Hot Water

As storm Arwen edged nearer, I was very grateful to see the plumber return to refit the hot water cylinder yesterday. The efficiency and speed of the carpet fitters meant that he was with us by lunchtime which - as events unfolded - turned out to be a good thing.
We managed to get the cylinder back in the cupboard without dripping water on the new carpets or taking any chunks out of the newly painted walls. With the cylinder sitting neatly on the new carpet in the airing cupboard it was now just a question of reattaching the pipes and firing it all up. All that went pretty smoothly, and it was then just a case of opening the taps to check the water was running smoothly. And that’s when the trouble started. The bath tap was running, but the water was very brown. The kitchen tap was spluttering intermittently and absolutely no water at all issued forth from the basin tap.
It seems that by taking the cylinder out and generally moving it around, all the sediment had been disturbed and had now found it’s way down the pipes to the taps. The bath cleaned up eventually, and cleaning the filter on the kitchen tap had that running smoothly after a while. But still nothing out of the basin tap. Cue a very stressed and worried plumber as, one by one, his attempts to get the water flowing failed. Cleaned the filter - nothing. Stripped down the tap - nothing. Had it been later in the day, I reckon it would have been down tools at that point and we’d have to wait until Monday. But it was only mid afternoon so there was time available to go to the next level - removing the pedestal to get at the pipes leading up to the tap. Which proved no help at all. No easily removable flexible fittings or extra filters that could be cleaned. Just copper pipes emerging from the tiles behind the basin. Which is when the doomsday scenario kicked in. Were we going to have to knock tiles off the wall and floor to get to the pipes? God forbid, we might even have had to lift the newly laid carpet to get under the floorboards in the bedroom. And never mind that this would have left us without hot water - and possibly central heating - on the coldest day of the year, with a major storm approaching.
Desperate times call for desperate measures so the plumber opened the basin tap fully and then opened the bath tap, before putting his thumb over the latter, in an effort to force the water back up the pipes. If it had all gone wrong, it could have burst a pipe or a joint buried deep in the walls or under the floor. But thankfully there was a gurgle, a splutter and then a load of dirt shot into the basin, followed by the joyous sight of clear hot water flowing freely. So despite the storm raging outside, we passed the evening in the warmth, after a very welcome hot shower.