Dodgy plumbing
Friday, 9th January 2009 by tomLife is never dull, especially if you live in a converted Victorian house whose structure and fittings are anything from 0 to 120 years old. Our most recent adventure has been tracking down (over a period of months!) a leak coming through our bathroom ceiling light fitting.
We started by suspecting our own plumbing, and vetoing that by switching our water off and observing that the leak continued.
The suspicion next fell on our upstairs neighbour’s worn out sealant in the shower/bath. So our neighbour fixed the sealant. The leak continued.
(We learned later when we removed some wall panelling and found dried up water damage that this was indeed causing a different, smaller leak which we had indeed fixed).
We found a bad seal on the waste pipe from the upstairs sink, but that wasn’t it. We also fixed the upstairs toilet cistern which was very slowly pouring water through the overflow pipe. Still the leak continued.
So we became cunning. We mounted a webcam and a mini-Maglight on a stick, attached the webcam to the laptop and made ourselves a crude endoscope, which just fit through the light fitting in the bathroom ceiling, and also through the hole in the old Victorian ceiling above our 1980s plasterboard ceiling. Paydirt!
Our little camera showed us a badly corroded pipe which had been sealed off in the most rough and ready fashion.
But how to access the pipe? It was under a tiled floor and above two ceilings! Well, part of the problem solved itself because the Victorian ceiling collapsed onto the plasterboard ceiling which in turn became very soggy and was in clear need of repair itself. So in the end it was a no-brainer, we had to go through the ceiling.
And so today the plumber came and that is what he did, and this is the piece of pipe he removed:
I’ll leave it to you to think up adjectives describing the mindset that puts such a piece of workmanship between a tiled floor and a double ceiling.
January 10th, 2009 at 5:57 am
Brilliant detective work – I love the DIY endoscope, you’ve inspired me in a related project. What was the pipe for originally, that it was still dripping? Someone must have been the recipient of tons of negative plumbing karma.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:54 am
As far as I can make out the pipe was laid as part of the central heating. I suspect it’s never been used, though. It looks like the builders who did the conversion from house to flats in the 80s laid one more pipe than they needed, plumbed it in to the supply and then decided to do a bodge job of sealing it off. Probably because the flooring guys were coming and they didn’t have the right endpiece to seal it off. I understand that there was a wild craze of cowboy builders in the 80s doing flat conversions to Victorian houses and this sort of thing wasn’t that uncommon.