B&Q - My part in its downfall...

Richard Conway · 2005-10-10T14:06:56+00:00

I was replacing our leaking hot water cylinder this weekend - what a joyous job it is!Anyway, I needed a small piece of 28mm pipe to repair a very badly soldered (yorkshire) joint on an old gravity hot water circuit (will change to fully pumped at some point - but thats a job for another day!)The soldered joint was quite something - the pipe had been cut at a very bad angle and must have slipped before it was soldered so that about half of the pipe was in the joint by a couple of mm and the other half was not quite in. The pipe went nowhere near the solder ring. I assume that when it was soldered, enough ran down the inside of the joint to create a watertight seal with the pipe - but offered no mechanical protection at all. It had obviously lived happily for years in this state, but when we started clanging about with the pipework it came undone.The biggest problem was that the joint was boxed in halfway down a wall and we had no idea that there was a problem, so we happily sat in the loft and turned on the supply to the f&e tank and waited for the system to fill up so we could check that the connections to the coil in the new cylinder were sound (obviously the holes weren't in the same place so we had to piss about all day changing the pipework). We suddenly heard a scream from below as SWMBO walked into the living room to see water dripping through the ceiling!Anyway, I digress. Back to B&Q. We were lucky enough to catch it, as this was about 3:30pm yesterday and it shuts at 4pm. I rushed in with time to spare and grabbed the only bit of 28mm piping I could find - 3 bloody metres of it! We only needed a bit! Anyway, looked at the price - £15.98 - horrified! So, I took it to the checkout knowing I didn't really have much choice, and the young girl on the checkout looked up at it, grabbed a ring binder full of bar codes (there wasn't one on the pipe) and asked, "Is that 3 metres of 22mm?"Well, who was I to argue over a few mm? Ended up paying £7.48...

Oct 10, 2005 21 Replies

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Graeme Eldred 20 years ago

I pasted a border around a room once, used two or three rolls, which were not quite enough, and left a gap of about six inches, so I returned to the shop, and asked for a sample 'just to check the colour'. The piece I was given was more than enough to fill the gap :-)

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Owain 20 years ago

Fisher-Price could clean up in Glasgow if they introduced a "My First Stanley Knife" toy.

(In Burberry tartan, of course)

Owain

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