The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music) Bzzz. The number of the incoming call is "Unknown". I reject it, obviously. While I am intrigued by the idea of receiving mystery calls from The Unknown, they are disappointing to answer. Bzzz. This guy's insistent: it's the fourth time he's tried to call in the last minute. He must really want me to install that new kitchen …
I have a similar, yet opposite kind of problem. I know exactly where the supply pipe and cut-off valve is for my house. It's at the top of the road, and cuts off all three houses that it feeds. There is no individual valve for my property, and trust me I've looked. As have several plumbers.
I never thought about stopping paying my water bill. I mean, they wouldn't be able to cut me off without killing the water for my neighbours either side. But then I remember that I live in Northern Ireland, where water bills are rolled into the rates (council tax), so I don't actually have much of an option for not paying it.
I had this in my current house after moving in last year. To be honest the water board* were absolutely great.
Built in the '30s, their plans shown the location of the inlet and valve somewhere where it just... wasn't. The lad then spent about three hours walking about with a combination of a little hand held detector and a long stethoscope with a wooden noggin on the end, listening for running water (while I ran taps).
In the end he found it along the road and on the opposite side directly outside someone else's garage. I would never have considered that as ours, and neither had he. Plans updated, valve checked and off he tootled.
I'd genuinely try giving them a call and explaining the difficulty. Hopefully you'll be pleased with the results too.
*Yeah, yeah I know.
At the previous house I owned, it was a semi-detached, but was built side-on to the road. Hence although my house was adjacent to the road, the neighbouring house was actually reached via a path running past my front garden.
The water main to my neighbours ran underneath my house and the isolation valve (which killed water to both properties incidentally) was inside my garage. Thankfully for them, they never managed to piss me off enough to kill their water supply, and I resisted the urge to turn off the valve and see what would happen :-)
I've had the pipe followed from the valve at the road. It runs down the road and branches off twice (once to the house at the top of the road, once to my house, then on to the next house). My branch then runs up one side of my house. There's separate feeds for my kitchen and a pair of outbuildings. No isolator valve anywhere.
Our local water authority is all kinds of useless. We had a lot of trouble even buying the place, because they couldn't make up their minds whether the septic tank discharged into a legally approved waterway or not. Yet they were in no kind of rush to actually send someone out to find out. We ended up having to work around it with the sellers, the bank and our solicitors because the WA were just perfectly happy to leave the situation stuck in limbo.
Slightly different - where my house was built in the 1920s and it is waaay back on the lot.
The city was replacing gas lines recently and first they used a tool to check/measure the existing pipe. Unfortunately their tool had a limited reach, designed for modern homes located nearer the front of the lot. They finally ended up estimating from the location of the meter.
Luckily it doesn't interact with my cable (at least I don't think it does).
A friend of mine moved into a new build. After a few months, they got the first water bill - for £0.00.
They thought this was a bit strange. Even the children were reasonably willing to wash, so they were sure they had used at least some water. However, maybe it was just because it was the first bill.
No - the second was also for £0.00. They contacted the water company and told them they thought something was not right. The company sent out someone to read the meter, who confirmed that it still read zero, so where was nothing wrong with the reading.
The company didn't seem to care that there was obviously something wrong - either with the meter or the identification of which one was theirs.
After about a year, the guy gave up trying to tell the company he was not being billed for the water they were using. He's kept all the correspondence for when the company take him to court for theft of water.
Very similar thing happened to us with the gas supply in a rented flat back at the start of the millennium. We'd been "happily" paying British Gas for a year when we got a letter saying that they were sorry we were leaving them, when called they refused to say who were were supposed to have been moving to and queries to the National Grid gas people to find out which supplier claimed the pipes were ignored so in the end we gave up. We were in that flat for 7 more years and never received or paid a bill. When we moved I left a note for the new tenants explaining the situation and suggesting they just keep quiet so for all I know it's still happening!
I had something similar when I moved into a new build. It was the middle of a row of 3 terraced houses, the three water meters were grouped together in the road in front. The meter reader would only read the meters for the other two houses, even though the third meter (ours) was clearly visible alongside the others. We wrote to the water company several times to alert them to our existence (and to avoid any future accusations of avoiding payment) and after a couple of years they eventually added us to their system and made us (over)pay by installments to make up for the lost time (how kind of them!).
"After about a year, the guy gave up trying to tell the company he was not being billed for the water they were using."
That probably means that his water supply is coming through another persons place, and they are paying for his water supply. Obviously, someone stuffed up big time with the plumbing.
If the source of your supply can actually be located at all, and isn't tied to your neighbour/street/entire 200+ apartment building they can reduce the pressure, although I've never lived anywhere where at least one of these wasn't the case.
They can also apply for an attachment of earnings though the courts, unless you're self employed, unemployed, or bizarrely, work on a boat - as long as it's not a fishing boat.
Nonetheless, I'm surprised more people don't bother paying.
> "But then I remember that I live in Northern Ireland, where water bills are rolled into the rates (council tax), so I don't actually have much of an option for not paying it."
Nope, the rates in NI do *not* cover water charges, they were included in rates prior to 2007 and the then intention was to introduce a separate water charge (though they did not reduce rates costs once water was removed from it!).
The UK government used the "threat" of water charges as a way to get power-sharing introduced in NI.
"Gov to local political parties: see the water bills are all printed and ready to post, they're going out in a couple of days time if you don't agree to form an Assembly where you can cancel their introduction."
One of the first things the Assembly did was to cancel them and instead since then the Assembly has been paying all domestic water costs "on behalf of the general public".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6496999.stm
They complained I had a leak or excessive consumption.
We turned off the main stop cock and consumption continued.
After an hours investigation he turned off the water entirely. Except it didn't.
The meter and tap in the street in front of our house works next door's water.
Ours is two up the street. He thought the one in the middle didn't have an outlet.
So next door had high consumption.
But the toilet and washing machine in the shed gets water from somewhere else.
We had a leak at our (newly installed) water meter. Water was pouring out and running down the street (costing us money) so we complained to the water chaps several times. Eventually a man sauntered out, lifted the cover and poked about with the gushing pipe, causing it to leak with renewed vigour.
"Yeah, it's knackered", he said when asked what the problem was, chalked around the cover in blue chalk, and off he went. 10 days later (with neighbours down the road considering sandbags) another van turned up and the leak was duly repaired.
We were informed that we wouldn't be charged for the excess water that had simply run down the slope to the nearest drain, huzzah! A few weeks later we get a bill for many hundred pounds from the water company. We rang up, explained, quoted their email, and eventually they grudgingly accepted that we didn't have to pay. Great. Two days later we get a bill in red, demanding the immediate payment of the outstanding many hundreds of pounds. More calls and emails ensued.
"Oh yes that's fine, just ignore the bill, it's all automated," we were told. So we did. A second very red bill duly arrived, more calls and emails, and eventually the billing machine (I assume) was quietly informed that it could stop now.
Phew, we thought.
A week later we got a bill from the waste water company for many hundred pounds as they calculate their bill as a (quite large) percentage of the incoming water used. More calls and emails.
"We need a letter from the water company" they said, so we rang them and they said they'd send one explaining the situation, not to worry. A week later we get a red bill from the waste water people. More calls and we were told they had sent the relevant letter, if we really insisted they would have to resend it at great inconvenience (resending an email is such a drag). We insisted. Cue very red bill, more calls....
Argh.
This seems to be a recurring theme, which seems to appear with tedious ( except for the victims) regularity. Customer service staff unable/unwilling to divert automated systems that were triggered in error. In many ways it's the same "The computer says..." problem that infected the Post Office and destroyed the lives of those poor postmaster.
Just because there's a computerised system all semblance of human initiative is dumped.
I have a similar, yet opposite kind of problem
We recently re-built our house. Building regulations in our neck of the woods require sprinklers for new builds, so we had to upgrade the mains from the ½" Copper that fed the original house to 32mm MDPE. During the build we kept a standpipe attached to the original ½" and the new connection was made towards the end of the "wet trades".
We had been paying water "rates", which was actually advantageous for us while the children were small and discounts were available, but the 32mm connection came with a mandatory meter.
Leaving aside the shenanigans when the water board cut through an electrical cable while digging down to find the main, the new meter was fitted next to the old stop tap, in the pavement at the front of the house. All very good, but then they buried the old stop tap inaccessibly next to the new meter, without disconnecting it.
So we have a standpipe on the driveway which could give us limitless unmetered water (but we resisted the temptation to connect it in to the house!), and if the ancient ½" pipe decides to spring a leak, theres no way to turn it off, short of calling the water board out to dig up the pavement again.
Have to echo some other sentiments though. Our waterboard (Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water) has been very good on the whole. We had quite a difficult issue to sort regarding sewers, and they always did what they said they would do, when they said they would do it. Might have cost a bit more than you'd hope, but the level of service we received (DCWW is not-for-profit) was generally excellent. We had similar good service from Western Power Distribution (electricity) and Wales and West Utilities (gas). The engineers were all great, happy to help, anything to get the job done properly. Definitely can't say the same of our energy "supplier", who faffed us about no-end, but that's another story.
M.
After 27 years we still didn't know the location of our supply pipe or external stopcock.
Last year mid pandemic a leak upstream of the in house tap forced us to get the waterboard in.
They acted promptly and with enthusiasm, but could not at first locate the pipe, dug a trench in the road with a big yellow machine at the obvious spot. Turned off taps by water troughs in neighbouring fields etc. Even dug out (at the suggestion of a retired water inspector) an as it turned out disconnected meter point on the golf course.
After ten days 180 degrees out from any direction expected metal detectors found the pipe and a couple of spares. In an hour a Polish guy (why are they all Polish) dug a hole, cut the pipe and fitted a brand new plastic stopcock. The original has never been found.
Just think of the man hours (at one point we had six people on the job) that could have been saved by a simple plan or map.
Still suspect we're stealing our water from the golf course's metered supply.
Try Cancelling it.
Phoned up ISP "I want to cancel my TV. The channels I am interested in are available cheaper on another platform. And they don't have adverts on it*"
They gave me a free sim and could use the box for OTA channels for half the old cost.
My plan was to Cut the cost by a quarter. They cut it in half.
*Probably do have ads but the source is on a blacklist at the DNS level.**
** probably explains the spinning wheel when the above show's title card is shown.
This post has been deleted by its author
Evil Scot> Try Cancelling it.
You cannot. Here in France it's a bundled package.
And if you change now you have to take fibre or 4G. You cannot have a new DSL contract any more.
(Unless in an area with no 4G or fibre.)
And hooking-up the fibre is a 3 visit job at least.
hooking-up the fibre is a 3 visit job at least.
My neighbours found this to be the case too. Perhaps they were too easily put off.
When the clueless fibre contractor turned up at our house, he said he'd need to book a cherry picker and all sorts of mental equipment. I surprised myself by telling him in broken French what to do and how to do it and that I would lend him ladders if necessary.
I had gigabit broadband within 2 hours.
I wanted to take advantage of a new subscriber deal so my flatmate who was moving with me became a new customer. Would they actually accept that I wanted to sign off their services? No they wouldn't. I ended up telling them that I was moving to Norway for a 3 year work contract in a remote area with absolutely no mobile coverage and which I had already looked up did not have an international subsidiary associated there, and that my bill forwarding address would be my parent's house - they even tried telling me they were going to connect my mother's house to their cable network - I'd chosen that address because they live a mile down a shared private road and that either the cable company wouldn't pay to dig it up, resurface it (which TBH is desperately needed) and install a new cabinet with a repeater just for the sake of keeping one paying customer OR if they did do that, the £60 a month they wanted was far, far cheaper than even getting the road resurfaced, paid for on a credit card!
I think you know which beard astronaut's name was part of the company branding.
When we moved to France I was asked to give the local water company the meter reading. I couldn't find the meter anywhere. Eventually they sent someone around to get the reading themselves. It turned out the water meter was deep under a concrete manhole cover submerged under two feet of dirty water. The guy had to bail all of the water out to get to the meter to read it.
That's interesting. I thought there were standards on that point in my country.
In every house or appartment I have ever owned, the meter to my property was either in a cabinet labelled as such, or in the garage.
As it is in the house we live in since November 2017. I have the meter and the cutoff lever in the garage, just like I had it in the house we lived in before for 20 years.
On the other hand, in this house I have no idea where the public water mains is if ever my water meter needs replacing.
Interesting, isn't it ? There are some bits of technology that simply don't fail. How come we can't do that with light bulbs or garage doors ?
There may be higher standards with new builds in France, but this was an old stone and cob farmhouse in rural Normandy. It had electrical wiring that looked like Napoleon had installed it and an illegal fosse septique (spelling?) that just consisted of a large tank that a local farmer came around and emptied occasionally, spraying the contents onto his fields, overflow from the tank ran into a nearby stream. There was no gas supply to the property, that is quite common though, and we had to buy gas cylinders from the local garage. There was no broadband and the phone line hung off a couple of the poles into a field for the cows to play skipping with. French telecom/Orange wouldn't fix the line as they said "it still works". My internet consisted of 22k dial up. So much for the services. Despite that we did enjoy our ten years living in France. :-)
How come we can't do that with light bulbs or garage doors ?
@Pascal - we can do it, at least for light bulbs. The problem is that they don't want to, as then they'd go bankrupt after selling that initial everlasting one per socket when the income-stream dried up.
Same as with many white goods these days, engineered to fail just after the warranty expires.
Can't comment on the garage doors, as I haven't had one of those (or a garage to put it on) for over 20 years now.
"@Pascal - we can do it, at least for light bulbs. The problem is that they don't want to, as then they'd go bankrupt after selling that initial everlasting one per socket when the income-stream dried up."
To get an incandescent light bulb with a v long life all you used to have to do was to "underrun" it (i.e. operate it at lower than the rated voltage). Disadvantages: 1) the light is too red, 2) efficacy (lumen/watt) is greatly reduced, so not actually saving you any money.
I guess I'm lucky with fiber broadband, probably because I don't forget to sacrifice a chicken every three months at midnight during a full moon night.
For the last two years, it was made unavailable only once, because it was the "accessible to everyone" kind, and someone had the hilarious idea to pull the cables enough to tear them off. My bad, I was short on chickens.
Before that, the last time I sat down in front of the TV just to watch a sports final was for the Six Nations rugby competition in March.
Pheww. Before that sentence I was close to believe you were irrecoverable.
I'm not lucky enough to be on fiber (I'm out in the sticks in Northern Ireland), but I took the time to construct a ward over the cable coming in to the house. The old double-square with a horseshoe, four-leaf clover, bird skull and a hair from the head of a virgin at the cardinal points works wonders. Only lost connection once in the last three or four years.
Also, I switched from BT to Zen a while ago. That might have had something to do with it as well.
USA here -- several years ago, I got a notice in the mail that my copper POTS line would be disconnected on [date], unless I allowed them to replace it with fiber. "OK," I thought, "this is my opportunity to get fiber installed for free." Told them to go ahead, and the fiber was duly installed and tested. I waited a month, then cancelled the phone service and replaced it with OOMA ($40/mo vs $5/mo) over my cable TV ISP (Comcast, if you must know).
At the time, Comcast and FIOS were neck and neck as far as speed and cost, so no reason to switch, and I was satisfied with Comcast. Fast forward to 2020. I noticed that FIOS had halved their price and doubled their speed compared to Comcast. "Right," I thought, "now's the time to switch." Called FIOS and initiated the process. Easy-peasy, I thought, since the fiber has already been checked out and was installed only a few years back.
Nope. Guy comes out to "install" my FIOS service. Looks at the ONT, shakes his head. "You have a problem," he says. "Hmm...worked when they installed it," I mutter. He points at the red "Fault" LED. No signal. So, this is 4 PM on a nasty, rainy night. I resign myself to waiting another week. Fortunately, Comcast is still connected.
The tech pulls out some equipment and attaches it to the end of the fiber. "No light," he says, "probably a broken fiber. I'll be back." He walks out into the rain and drives off. Comes back in 15 minutes. "You have two or three breaks in the run back to the box" I think of all the ice and snow storms in the past three years, and how many trees have come down. Not surprising at all. What was surprising, was his next statement: "I'll call construction and see if they can get someone out," he says. It's around 7 PM. He drives off. Comes back about an hour later. "Should be OK now," he says, and hooks the fiber back up. "Fault" light goes out. He calls his office and tells them to turn on the data. We have a nice chat about telephones, and I find out he's been with "The Phone Company" for 25 years. I fire up my laptop to test the connection. He gets the OK from the office and we hook up and do a speed test. He tells me, "You have 200/200 service, but you'll probably see 300/300 because the box is only half full". And that's what I see. I thank him profusely, and he heads out.
That was a year ago. FIOS internet has been flawless since then, all through WFH. I ran it for a week, with Comcast still hooked up, then dropped Comcast. I'm fully aware that my experience was unusual, to say the least. I probably met the last remaining telephone company employee who actually gave a damn about customer service. And, yes, when they sent me a "how did we do" form, I praised him to the heavens.
So, Dabbsy, there are still a few left. Hopefully one day you will get one of them.
I probably met the last remaining telephone company employee who actually gave a damn
Years ago one summer I complained to Virgin Media that my phone line was always crackling regardless of handset or socket. A technician had a look and said he'd book some guys replace the ancient Post Office cable buried under the grass between the road and my house.
So they waited until the depth of winter to send out a team of poor sods to dig up the frozen, iron-like turf with pick axes. IT took all day.
my phone line was always crackling regardless of handset or socket
Many, many years ago in the days well before t'intertubes, when through lack of funds I could only dream of connecting a 1200/75 modem to my BBC Micro, I still wired up a couple of extensions to the bedrooms, "just in case", once BT had changed the socket.
My dad was going through a bit of a hard time at work and much crackling on the line (definitely not my dodgy wiring!) convinced him that his employers were tapping the line and trying to collect some kind of incriminating evidence against him. Particularly as it often only started a few seconds into a phone call.
One day, while speaking on the phone to - I dunno - aunty Beryl or someone, he said, rather loudly, something along the lines of "yes, I'm sorry about the awful noise on the line, it only happens when they are listening in".
The next time we made a phone call the line was perfectly quiet, and the crackling never returned. His problems at work eventually got sorted.
Perhaps dad wasn't so paranoid after all...
Living in Cheltenham as I do, when talking about an action designed to undermine the state and/or the natural party of government, such as manning a Greenpeace stall in the town centre or distributing half a gross of Green Party flyers during a council election, it's standard practice to preface the deeply suspect part of the telephone conversation with "Hi, GCHQ!".
What are the odds that spooks [and other interested and foreign bodied parties] from more than just the likes of a GCHQ cruise El Reg type waters phishing for prey and praying they don't get savaged by any novel technology which escapes them to privately haunt and publicly taunt them online in the virtual spheres in which they are remarkably inept but find themselves distressingly addicted to because of the rewards and attractions which success in ITs Advanced IntelAIgent Fields so clearly can Offer and Deliver?
That's why they are listening, which is akin to them being up to no good, and no great good has ever nor ever will come of such behaviour which would be favouring theft of exclusive elite executive second and third party proprietary intellectual property over simple purchase of licences to thrill with IT which may not kill them stone dead with the present future bill fully paid and realised in regular much easier to launder/stomach/justify instalments.
IT aint FCUKing Rocket Science for Crash Testing Dummies, Uncommon Nearly Perfect Sense.
I probably met the last remaining telephone company employee who actually gave a damn
In every company there is one person that gives a damn, they do 90% of the work. The rest just look for the tiniest excuse to fob you off or put the ticket back in the queue with a note (cannot complete because X is not done, Y is missing, request is in the wrong colour ink, there's a 'y' in the day). Call department X or Y and prod to get the work done? Oh no sir I cannot do that.
It recently took me 17 calls to Lloyds to get an account closed, a job that should have taken 2, one to initiate the process and a second a few days later to complete it. Call 1 was made in February, call 17 in June. The lovely young lady on call 17 deserves a medal, a raise and a job somewhere she isn't surrounded by idiots.
For tech companies to find the one person with clue the magic word should be well known hereabouts:
https://xkcd.com/806/
This is target culture, isn't it. To keep their job/gain a bonus frontline staff need to complete each (say) 10 minute call within 7 minutes - on average. So anything that looks a bit tricky, i.e. when they actually need to do their jobs, is best ducked. Fob Off a Punter is the name of this game.
True, which is a shame. Miss 17 took the time to open my account records before answering the call and opened with 'Hello Mr iShit. Are you calling about closing your account?' instead of the previous 16 calls unprepared 'How can I help you Mr,er..... <tappity tappity> iShit'. She put me on hold while calling department X and confirmed they had in fact done their job back in February, it just hadn't been recorded correctly. That resulted in ticket ping pong between departments each time I called. For four months. Later calls at which I insisted on talking to a manger whatever made absolutely no difference. Requests that they take ownership of the ticket and manage it through to conclusion were wasted breath.
It's just luck that on call 17 I hit the jackpot on the call allocation lottery. The call took 20 minutes in all and she'll probably get a bollocking at her next review.
Sigh.
Actually, it is very easy to get good service at a phone company call centre - just swear profusely at whoever eventually answers the call - you will then be bumped to a very nice and super competent sooth sayer person, who will fix the problem for you. At the end of the call you can apologize for the bad behaviour if you want.
"I probably met the last remaining telephone company employee who actually gave a damn about customer service"
IME, technicians (especially outside plant techs) for the legacy telcos are pretty good.
Back when 56K was the hot new thing we were struggling to get a new T1 turned up and playing happy with our equipment. After a long and frustrating process (including a conference call with a tech at our Demarc, a tech at the CO, and a switch tech from a remote location), things started working. Right after that, I got a call back from the grouchy old tech at the local CO. "Ok, here's what you need to do, tomorrow, you call them and say you need A, B, and C, when they say they came do that you tell 'em that's bullshit, and you know that $competing_ISP has A, B, and C on their PRIs".
...however, in the south of France (like me) you'll need a 1-metre dish (minimum) to get a good signal from the Astra 2 constellation, and they often turn the power down in summer.
Still waiting for that fibre broadband, they laid the cable in the road outside the house almost a year ago, but they haven't actually got around to connecting anyone yet, though.
Love my Humax Foxsat boxes with modded firmware giving me a full-on web based interface, FTP file transfers and unscrambled HD recording!
Mind you, the free-to-air film collection has gone past 4,000 items and the Plex server currently has 18 Tb of storage hanging off it, so be careful what you wish for :-)
I have a large Astra dish AND a high gain aerial on the roof, dish not quite but it can see over the trees.
So my sat signal can survive drops which would take out a Sky system (Freesat via Humax) and I lose Freeview very rarely.
Had free DTTV now for 21 nearly 22 years.
Even had the £3 a month IDTV thing until Monkeh went bust.
It will have some free channels, no matter which satellite it's pointing at. It might need a new LNB (cheap). It's not impossible to point it at a different satellite, but time consuming without decent test gear. The Satellites are about 36,000 km away spaced around an imaginary line above the Equator.
A box with an HDMI out is about €45. I use one on the TV that has dual sat tuners because the Android TV is such a rubbish GUI for actual Terrestrial or Sat TV. It's designed for someone using a screen sitting at desk using Internet services and Apps.
I have 5 LNBs in an arc on a bar in front of a 1m dish for 28E, 23E, 19E, 13E and 9E approximately and a box that that takes four Quattro LNBs. I sacrifice one port on 23E (a 1/4 approximately) to have the 9E which only provides one band and polarisation.
I use it also to listen to TSF Jazz, here in Ireland. The magic box in the shed under the dish has 12 outlets (an earlier one had 16). I use little €6 FM transmitters intended for phones or mp3 players to car radios on 3 satellite boxes, powered by the USB port (the boxes have two and work a USB HDD fine for timed recording). So I have three extra FM channels derived from Satellite, though I've nearly stopped listening to BBC R4. The FM radios in house, workshop, phone etc get good stereo.
I set the boxes to only store the free TV & Radio at install. Cancelled Sky nearly 15 years ago. Wife watches free tennis on BBC and German Eurosport and uses timer on the €45 box to record on the SATA HDD, from a scrapped laptop put in a €8 USB case. Unlike the Sony TV it doesn't want to reformat and encrypt the disk.
About 2,500 free radio stations and about 1800 free TV. Both mostly either garbage, or in languages I don't know or both.
Lots of very useful information at The Satellite Superstore and all on a very pleasingly retro-themed web page. UK-based, of course, but many of the principles apply elsewhere in Europe.
I've had fantastic responses to email too, though I haven't actually yet got the funds together to buy the stuff I need. I expect he's wondering where my order is after spending all that time giving me advice.
Installed my own dish & LNB on the old house and intend to do so again. A bit tedious lining it up, but once sorted it was flawless, other than in one high wind when it shifted slightly and required the re-application of spanners :-)
M.
This will always be a mystery to me. For about 25 years we and our neighbour had a shared supply and stopcock. Turn off one, turn off both.
OK fair do's, it was what it was. Bothered her, because she'd have liked a meter. And we had an internal stop tap fitted for emergencies.
Then they came to replace all the lead inlet pipes, and stop taps. And they dug down and there were two inlet pipes for our respective houses. So the only way it could have worked up to that time was that the two inlet pipes had both fed into one stopcock, then out again into our respective houses.
I can only assume is that several decades ago the fitters ran out of stopcocks ( or only had double ones on the van) and decided to double up.
Yup, I had this with a toilet that wouldn't flush. I was on one of those British Gas "we fix all plumbing" insurance plans so I called them in. The man spent the day dismantling the big and reassembling it before telling me I needed to replace the whole thing.
The next day, the guy who mowed our lawn every 2 weeks went for a slash and said "oh you need a blahblah", nipped out to the DIY shop to buy one, fitted it and charged me the price of the part.
Similar but opposite here. The row of house I live in, each house used to be two smaller ones. there two stopcocks for each house, but only one actually leads into the house. One year, I saw some water seeping up and though "oh shit this could be expensive". Then stopped and though about where the "live" stop cock was and where the water comes into the house. Turned out the unused stopcock was still open and the it was probably the capped off end 10 feet towards the other end of the house that was leaking, likely the cap itself. So I turned off the disused stopcock and the leak stopped.
Some years later, the water company sent a letter saying they'd be coming out to replace the stopcocks in the next two weeks. Came home from work one day to find a nice square of concrete had been sawn out and replaced, a nice new round stopcock plate in the middle that looks like it needs a tool to open. They didn't touch the other stopcock, still having the ancient square flip-top cover. Such a shame they replaced the disused one and not the actual active one.
Some years after that, the water company dug up the whole road to replace the water main. I was leaning over the fence watching them work when they got to my house. I pointed out that each house used to be two houses and the second pipe to each house was not in use. One of the guys said something along the lines of "fuck! why did no one tell us?". They had been putting in all the joints and offshoots to match what had been there for the last 120 years. I live at the end of the street they were finishing at.
"fuck! why did no one tell us?"
Probably because other than you and maybe some other smart enough residents of those houses nobody knew that that was the actual situation. Good chance when the houses got joined someone got paid to remove all the old stopcocks but couldn't be arsed and just capped off the ends of the lines. Plans got updated to "should be" and after some time and retirements those "should be" plans become "reality".
Being as I am a contractor, I engaged the help of a mortgage broker who specialises in contractors when I was moving house. He was great, really knew his stuff and got me all the information I needed very quickly.
Sadly after that I got passed over to his admin team to do the actual paperwork, and they were muppets utterly unaware that not every country in the UK does things the same. My application was rejected for expired home report (had a month to go but "might" expire before application), wrong recommendation letter (they had sent me the wrong template so the wording was wrong) and water bill of £0. It took a lot of persuading to convince them that water bills are paid as part of council tax in Scotland, so I couldn't tell them exactly what I paid.
This wasn't even at the stage of going to the mortgage provider, was all down on the broker's online portal so they had all the information they needed before sending to the provider.
I had some rather stern words with them, they weren't cheap and the whole point of using a broker was to avoid the stress of applying for a mortgage as a contractor. Instead I got the stress of dealing with them.
"You lose some of the grandeur of a major sporting occasion when part of the chilli tortilla chip you're munching falls onto the screen and obscures half the playing field."
It's tricky. Every night at the moment I'm watching the daily highlights from the July Basho of Grand Sumo, on NHK World. It's nice to relax in bed before lights-out but it does lose something on the small screen, particularly when a cat settles down and blocks the view. So much more satisfying watching two muscular 30-stone giants thumping into each other on a 37" screen.
they'll have to repipe out into the road. The current pipe goes some weird and convoluted route in order to reach the far back corner of the house where it is sealed in a concrete shroud just big enough to fit a cock - key through the slit. TBH if they are willing to replumb it just to fit a sodding meter, good luck to them! I'm not paying for it.
A few years ago, in the first of those two really cold winters we had when it snowed for the first time in 25 years where we are, the central heating boiler decided that would be the perfect time to break down for the first time in its long, long life.
My elderly dad called a local heating engineer (a 'name' in my city), they turned up, and told him it was the water pump switch and they'd have to order one.
After 5 days with no hot water, no central heating, no further news, and the fifth straight day where it hadn't got much above -5C outside, I phoned them up and cancelled the repair. I then immediately called a plumber I'd found on Google.
He came within the hour, determined it wasn't the water pump switch, but the main board in the boiler unit, nipped out to go to a plumber's merchant, was back within another hour, and the boiler was working immediately after.
He gets any plumbing service work we need doing.
Use a local tradesman, preferably someone who's been recommended.
To succeed running his own business he has an incentive to do a good job to get repeat business and word of mouth recommendations. Someone working for or, more likely, subcontracted to what is essentially a ticketing operation had an incentive to close down tickets. The two are different incentives and only one works in your favour.
OH yes. We had our boiler fitted by British Gas two years back.
During which they f*cked up the electrics, drilled the vent hole at too sharp an angle so that the drain leaked and made the pipe too short so that it didn't meet their own regulations. They also failed to provide the statutory commissioning document and were unable to locate the engineer's records to supply it a year later when the servicing engineer came ( our own, not BG!).
And yes, the fitters were all - no not subcontractors,- sub sub contractors.
Our services were performed by a Gas Safe engineer recommended by our plumber ( who was recommended to us too).
We had our house insulated recently, under the government's (untimely demised) Green Scheme*. We used a local company, who did use subbies, because that's pretty much how the scheme had to work, and hey we weren't paying the bulk of it. But these were also a local team of small builders. And they weren't going to get the work signed off and paid for unless the work was finished to the required standard. They did such a good job of it that we then brought them back to do some construction work we needed in the garden. It looks amazing.
*Being totally cynical about such things I was signed up to the scheme within hours of applications opening, having done all the preliminary work in advance and found contractors to request quotes which were arranged within days (and even then it wasn't easy -this time the chaos started almost from the first minute).. So that we were already accepted long before its final premature collapse into incompetence. For us it was too good to miss. The house needed this insulation. It also needed pointing. Our contribution was roughly what we'd have had to pay to get the house pointed, so to us there was effectively zero cost for the insulation work.
My water comes out of a hole in the ground from a natural spring. Goes through my house and back in to the ground. Percolates through the field and right back down the hill. Zero waste.
It sounds like the government can shut off your water and use that to coerce you. Seriously though, who cares if you are dehydrated and stinky, as long as the game is coming through complete with targeted adverts in crystal clear ultra high definition.
"My water comes out of a hole in the ground from a natural spring. Goes through my house and back in to the ground."
And does anything clean it before you drink it? Do you run your own filters?
"Percolates through the field and right back down the hill. Zero waste."
And do you filter the waste water before releasing it? Because not all the things that end up in waste water will be appreciated by the plants growing on the field, let alone someone receiving the excess.
"It sounds like the government can shut off your water and use that to coerce you."
Er ... I suppose they could. Of course if I was the government and wanted to coerce you, I'd use somebody from the military. Unless everything else you do is also independent to your house, water's not the only thing that could get cut off.
For the first 14 years of my life we also used spring water via a short run of lead pipe. Part way through that a long copper pipe was installed to bring the municipal supply so the kitchen had 3 taps, hot, cold and spring. We still used the spring water for drinking. The discharge was into the head goyt of a disused mill dam; it had probably been will filtered through the silt before making its way into the river.
BTW the problems with lead internal plumbing really arise if the water is left to sit all day in heated but unoccupied houses. That house was occupied 24 hours a day and certainly not heated.
"So I give you fair warning: if you hear about an earthquake, tsunami or aeroplane crash in my neck of the woods, it'll be because I'm trying to watch the Olympics."
We know! Any time something interesting is happening up in the heavens, you can be sure it will at least be cloudy, if not actually pissing it down, hurricane force!
Murphy is a busy little bunny!
Since getting a dog last year, I've taken to tweeting Virgin or BTOR with photos of their street cabinets that me and the mutt walk past that are missing doors or otherwise not in the best shape.
The eastern side of Nottingham does seem to have a ready supply of oiks who gain some sort of enjoyment from damaging telecoms equipment, so it's a regular thing at the moment. It might slow down when winter comes and they're holed up in the warm.
To be fair, Virgin/BT come back with a "thanks" quite quickly and the cabinet is fixed within a few days at most.
That's lucky. Some years back some nut job managed to hit our parked cars and the VM cabinet. Long after the cars were repaired the VM cabinet was a wreck. Even now it sort of perches on its base, rather than being fitted.
As to why the doors aren't securely locked on these boxes???
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