My daughter wanted an outside tap so she called in a local professional. This was the result. There was no reason why the pipework couldn't go inside the garage. Incidentally, turning off the rising main in the house did not turn off the supply to this tap.
If that's where the mains supply originally went into the house, I don't think it was very satisfactory even before the current cowboy turned up. Unless of course she lives in a foreign and entirely frost free country.
What an abomination...... there is so much wrong with that I don't even know where to begin!
I would have:
put in a isolation valve in garage. ran it in copper tube (to blend in better with masonry walls) run it inside garage as much as possible pipe clipped to wall at 50cm intervals put on pipe insulation exit out via wall with a 16mm diameter hole a tee piece with outside tap with a double checkvalve above it and a draincock below it (so one can turn off inside garage & drain peipework for the cold winters) fitted an outside tap insulation cover. put the tap ideally over a rainwater or foul water drain or drainage gulley or soakaway (so if it leaks during a cold snap, one does not get an ice rink outside)
So how did the "plumber" manage to connect it up if the stopcock in the house did not turn off the supply? Did he/she turn it off at the water meter?
It looks as though the buried black plastic pipe from the street rises out of the ground outside the house and joins some 15mm copper which goes through a brick wall to the stopcock in the house. The new plumbers seems to have separated the plastic and copper and inserted a plastic tee instead of a straight connector so the new plastic pipe comes off the outside supply before the stopcock. The original copper should have gone through the wall to the stopcock 18" (other length units are available) below ground level, and it seems very unlikely the new plumber dug it up so that was a dubious installation to start with.
Good point. It's not clear from picture 2 that the tap has a none-return valve (although they are pretty small and fit comfortably inside the body of a tap). I wonder why the "professional" didn't save himself a bit of time and use one of these with a hose pipe from the water supply:
Nice job, must take years for training to become that "professional".
To be fully qualified the plastic pipe would have to have been cut freehand and at jaunty angles with a hacksaw. Then shoved into the fittings, burrs and all, without any inserts.
I'm not sure we are getting the full story from Bill though. This work was done a while back. The cut timber gate post doesn't look that fresh and looks chisled not drilled. There is an accumulation of cack and spiders web.
I can't work out what is happening in the garage. The black plastic pipe, grey fitting, copper to the compression fitting are all old, covered in cement/paint splashes. The bit of copper out of the top of the grey plastic is cleaner and has fairly recently been cleaned up with sandpaper or similar before being inserted. I can't see a pipe leaving the other end of the compression fitting or a nut if it was T peice and it looks too close to the wall for that anyway without the brick being cut. Is that compression just a complicated stop end?
The hole through the wall is new or has recently been enlarged, to accomodate the bend in the white plastic? Was there an outside tap at some point in time before this one? Prehaps one that had frozen up, damaged the pipework and been disconnencted?
I was under the impression that most outside taps, well those I've seen, have an isolation tap inside, so that the pipes outside cannot freeze as they are drained before winter sets in, assuming you remember of course! Brian
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