Plumbing trouble

Well, it had seemed too good to be true. We have had very few problems with our house so far and felt that the person who lived here before us, while not spending much money on decoration and furnishings, had always kept the really important things in the house up-to-date. We’ve got a recently-installed boiler, modern circuit-breakers for our electricity, the dormer windows have been recently re-felted and our soffits have all recently been PVCed. This opinion changed slightly when my wife felt water dripping on her head.

A couple of weeks ago, we set about starting to get our house ship-shape by decorating the top room. The finishing touch was (and still is) going to be some lovely maple laminate flooring. We’re pretty good at doing basic DIY but as we’re both so busy, tackling a job like fitting laminate flooring isn’t something we’ve got the time to do. So, my wife arranged to work from home and we employed the great guys at Fitafloor to come and put it down for us.

We’d kept the flooring that we had bought in one of our bedrooms, which we don’t enter much. The guys were finishing up, my wife went into the bedroom and felt the ceiling dripping on her head. On closer inspection, she also found that water was eminating from the light switch – not normally the way you plumb things in! The water and electricity mains were promptly switched off and British Gas were called, as we have both central heating and plumbing and drains cover with them.

When the British Gas plumber arrived, he made it clear that he didn’t want to be there. After ascertaining that we had been installing laminate flooring, he basically told my wife that it was their fault as they had probably put a nail through one of the pipes and therefore he didn’t have to do anything. After hooking up our central heating pipework to our hosepipe to drain outside and saying that he wouldn’t hang on for the Fitafloor team to return, he promptly left.

Fitafloor were great – the poor guys were just arriving home after they had finished at our place when my wife gave them a call and explained the situation. They promptly came all the way back to our house and proceded to take up the floor that they had just finished installing! Once the floorboards were up it was obvious that the pipes weren’t looking very good but it clearly wasn’t their fault – laminate flooring doesn’t take many nails to install and they hadn’t put anything through the floorboards. So, after that, they too left.

I finally arrived home as it was getting dark and found my wife preparing candles. We ordered a pizza and waited for another guy from British Gas to arrive. This time we had Dave, a very friendly and competent fellow, who listened sympathetically to what had gone on. After checking the copper pipes out and finding a number of holes, he fitted a valve for us so that we could isolate the central heating and arranged for somebody to visit a couple of days later remove the faulty length of pipe and replace it with some new copper. He even followed up the next day with a friendly call to let us know what was going on.

While Dave was around, we took time to check out where the leaks were coming through. The evidence is that it isn’t something that has happened just recently – in the bedroom that had dripped on Katie’s head we found that the corner of the room had been the recipient of a quick patch-up job where there must have been a leak before. We also found that there has definitely been a leak above the toliet door before (which looks much worse in the photo, thankfully) and a little damp in the main bedroom. Dave also was concerned that we have very orange water in the central heating expansion tank, which he says suggests that there is oxygen in the system.

The guys that eventually came round to fix the leaky pipes were from Promark Accord, a company that British Gas often pass repair work onto. They seemed very good and gave me a second opinion on what the state of the pipes were. Although they thought it very unusual that straight lengths of copper should have holes in it they didn’t think the orange water was anything to worry about. We’ve now got a new section of pipe but still have our floorboards up and everything in a mess as we wait to see if it leaks again.

After we put the water back on we noticed that in an unrelated incident we had small black dots appearing from our cold tap in the bathroom. Dave thought that this was because we have some old iron pipes in the house which have been rusting…the turning off and on of the mains will have disturbed the corrosion.

Overall, it’s a little bit worrying. Although the leak seems to have stopped I can’t help thinking whether we should get another opinion on the state of the pipes and the central heating. If they need replacing throughout, I’d be happy to know that we found out before we decorated the rest of the house – it would be awful to have a major problem once we’d finished everything. My little reseach on the web has found out some worrying evidence that the distance between the open vent and expansion tank has caused something called pumping over, the first evidence of which is pinholes in radiators (or in our case, pipework). What to do? I’m thinking along the lines of getting somebody to take a good look but I’m worried that it’s not in their interest to tell us we don’t need anything to be done…