Untimely leak

Saturday night we thought we’d sleep in the house, bedroom two. Take a tray with kettle and tea things, take an extra pillow and some water for the night and hopefully see the dawn in Greenwich mean time.

I’d set up temporary electrics, taken the tray and was going up to bed when I noticed a patch on the floor at the foot of the stairs and did a classic double take. It couldn’t be. It was. Damp; but where was it coming from? Up through the floor? The torch illuminated droplets running down the lighting cable (1st fix, not yet live) from upstairs – was the roof leaking? – and upstairs I followed the dampness back across the floor of the bathroom, along the base of the stud wall with bedroom two. There was no apparent source in the bathroom (could it be in the stud wall and already hidden?) but round in the bedroom the wet ran from the west wall. A push fit connector in the cold pipe feeding the bath upstairs and the shower room downstairs was dripping steadily, despite having been pressure tested by the engineer when the heat pump was plumbed in.

This wasn’t fair, it was bed time, I was tired.

Tough.

It took a few moments to order my thoughts and work out what to do then a few minutes to do it. Briefly: heat pump off, stop cock off; find a bucket and some rags; drain the leaking section of pipe from two nearby outlets (via emergency stop valves that I’d thought might be an unnecessary extravagance); disconnect the push fit junction and re-make it (Tash on one side of the wall, me on the other), ensuring the pipe was fully pushed home.

When I turned the stopcock back on the dripping had stopped, so I turned it off again for the night and we went to bed, relieved for the time being.

It’s been one of those weeks. I got as far as I could with the flue in the house before phoning Bonk and Co in Inverness, suppliers of stoves and flue. I’d been up the ladder twice outside to work out from the bolts in the metal roofing where the battens were and where the centre line of the flue would have to be to avoid them. I wanted the chimney emerging higher up the roof so that outside it appeared shorter and didn’t make the house look like a factory. Talking on the phone it transpired that extending the indoors diagonal part of the flue wouldn’t do. It exceeded the preferred twenty percent of the total flue length and the diagonal part would disappear, slanting through the ceiling into the thickness of the roof – oops – can’t do that! More checking then a revised sketch with amended measurements in an email to Bonk and Co.

I’d assembled the flue on the floor and now took repeated measurements – along with many sketches and much arithmetic, trying to work out how to bring the flue out of the roof between the next pair of battens lower down the roof. It was hard to tell exactly where this would put the stove – all is dictated by the battens and the available pieces of flue. Custom lengths don’t seem to be available but something fairly close is available as two pieces. As I’d be bringing the flue out of the roof lower down I’d need an extra length outside to compensate, to make it long enough still to end six hundred millimetres above the ridge. Waiting for a response to my email I put in some insulation near where the stove will go…

…and then got on with plumbing the shower valve in the bathroom, upstairs.

It was several weeks ago when I left this plumbing to finish outside tasks… where was I exactly?

It was a curious coincidence that my plumbing in the bathroom should be followed immediately by a leak next door, but the shower valve’s hot and cold supplies are currently disconnected from the rest of the house, so coincidence it must be.

Having made the remaining connections, which entailed some further drilling of holes, new support clips for the pipes and adjusting the timber plinth for the hand-set wall plate I fitted the taps and the chromed face plate, just to see. The plate was a few millimetres out of plumb. In use it will be seen against tiles with horizontal and vertical joints, against which its slight skew will show. Not good enough. A lot more fiddling and a bit of leverage and without disconnecting any pipes I managed to set and refix the board, on which the valve is mounted, straight. I pressure tested via the hot and cold supplies and I thought I’d got it, perfect first time, until I found wet on my finger tip and watched a tiny silver bud of water growing in the joint with the brass wall plate. I’d abused the connection, forcing the plate into position, and assume I’d upset the olive.

So much for indoor plumbing; on Monday I’ll retighten the new connections (new pipe, new olives) and pressure test again.

Outdoors – my metal guttering is somewhere in transit and I started to think about the black plastic soil (sewer) vent pipes that I have to fit up the walls of house and workshop. The workshop is straight forward (apart from having to miss the fan outlet above) and relatively hidden, but the house is a concern. As well as letting smells vent to atmosphere, where they’ll not be offensive, the open topped pipe ensures that water flowing going down the drain doesn’t create negative pressure and suck the water out of the traps under the sinks, bath, showers and other toilets, allowing bad smells straight into the house. As the house vent pipe will be close to an opening skylight it must rise well above it but, as with the flue/chimney, for practical and aesthetic reasons I’d like to minimise the height of pipes sticking out of the house. Internet research provided no definitive answers but I was hoping I could use a shorter pipe with a valve to admit air. An email to the building control officer got a quick and positive response: because workshop and house are on the same foul drain with the workshop at the ‘top’ end of it the house can have a valve so long as the workshop has the standard open pipe. Just what I wanted to hear!

Perhaps Saturday night’s leak hadn’t been so untimely. Had it occurred a few months later it could have been much harder to track down and remedy.

I took the flue to pieces and packed it all away again to keep it safe and give me more room, then sent off eight requests for prices on zinc worktops, thinking zinc would be a softer, more sympathetic finish than stainless steel, and maybe cheaper. Duncan replied by phone and said he was going to do a negative sales pitch. And he did, explaining that zinc is great in a commercial setting where it might get eight hours a day of constant spills, scraping and wiping, but in a domestic setting untended parts oxidise, leaving a gritty powder deposit. Also it will blister under a hot pan when a stainless steel surface wouldn’t. Impressively candid.

I was ready for a weekend.

Saturday promised and delivered sun and we drove north, twenty something miles to the far side of Loch Caolisport, through sublimely seasonal, sun-enhanced colours. Our walk took us up past the biggest magnolia and rhododendron trees I know and up over high moorland to the Point of Knap, where at half past three we sat on the wet road and ate lunch, finding chanterelle and hedgehog mushrooms on the way back.

The sound of wind and torrential rain on Saturday night made us feel snug in the house. We didn’t rise early as it was still raining and there was no sunrise, but by one o’clock there were blue patches and sun. We took an afternoon walk from home, hoping to find lithe withies to cut for making baskets. Instead we climbed two local hills, revelling in the intense colours and finding more chanterelles and hedgehogs. Our intended circuit was stymied by a deer fence so we retraced our steps and discovered an improved route for the next time we want to climb the hill. We also discovered two venerable trees. Tash held a leaf aloft ‘what’s this?’ Large, lanceolate and toothed, – sweet chestnut. We looked around – the closest tree rose vertically with a stout, straight trunk nearly a metre thick, ridged bark starting to assume the distinctive spiral appearance typical of older specimens. Beneath the second tree we started to see the spiky cases and in the fading light filled our pockets with chestnuts. Another treat.