Its been a funny old day.............

Simple small plumbing job for a regular customer, 10 year old detached
house. Not done any plumbing work there before however.

Could not find any internal stopcock anywhere. Looked in all the obvious
places, asked the neighbours where theirs were, customer didn't know.

No problem. I'll turn of the water outside. Customer happy with that.
Found a metal access cover, lifted it to find 4 x meters & 4 x plastic
stopcocks - not a label in sight, chamber about 22" deep, just about able to
reach them when kneeling directly over the chamber.

Cunning plan. Got the customer to stand by his kitchen cold tap, went
outside & called him on the mobile. Turned off stopcock one. No joy.
Opened it again.

Stopcock two, shut off, no difference. Opened it again and to my surprise a
jet of extremely cold water at surprisingly high pressure made contact with
most of my upper body. Second surprise was to find the top part of the
bloody stopcock in my hand.

It hadn't broken, simply come undone, not a dissimilar arrangement to a
normal tap jumper.

The chamber rapidly filled with water, overflowed and soaked my knees &
lower legs, thus completing the job of 100% saturating a handyman. Huge
quantities of water are now flowing down Robin Hood Drive.

I spent the next 35 mins trying to get the bugger back into place. Local
kids found this great fun, jumping it & out of the rapidly flowing torrent.
Eventually gave up, having lost all feeling in my right arm due to the
freezing water.

Customer was surprisingly calm. I got him to call the water company & spent
the next half an hour sitting in the van, engine running & heating on full
blast, wondering just how much this was going to cost me, and how it would
affect my public liability insurance premium. I did dry out quite a lot
though.

Water board bloke turned up & spent 20 mins trying to get the stopcock
screwed back in. He couldn't manage it either. I felt better.

Eventually he removed the water meter thus lowering the pressure
significantly & managed to screw it back in, muttering & cursing about 'poxy
plastic stopcocks, always doing this'.

He then checked the other three & found two of them (the two I hadn't yet
touched) hadn't been tightened up properly either. He used a giant basin
wrench type thing to tighten them up.

He put his tools away & returned from the van. I expected a large bill. To
my surprise & delight he profusely apologised for the inconvenience caused
by the poor installation! Result!

Never boring this handyman malarkey.........



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Dave - The Medway Handyman
www.medwayhandyman.co.uk
01634 717930
07850 597257