Another Shocker

No wonder there was a blockage in this wash room with this curious section of waste pipe. It was all revealed when the boxing in was removed during a maintenance call. An electrician once said to me "Plumbers only need to know one thing; s**t runs down hill". If that's true then whoever fitted this wasn't a Plumber! This is a typical 'bread & butter' day to day type maintenance job for us. It clearly wasn't feasable to simply unblock and leave this as it would have soon blocked up again. The second picture shows the inside of this pipe.

We renewed all the pipe back to the soil pipe connection, clipped it securely and fitted a rodding point for future maintenance. A good maintenance engineer should always leave things in better shape than he found them.

Commercial Installations

Here's John Mitchell swapping a pump in a commercial boiler house of a large sheltered accomodation scheme we look after. The scheme was built in 1984 so the old Crane pump replaced lasted about 27 years. There are two pumps; a duty pump and a stand by pump. Each six months when we carry out maintenance we switch over the duty pump so they wear evenly and don't seize. The orange coloured pump below is one of the original Crane pumps which are now obsolete hence the new model we are fitting. The new pump is fitted on 3" flanges and has a maximum speed of 2800 lt / minute. The rest of the system comprises of 3 Hamworthy boilers all linked together and on a shared flue system. The main system pipework is in 3" steel which circumnavigates the ceiling void of the upper floor of the building, dropping down to feed each flat in groups of 3 {ground floor, 1st floor & 2nd floor} where it enters each flat in 22mm copper tube. I enjoy this type of work as it is what I was trained in as an apprentice many years ago. We are always keen to quote for this type of work.

Accidental Damage

Just when I thought it we were over all the burst pipes and floods of the severe weather of the winter another similar emergency crops up. This was accidental damage rather than ice damage. An alarm installer was drilling through a wall to route one of his cables when disaster struck. Two plastic heating pipes had been installed behind the skirting board. There was nothing to indicate pipes were hidden there and plastic pipes like these cannot be picked up like copper ones, with a metal detecting tool. On the new build houses we recently completed all of the hidden plastic pipes had to be wrapped with a foil like metalic tape so they could be traced before drilling into walls. This is a good idea as a lot of accidents like this could be prevented. Luckily for my friend the alarm installer this one didn't cause too much damage and was an easy repair.