I didn't want to be a plumber..

[Tim Lamb]

So, first morning of the long weekend.

Have you noticed that wet patch says she!

Fortunately near an existing access point in the landing floor. A 15mm copper pipe with a slight weep although her vanity mirror got lost under a Gorilla's armpit of pipework. Bathroom soil, shower waste, basin waste, 6 lots of 22mm pairs... heating, boiler flow/ret. and hot/cold offtake. So, through the ceiling then. Nice rectangular cut for easy re-fitting. Levered it down carefully and got an immediate shower of water, about as fast as I used to be able to piddle!

Not mains, turned off. Not gravity cold, turned off. Not hot.... oh shit it must be central heating. But the valve is off, the rad stats should be closed... oh shit again it must be the bathrooms which are open for boiler overrun!

Luckily we have buckets and the water was surprisingly clean.

The fault turned out to be a galvanised nail (plasterer) which had just entered the pipe wall leaving a neat square hole. Nicely sealed for 23 years so why pick today?

[spuorgelgoog]

Because it's the first morning of the long weekend ...

Owain

[Johnny B Good]

You're getting 'warmer'...

[Johnny B Good]

Possibly but now you're getting 'colder'...

I think "Occam's Razor" applies here. If you think "Murphy" (or "Sod"), you've 'Nailed it!' :-)

[Steve Walker]

As a child, I remember getting up at 4 in the morning to go on a day trip to London. Only for my mother to turn the kitchen light on, hear sizzling and find water dripping from the light fitting. It turned out that a wrongly positioned nail in the bathroom floor had worked its way into a pipe as people had walked over it. Again, why that particular day?

SteveW

[Brian Gaff]

Well I blame the phase of the moon, it affects the tides so why not over time pulling and pushing on the different densities of your pipe and nail? Brian

[Brian Gaff]

No the plasterer did that. Brian

[Robin]

Nah, Sod's got more self-control and belief in the value of deferred gratification. She'd have had the leak in the heating system appear on

24 December, just after the OP's dinner was served.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Brian Gaff writes

We will never know. Spotted because she was engaged in some stretching Pilates exercise on the floor. Perhaps we need to explore the trigger for that activity? All fixed apart from the decoration and a concern about the floating debris I saw disappearing into the boiler circuit from the expansion tank refill.

[Andrew Gabriel]

The day after my grandmother's partner of over 30 years died, water came pouring through her kitchen ceiling from some plumbing fault in the loft (don't know what it was - I wasn't around). Everyone was rather annoyed by this happening at that moment, except my grandmother who sat carmly though it, only to say that exactly the same thing happened the day after her husband had died some 40 years earlier.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Jim K writes

After the drain down and strategically placed buckets.

The initial assumption was corrosion so I removed a short length of the offending pipe. Partly because it was tightly fitted against a floor joist and I could only get in with a Junior hacksaw. Once the pipe was free to move I got the usual shower of black water. (all this with mother hen flapping about with sponges trying to protect her recently decorated wall). I have plenty of 15mm pipe and Yorkshire fittings from the cottage job so wire wool, flux and propane burner.

Batten along the floor joist, plywood lap over the ceiling plasterboard and the cut out section re-fitted with *short* screws!

[Johnny B Good]

Cute! :-)

[Johnny B Good]

You're quite right. Silly me, it's Murphy's function to ensure that if something can go wrong, it *will* go wrong. Sod just takes care of the scheduling.

I should have rephrased it as "If you think "Murphy" *and* "Sod"... :-)

[Andrew]

When I moved my cold tank in the loft in 2008,

32 years after the house was built, I discovered that at the junction that fed the CH tank, the spur to the CH tank was only inserted about an eighth of an inch into the yorkshire fitting (not end feed).

And for 16 years I had been treading on that connector every time I went into the loft.