DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD
Bad Plumbing
Regulations broken:BS6700:1997 Clause 3.1.7

My neighbour recently asked if we could repair a few plumbing issues at his property. I went over to take a look and found a dead electric shower and a few taps that needed replacing. I was then shown a water meter installation that looked like Niagara Falls! Water appeared to be coming out of every connector. The leaks had been getting worse and before anyone noticed the kitchen unit surrounding the pipe work had been damaged beyond repair. The cause of the problem?

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The cause of this problem was  the substandard installation of a water meter by the Utilities Provider. The sketch above show the scale of stupidity by the installer. The pipe work coming into the property is lead with a short piece of copper sweated into the top. That used to feed the entire property. Our maniac meter man had to install a meter QUICKLY (I’ll explain why later) so the easiest method was to cut the existing pipe work, place the meter out to one side and then connect the meter to the house.

The Poorly Laid Plan Of this Man was to create a pipe work cantilever with the heavy meter hung and unsupported about 18 inches away from the original cut. Actually, the meter is supported by the soft lead pipe which has since been slowly developing small micro-fractures which are now leaking. The original pipe work also fed the kitchen basin above the meter by way of a T in the original pipe worm. Our man’s way of repairing this was to add a flexi hose connector which in turn was connected to a compression straight connector which was in turn connected to the installers new pipe work. Unfortunately the olive in the compression connector had not sealed properly and was leaking as well!

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We’ve since repaired the leaks to all copper pipe work but the lead pipe will create a problem as the kitchen unit will have to be removed, the wall and floor chiseled away to see if we have enough good lead to make a repair. If not then we’ll have to find the pipe outside, dig a trench into the kitchen and lay a new pipe with a new stop tap. All of that work could have been avoided by an installer who new what he was doing.

As I mentioned above our installer had one hing on his mind and that was to work quickly. Why? Because these guys are on piece work. That’s why they don’t care and that’s why they do shoddy work. They get paid by how many meters they install so they try and install lots of them. Unfortunately you get some guys who don’t care beyond no leaks on the day mixed in with the guys who do good work.

We have seen the same thing happening with gas work too. We registered a complaint with CORGI about two years ago. Installers were putting in replacement gas meters and then telling the home owner, with no advanced notice mind you, that they had to everything tested by a CORGI Registered installer before they could re-connect the appliances to the new meter! So we have folks calling us up when they get home from work at six in the evening telling us they have no gas. Sadly we never did get an answer back from CORGI.

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