"NY" wrote in message
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"S Viemeister" wrote in message
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On 12/14/2017 12:09 PM, Rob Morley wrote:
On Wed, 13 Dec 2017 12:25:03 -0500
S Viemeister wrote:

I wanted to turn off the water before the rising main under the sink
(it's begun to drip a bit) and when I got out my trusty long-handled
stopcock turner, I found that the outside stopcock appeared to be
'frozen' - it hasn't been used in at least 14 years. I don't want to
force it. It's down a fairly deep hole, so access isn't easy.

The last time I turned off our external stopcock, which is buried in the
back garden and operated with a long handle, the whole thing unscrewed
when I turned it back on again. Fortunately there's a new one in the
street since they replaced the main.

That's the sort of thing I'm afraid might happen.

When we needed to turn of our water to replace either a leaking
electrically-controlled valve in the shower or else the ball valve in the
loo, the stop tap under the sink had seized. I fractured the brass tap
handle in trying to turn it, and rounded off the flattened end of the
spindle that it had been attached to. We needed to call in a plumber who
had to turn off the water company stop tap in the street so he could cut
the rising main in the house and insert a second tap downstream of the
seized one. He did that rather than remove and replace the old tap because
one end was welded onto lead pipe and he have had to dismantle the kitchen
cupboards to work on it.

Tuning off the stop tap in the road was fun because one tap controls all
the water to two terraces each of three houses, so we had to warn everyone
that their water would be off for a little while.

Is there any reason why a shared supply from a single stop tap in the road
would mean that we couldn't have a water meter? Surely they'd just insert
it downstream of the point where the common pipe diverges into the feeds
to each house, probably close to the point where it rises into the house.

Really depends on how practical it is to have the water meters there.

Evidently not because the water company say that a shared stop tap means
you can never have a meter.

That might just be a quick and dirty blanket approach
done instead of the much more expensive approach
of deciding if its practical to have meters after it.