail sooner or later. So, no real reason for a grump . . . especially as I had some telegraph poles to hand (as one does) as a replacement as well as access to a mini-digger - so what could go wrong?

Well, I knew there was a mains gas pipe to the house in the vicinity of the gatepost so was very much 'on guard' in that respect. What I didn't know was that there was also the water pipe to the house even closer to the gatepost - close enough to be easily broken.

Fortunately, our water meter is halfway along our lane so I was able to turn off the water very easily and didn't have to involved the water company, which would no doubt have been quite costly ButI had to do a lot more digging than anticipated so as to expose enough of both ends of the broken pipe. Then a quick 25 mile round-trip to the nearest plumbing merchant for a couple of Philmac MDPE couplers and a short length of 25mm pipe. These are supposed to work with just hand-tightening but the first attempt leaked a little so I had to 'nip' them a little tighter with a couple of wrenches and the "job's a good-un" as they say in these here parts.

With that little diversion dealt with I managed to get the sawn-off telegraph pole in place of the old post and half bedded in. I decided to leave the water repair exposed overnight so I can check for leaks tomorrow morning, meaning I couldn't fully refill the hole and the final gate fitting will have to wait until then.

So all's well that ends well and at least it only cost me £10.92 in total, so it could have been a lot worse.

Actually, I was a little surprised it was a blue MDPE pipe rather than a black one - does anyone know when blue pipes were introduced?

[Feltwell]

Arrgghhhh!! What a pain FF. Could have been worse, but even so!

Reminds me of drilling a hole in a wall here several years ago, and finding that some eejit had ran a lighting cable at 45 degrees, as I hit it with the drill. Single storey part of the house with no ceiling hatch into the roof space, I had to cut a ruddy great hole in the ceiling to climb up there & isolate the cable!

[Feltwell]

Grump du jour...….

When you've stripped down a section of cast iron rainwater goods, due to a broken downpipe socket - then you go to refit them several days later and the S bend from the downpipe out to the gutter is the wrong size, in terms of offset.

You've clearly picked up the wrong one. But it must be that one - have you got any others kicking around? Aha, what's that, another one in the garage. You must have got them mixed up. So you take the other one and climb back up the scaffold, haul the very heavy and slightly precarious pipes back into place again, then realise it's the same size as the first one you tried.

The parts are heavy. Your arms ache. You are beginning to doubt your own sanity. Nothing has changed position. It must be the first one, surely, there are no others and you remember the bottom of it was a distinctive, broken shape.

After further doubts on your mental faculties, it suddenly dawns on you that the reason the pipe socket repair is needed is all down to a conversation from around 120 years ago, that went something like this:-

Arthur - "Bloody bend is the wrong size"

Albert - "Ahh sod it, it'll fit, just knock a bit off the bottom with your hammer and wedge it in at an angle".

Builders

[overlander matt]

Grump of the day ... ... ... Aerial installers

We're looking to install a new phone line soon and I wonder how flexible the installers are about cable routing... I have an ideal internal route for the cable that avoids the unpleasant clips all over the brickwork. The brickwork is still to be repointed too so I would rather not install the cable externally when a more convenient route exists inside.

Anyone have any relevant experience of this?

Thanks,

Matt

[Feltwell]

My experience is that as long as it's as easy for them as possible and not obviously unsafe, they'll be helpful and do as asked. If you've got a pre-prepared route with holes drilled, furniture moved, floorboards up or whatever I've always found the engineers to be helpful.

They've got a set amount of time allocated to each job so as long as it won't hold them up for the next job, i.e. take longer than a "standard" install, they're generally OK.

[Flyfisher]

In my limited experience they are very flexible.

We had two phone lines to our house, originally via a telegraph pole in our garden. The pole actually belonged to the electricity company for an overhead supply to the house and it was all a bit unsightly. I arranged to have the electricity supply buried (which they very helpfully did for free, with me digging the trench) and a new meter installed in an outbuilding so that we didn't have one of those ugly white boxes attached to the house, leaving just the phone line on the pole.

I called BT and explained that the pole they were hitching a ride on was being removed by the electricity company (which was sort of true), hoping that this would mean I wouldn't have to pay for the phone line to be moved - and it worked!

Someone from BT came out to have a look and we discussed how to route the new phone line. I explained that I wanted the new line (from another pole much further away) to be fixed to an outbuilding, then routed along the fascia board, then to enter the outbuilding before exiting under about 10m of grass then going up the side of the house and then running into the attic where I wanted the two new master sockets to be fitted because that was where I had had routed a number of Cat5e cables from around the house to form a sort of 'patch panel'.

So, a far from standard installation but the BT chappie didn't bat an eyelid except to say that the section under the grass would have to run in a suitable conduit, which he would supply the next day for me to bury and then call him when I was ready. True to his word, the conduit (basically a 2-inch black pipe with fairly thick wall size) turned up the following day and I was able to dig a suitable trench and install it in my own good time. When it was ready, I called BT and they subsequently turned up to remove the existing phone line via the pole and install the new one along the routing we had discussed right up to the two new master sockets in the attic.

I have to say I was very impressed with how helpful they were - in fact, both BT and the electricity company were really helpful and the end result was no more unsightly telegraph pole in the garden with overhead wires to the house. And all for no charge!

I won't mention the subsequent fun and games over the following few years when the electricity company 'inspection teams' came out each year to check the overhead cables that no longer existed, or the meter readers that insisted on reading the meter that had been removed when the new one was installed. That would be another long story.

[Me!]

We're looking to install a new phone line soon and I wonder how flexible the installers are about cable routing...

Yes, very flexible.
We had an existing phone line replaced due to it becoming faulty. I wanted the new line to follow the same route as the old one, but unfortunately a single storey extension has been built on the house since the old one was installed and that meant that to follow the old route whilst obeying modern health and safety rules would now require a cherry picker or scaffolding to get over the extension. And, they were happy to arrange a cherry picker for free, but it would have added a couple of weeks to the lead time and I didn't want to be without a phone and internet. So, I suggested that they fixed their new cable as far as they could get it until blocked by the extension, and then went and had a cup of tea and looked in the other direction for a few minutes, by the time they came back I would have routed the cable over the extension by leaning out of upstairs windows. Problem sorted.

[LadyArowana]

We're looking to install a new phone line soon and I wonder how flexible the installers are about cable routing...

Could you repeat the question, I’m not understanding this banter at all, is this some sort of retro electric telephone? Mine comes with a wire that goes into any normal socket for a while and then I can take it out in my bag

[Flyfisher]

Funny you should say that Milady, our telephones are exactly the same.
Perhaps 'phone line' should be redefined these days to mean 'broadband line'.
It's certainly the only thing that we use it for, like many (most?) of our friends.

[Bogart]

Simple jobs that turn out anything but.

One of our gateposts broke yesterday - the post supporting a 3.5m wooden 'field gate', so quite a lot of strain for well over a decade now plus it was only pressure treated softwood so it was fairly inevitable it would fail sooner or later. So, no real reason for a grump . . . especially as I had some telegraph poles to hand (as one does) as a replacement as well as access to a mini-digger - so what could go wrong?

Well, I knew there was a mains gas pipe to the house in the vicinity of the gatepost so was very much 'on guard' in that respect. What I didn't know was that there was also the water pipe to the house even closer to the gatepost - close enough to be easily broken.

Fortunately, our water meter is halfway along our lane so I was able to turn off the water very easily and didn't have to involved the water company, which would no doubt have been quite costly ButI had to do a lot more digging than anticipated so as to expose enough of both ends of the broken pipe. Then a quick 25 mile round-trip to the nearest plumbing merchant for a couple of Philmac MDPE couplers and a short length of 25mm pipe. These are supposed to work with just hand-tightening but the first attempt leaked a little so I had to 'nip' them a little tighter with a couple of wrenches and the "job's a good-un" as they say in these here parts.

With that little diversion dealt with I managed to get the sawn-off telegraph pole in place of the old post and half bedded in. I decided to leave the water repair exposed overnight so I can check for leaks tomorrow morning, meaning I couldn't fully refill the hole and the final gate fitting will have to wait until then.

So all's well that ends well and at least it only cost me £10.92 in total, so it could have been a lot worse.

Actually, I was a little surprised it was a blue MDPE pipe rather than a black one - does anyone know when blue pipes were introduced?

Wouldn't trust just nipping up by hand, especially as it is an out of sight repair, use a pipe strap after. I actually prefer the push fit ones. You did use pipe liners I assume. Been blue since end of 90s at least.

[paulc]

Brand new radiator to plumb in. Had been trying to avoid doing it for six months or more. Finally got some time off work and have been doing a little each day... Took three attempts to get a leak free solder joint between old and new pipes. Fitting the flooring, and I find one of the tails coming out of the radiator has a slow drip.. Despite tightening it up, removing and putting even more ptfe tape on, the flaming thing still drips....
Raid the spares box, and find an old tail to whack in. Touch wood, that seems to have cured it.

Why are these things sent to test our patience.

[Zebra]

Brand new radiator to plumb in. Had been trying to avoid doing it for six months or more. Finally got some time off work and have been doing a little each day... Took three attempts to get a leak free solder joint between old and new pipes. Fitting the flooring, and I find one of the tails coming out of the radiator has a slow drip.. Despite tightening it up, removing and putting even more ptfe tape on, the flaming thing still drips....
Raid the spares box, and find an old tail to whack in. Touch wood, that seems to have cured it.

Why are these things sent to test our patience.

Indeed. Plumbing is the most traumatic of jobs, in my opinion.

[Flyfisher]

Simple jobs that turn out anything but.

One of our gateposts broke yesterday - the post supporting a 3.5m wooden 'field gate', so quite a lot of strain for well over a decade now plus it was only pressure treated softwood so it was fairly inevitable it would fail sooner or later. So, no real reason for a grump . . . especially as I had some telegraph poles to hand (as one does) as a replacement as well as access to a mini-digger - so what could go wrong?

Well, I knew there was a mains gas pipe to the house in the vicinity of the gatepost so was very much 'on guard' in that respect. What I didn't know was that there was also the water pipe to the house even closer to the gatepost - close enough to be easily broken.

Fortunately, our water meter is halfway along our lane so I was able to turn off the water very easily and didn't have to involved the water company, which would no doubt have been quite costly ButI had to do a lot more digging than anticipated so as to expose enough of both ends of the broken pipe. Then a quick 25 mile round-trip to the nearest plumbing merchant for a couple of Philmac MDPE couplers and a short length of 25mm pipe. These are supposed to work with just hand-tightening but the first attempt leaked a little so I had to 'nip' them a little tighter with a couple of wrenches and the "job's a good-un" as they say in these here parts.

With that little diversion dealt with I managed to get the sawn-off telegraph pole in place of the old post and half bedded in. I decided to leave the water repair exposed overnight so I can check for leaks tomorrow morning, meaning I couldn't fully refill the hole and the final gate fitting will have to wait until then.

So all's well that ends well and at least it only cost me £10.92 in total, so it could have been a lot worse.

Actually, I was a little surprised it was a blue MDPE pipe rather than a black one - does anyone know when blue pipes were introduced?

Wouldn't trust just nipping up by hand, especially as it is an out of sight repair, use a pipe strap after. I actually prefer the push fit ones. You did use pipe liners I assume. Been blue since end of 90s at least.

Yes, it’s the out of sight that bothers me, which is why I haven’t filled in the hole yet - I keep looking to check if it’s leaking (it isn’t). I used a couple of pipe wrenches to tighten each joint and yes I used pipe liners as well.

What I can’t find anywhere online is any guidance about whether or not to protect the joints before filling in the hole. I’ve bedded drainage pipe work in shingle before now, but I’ve never laid a water supply pipe. The existing one seems to have just beeN buried in the soil. I was thinking about cutting two short lengths of guttering anD placing one below and one above the couplers before covering in sharp sand then replacing the spoil, which is a very chalky soil mixture.

Any better ideas, or does anyone know if there is a ‘standard practice’ for such repairs?

[Feltwell]

I've only ever seen them just buried FF.

A bit of sand over it wouldn't do any harm mind.