..that it has been a really bad day.
I was “Encouraged” to attend the weekly “Thursday Shopping” because it is the BH W/E and it would be rammed full and she also wanted some gardening stuff from another shop.
We got home in the rain and the Waterboard were still there and the hole was deeper. They knocked on the door to advise that “my” outlet from the main was leaking and they would need to cut off the street supply to renew it.
They renewed it but when they reconnected there was no rising-main pressure at all. After some discussion they declared that they would replace the street stop-cock on my property and if that didn’t fix it they would replace the internal stop-cock in my house.
Basically their works had broken my supply. They have just knocked after replacing the garden stop-cock and I have re-tested and it all seemed fine. Phew!
However, after the water board folks had finally filled in the hole in our front garden and departed at about 3:15 Reta was out in the hallway and could hear a tapping noise.
She went upstairs to find water dripping through the landing ceiling light and out of the loft-hatch onto the floor.
Lots of loud shrieks of “Dan, Dan…come quick!” I turned off the cold rising main at the indoor stop-cock and told Reta to run the hot & cold taps in the bath room.
We put towels down to soak up the dripping water.
I think that the lack of any mains water and the demands on the water in the system had dropped it to a level it does not normally drop to and it managed to jam the ball-valve.
So, the ball valve in the cistern had failed and the lack of overflow piping (removed by the builder when doing the upstairs extension in 1997) meant that the overflow just dumped onto the attic floor.
Weirdly, I had a premonition about this earlier this week, spooky or what?
Then I spent the rest of the afternoon replacing the failed ball valve, sadly, the fibre washer on the pipe-joint to the new ball valve just disintegrated and so It was after 5 by then and I had to do a dash to Screwfix to get a pack of them.
Finally got it all leak-free and shutting off properly at 6:45 PM.
I will doubtless be up there over Easter fitting overflow pipework.