Plumbing hilarity

What do you do when faced with a dripping tap? Answer, in my case, is try to fix it. No matter that it wasn’t my tap, the urge to show off my plumbing skills was too hard to resist. So, after a rummage around under the sink I found the isolator for the tap in question and, after a bit of swinging on a spanner managed to pull out the leaky bit.

At this point I was feeling somewhat smug. All we had to do was find a replacement and drop it into the tap. And then someone pointed out that all the water in the house was off.

Oops. Perhaps the isolation valve that I’d turned off did a bit more than I thought. So I put everything back together and turned the isolator back on again. And the water was still off.

Now I was more than a bit worried. My attempt to demonstrate my skills was showing something else entirely Then we discovered that, owing to a supply fault, the water was off in the entire area.

We drove off to the DIY superstore marvelling at the way circumstances collide. How a dripping tap had coincided with a water outage, both events calculated by fate to make me look like an idiot. Then the DIY superstore showed that it was a lot less than super by not having any of the replacement parts in stock. So we took our masks off and headed back.

To find that the water pressure was back to normal and the tap had stopped dripping. At least I’ve learned something, which is that some designs of tap fitting need high water pressure to force them shut. We’ve ordered some spare parts in case the problem comes back again. And I’ve discovered (but not learned just yet) that sometimes fools really do rush in where angels fear to tread…..