Our late sixties Sydney architectural school house is nice to look at and lovely to live in, but it is showing its age, with lots of repairs and maintenance having been needed since we moved in. We've seen an awful lot of local plumber John, but he's always a welcome presence, and he's proved himself to be the prince of plumbers with his latest accomplishment.
I noticed a few weeks ago that there rarely seemed to be enough hot water to last us through to the evening, however little we seemed to have used in the morning. Of course I suspected Fenella of having secret long showers, but when she was away the other week it kept on happening. Eventually I checked the main meter and realised that we had a leak in a hot water pipe. We had been losing about 500 litres of water a day, stealing away our evening shower potential, and probably doubling our water and electricity bills (we'll find out soon). Oh no, another plumbing problem.
John came to have a look, and with the help of a specialist with various listening and tracing gismos, established that the leak was somewhere under the concrete slab, that all the pipes and all the joins were also under the slab, and the only way to rectify the situation was to replace almost the whole network of copper hot water pipes! This sounded like a big scary job, but John polished it off in a day and a half, after a couple of nights dreaming about it and perfecting the solution to the jigsaw puzzle involved.
We now have a new network of plastic pipes, going up into the loft and down through various cavities, backwards and forwards a bit, but all connected up to all the taps, which all now deliver hot water any time of day or night.
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