The agricultural solution would be to expose the steel pipe at the foot of your internal wall, attach the MDPE to the cut off horizontal length and then pull this back to your trench.
I'll bet plumbers used to dealing with buried pipes have the tackle to do this.
The floor slab is not original, IE it's not 100 years old and it can be broken through, near to the wall....the easiest way to do it is like this:
1) dig the trench right up to the foundations.
2) hire a breaker and break out a hole in the wall, as low down as you can get it, through both bricks and under the substrate of the floor.
3) scrape out as much subsrate as you can get out, so that it's a hollow.
4) go inside and break a hole in the floor, it should go through easily due to it being hollow underneath, make it about 8 inches wide, enough to allow the sleeving and insulation to come up to floor level.
Your ideas about taking it up an outside wall - forget it, it's been tried and failed a thousand times in the past, there's only one way and that's through the wall and under the floor...it doesn't have to go where the other main is, we used to take them to the nearest cold water pipe inside, sometimes it was behind the front door, sometimes in a downstairs bathroom.
it's 750mm deep for a reason - frost can't get to it, clipped to a wall is different, it will freeze and it will burst...the only time I ever saw it done like this, it had to have a brick built 'box' around it, filled completely with insulation, which will cost you more than the last war.
What are the reason(s) why you can't have it done as I've mentioned above? - if the concrete is less than two feet thick, it's doable.
Given the advice to date I will probably cut an access hole in the false hearth/wall to see the pipework there and how the pipe comes up from the floor.
Will have a look at the HSS drilling rigs but I am not sure how that would work out (given I currently know nothing!) as I presume I would have to have an attachment that would be up to 2 meters long?
Your comment on pressure is valid, however the other cottages in our terraced row have pressure sufficient to make ours look feeble. I'm again assuming that this indicates the main supply is adequate and it is just 'our' pipe that is duff!
I'm h> >I am grateful for all the advise and guidance given.
Your risk but my cottage was originally fed by a steel pipe from the farm across the road which surprisingly was left live but plugged at the end after it was replaced some 40 years ago. It has now been isolated but prior to that it burst twice in the road causing no end of bother.
No...a diamond drill/core bit is for cutting through the concrete floor. HSS is the name of the hire shop that has them
Given that both your water mains ar connected at a Y, which is already connected to alkathene and both houses are suffering low pressure, it's fairly safe to say that the blockage is close to the house.
The advantage of drilling the hole in the lounge is that we could install a stop tap at the same time.
Showing my ignorance but 'alkathene' ?? whats that?
My logic (please correct me if i'm wrong!) is that the 'restriction' in the pipe must occur before the pipe Tee's off to the next door neighbour. The reasoning is that if this wasn't the case then either we or our neighbours would have adequate pressure. Therefore, the blockage is in the shared section of pipe. The joint is about 2 meters from the back door.
The restriction could be anywhere, and quite possibly everywhere within the steel pipe, if you've gone this far, IE having the trench dug and buying the alkathene, I can't see any point in botching things up so close to the house...steel pipe has a tendency to corrode uniformly along it's length, both internally and externally, although externally it's often coated in bitumen, what started off as one inch diameter internally, may now be down to less than a quarter of that.
Are you *sure* you want a combi boiler, anyway? You presumably have stored hot water at the moment - albeit heated electrically? Why not have a conventional boiler and use *that* to heat the stored hot water, as well as heating the radiators?
As a matter of interest, what flow rate do you get with the existing pipe if you turn a mains-fed cold tap on fully? [You'll need a bucket and a stopwatch - and maybe some scales - to measure it. Collect the water for 1 minute (or 30 seconds and double the reading if more convenient) and measure the water collected in litres, or weigh it in Kg, to get litres/minute].
On 16 Dec 2006 08:38:00 -0800 someone who may be snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote this:-
Does it have to go through the living room and connect to the existing pipes in a false wall? Could you not take the plastic pipe in elsewhere and run it up to the loft? Adding a small amount of copper pipe may be necessary to feed existing fittings "the wrong way", but is usually not necessary.
You leave a couple of metres of the MDPE pipe ready for Anglian to connect so there is no use of the steel pipe at that end.
You bring the MDPE pipe right into the house and then convert to 22mm in Copper or Plastic with an adaptor. If you have some steel pipe _inside_ the house that you are not yet ready to ditch then you look for a suitable joint to unscrew and fit on a screwed adaptor.
It nearly goes without saying that the steel pipe in the ground is not to be used at all whatsoever. Likewise the steel in the house won't be helping any and the increased water flow will likely cause a shower of rust particles to comes out of the all the tap and stick in all the fitting and appliances. YMMV but YHBW.
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