Tuesday 4th of March 2014 – Leaky pipe, lucky escape!
I was dreaming last night when something really noisy intruded upon it, like a food processor was turned on, or a vacuum cleaner… I woke up, at 2 in the morning, the noise was still there. A really loud electric humming. Well, really loud to my ears, no one else in the house woke up because of it.
At first I thought it might have been from outside, maybe some engineering works or crazy late DYI. I got up to have a look, couldn’t see anything out of the window. Then I thought maybe the freezer in the utility room was being extra noisy and maybe it was about to explode. So I went to check. It seemed ok. Went in the living room and the noise diminished a bit…
Then I went to the kitchen and noticed the rug in the hallway was soaking wet! I thought maybe the bathroom upstairs was leaking, but the ceiling looked dry. At that point I went back upstairs and I got J up – we somehow concluded the noise/leak must be coming from the pipes in the downstairs loo, i.e. behind the box they built to house the heating and sink taps. J said ‘we need to turn the mains off’.
So we turned off the mains water in the kitchen (since we had a water softener fitted in that’s pretty easy to do, before that it would have been impossible as the tap was all rusty, broken – and very hard to get to!). J wanted to call Terry (bathroom job manager) at 2:30 in the morning, but I suggested to wait until the morning, as it would do no good apart from unnecessarily stress him out! And we wanted him to send someone to fix this, at no extra cost, as part of the 1 year guarantee. So we dried everything out – thankfully that rug was there, it soaked most of the water and didn’t ruin the floor – and went back to sleep. Obviously after that I couldn’t sleep for ages! Neither could J.
This morning we ripped the box out (no easy way to screw it out, we did the best we could) at my insistence, I wanted to see what it was before they came here to fix it. I tightened the joints and voila! The leak stopped. Thank god it was such an easy fix, and also how lucky we were home when it happened and that it made such a strange noise!!!! Imagine if we’d been away. Leaving it open for today to see if it leaks again then tomorrow J arranged for someone to redo the box. They better put an access panel in this time.