It’s been a particularly unpleasant few days up here on the hills. There has been an intermittent water leak from the mains just outside my neighbour’s house for ages. Severn Trent have dug up the road multiple times, and each time claimed they’d fixed it. Well, they clearly hadn’t, as they were back again yesterday to have another go.
It wasn’t actually too bad yesterday. The water pressure was low while they were doing the job, but it was manageable. The colour of the water was a bit off-putting though – frankly it looked like cat’s piss, not to put too fine a point on it. According to the Severn Trent website, that was “just” sediment from the pipes, and would clear in time. I played safe and drank bottled water which was much pleasanter.
At 0813 this morning, I got a text from Severn Trent saying “Good News” – they’d fixed the leak (again?) and my water supply would now start to return to normal. Then at 0822 I got another text saying that they’d found another problem in the area which they needed to work on. At 0825 the water went off without further warning. And stayed off until 1820 this evening.
I’m working from home at the moment, of course, and it’s quite eye-opening just how often one normally uses water in the course of a day. Not just showering, flushing the toilet or washing hands, but making cups of coffee to keep you going through the endless meetings. And rinsing the coffee cup out between meetings, cooking lunch, running the dishwasher, etc etc.
One of the very few positives about being in the middle of a pandemic is that I had plenty of alcohol sanitising gel that I could use to clean my hands instead of washing them under the tap. And I had a five litre bottle of spring water in the garage for emergencies, so I was able to use that for drinking and cooking. But it’s really not been a pleasant day!
When the water did come back on this evening, there was so much air in the pipes that when I flushed the toilet, it sounded like there were two hippos fighting in the cistern! And the kitchen tap was spitting and hissing like a particularly outraged cobra! Fortunately that seems to have calmed down a bit, and I’m hoping that the leaking mains now stays fixed for few years at least…..
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Thats you ‘Townies’ you see :). We had no water for about 10 days couple of years back. Farmer told water company a storm had damaged main pipe (main as in supplies entire region), they saved money by just bodging repair. When it did finally fail it was winter, with snow and ice and the pipe on top of Shap Summit, they struggled to get equipment up the mountain.
But i think it was £25 or £30 for every 24hrs with no water and loads of free water being handed out in towns/villages. Made quite a bit in compensation