Two holes

There have been various Thames Water outings in the neighbourhood over the past few weeks, but yesterday, following the telephone call reported at reference 1, it was our turn again for an 08:00 start with two pleasant young men.

First off, there was some spray can action on the pavement outside, one result of which is that we now know where our electricity comes into house, before coming up under the stairs.

We then had a hole in the pavement, next to the meter, followed by the announcement that there was something wrong between the meter and the house. Apparently, both lead and copper pipes in the ground degrade over time - whereas I had thought that copper at least lasted a very long time.

Today, Bing turns up plenty of DIY stuff about the life expectancy of copper pipes, for example reference 2, and the story there seems to be maybe 50 years or more, possibly significantly less if the ground water or the supply water is either excessively alkaline or acidic.

This announcement was followed by a second hole, this one just in from of the jasmine growing up the front of the house, some mole action and a length of blue pipe running between the two new holes. After which we still had a leak, to be followed up by further Thames Water action in due course. 

We had no water for maybe a couple of hours.

They made a decent job of clearing up and of putting the holes back together again and the grass will probably recover fast enough.

The meter hole snapped above, while wet, was not full of water, which was an improvement. And while there was no little propellor whizzing round when water was running, as there had been in a meter past, the digits were moving slowly, with maybe one step every few seconds. There was also a rather faster, faint ticking, perhaps today's version of the propellor.

But while we may still have a leak, there is no hissing to be heard in our downstairs toilet (where the internal stopcock is to be found), hissing which I had first noticed months ago, and which until hitherto had been put down to a leaking meter. Another sign of improvement.

PS 1: early this morning, there were some odd bursts of a faint whirring to be heard in the kitchen. I could not decide whether these were coming from inside the house or outside. Given that I have heard no such whirrings since, maybe I was not properly awake.

PS 2: a new bit of information. A neighbour had had problems with a lead water pipe running from road to house, so it is likely that our house was originally lead too, replaced by copper in a 1960s refurbishment & extension campaign. Plus BH thinks she remembers something of the sort from another neighbour. We are not the only ones with water supply problems.

PS 3: a job for mañana: turn off the stop cock in the house and see if that turns the ticking of the meter in the road off or not. This would test the possibility of a small leak inside the house.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/more-musak.html.

Reference 2: https://www.howtolookatahouse.com/Blog/Entries/2018/7/what-is-the-average-life-expectancy-of-copper-pipe.html.

Group search key: twsk.