Roly wrote:

None wrote:


How serious was your problem i.e. was your actual drinking water
running brown, because ours isn't, though there is a definite yellowy
colour to it. How did the council/water company fix it? Did they have
to dig up your whole driveway?

We don't really know how long it had been going on for before we
detected it. We would occasionally spot bits of grit in a bowl or the
sink when you wouldn't expect there to be any, but we did note that a
lot had built up in the washing machine filter, trapped by the fluff
that accululates there. It looked quite different to how it normally
did, but even then didn't think anything of it.

The big problem came when the bath became very slow to fill and
eventually we discovered that the cold water pipe to the tap was a long,
horizontal run and it had mostly clogged up with sediment and was hardly
letting water through.

At that point we started to wonder where the contamination was coming
from. I fitted a particle filter just after the house stop cock and it
soon became obvious that the muck was coming in from the mains.

Once the pipe was fixed, the filter never again trapped any significant
amount of muck.

I should have added that the pipe was replaced by only digging up two
small bits of the drive. The job was done while I was out, so I didn't
see how they did it, but they dug a small hole near the stop cock in the
pavement and a small hole where the water pipe enters the house, but the
forty feet or so between those two points wasn't disturbed.