La vie à la petite ferme: The water

Thursday 24 May 2012

The water

Before we arrived we were expecting some kind of water incident as the water comes from a spring and is pumped up to the house and over the winter there were sustained periods of below -10 C (unusually cold).
When we arrived we tried the water in the kitchen tap and were amazed when it worked.
However water refused to come out either the hot tap or the taps in the bathroom and when those taps where turned on there was a worrying rushing noise. We thought that the pipes in the walls must have burst although we couldn't work out where all the water was going as there seemed to be only a dribble coming out the bottom of the wall not the flood we would expect.

After a day spent listening carefully to parts of the walls and eventually smashing through in a couple of places with a hammer (the holes started off v small and exploritary and got bigger as we got more frustrated) we found a joint that was leaking.

Marcus (our v helpful estate agent) found us a plumber who came round and soldered this back together. We were all disappointed when the water still didn't work. After the plumber (our favorite person in the world at the moment) had knocked a few more holes he decided that the issue was that one of the pipes had rusted up so that only a tiny dribble of water could get through (which made a rushing noise like water escaping while he did it. So lovely guy that he is, he hacked out a bit of the pipe and replaced it. Miracle we had water to the toilet. We had been living here over a week by this point so that was quite a relief.

During M. Dabats supposedly final visit to do this pipe replacement the pump decided to stop working. Wonderful M. Dabat diagnosed this as loss of pressure as these pumps need pumping up ever few months to keep them going so he fixed it... or so we thought. As it then turned out some bit of the pump was rusted through also and there was a slow air leak. We managed to keep it limping along while a new one was ordered, finally 3 weeks in the new pump was installed and we had working (cold) water. Such a relief. As an additional excitement the new dishwasher was delivered just in time on the same day AND more excitingly the internet was finally fully installed then too. What a great day!