So, she comes in from "Dancin", has lunch and goes upstairs to change. She then informs me that there is water dripping from the bedroom ceiling. I investigate the report and she is correct. A slow excavate of some of the loft flooring ( covered in 40 years of her essential memorabilia) reveals that the cold feed main which was plumbed in by the plumber with thinwall copper tubing about 1973 has punctured at a fixing point and spread water over rather a lot of the bedroom ceiling. The thin glass fibre layer of loft insulation has acted as a capillary mat and lots of water has gone some distance in all directions. The 100mm rockwool layer on top of the glass fibre has stayed reasonably dry. Fortunately the stop valve works so water off was easy. I sent her on a quick excursion to Toolstation for a 15mm repair coupler and in spite of the counter staff giving her the wrong itm, she came back with the correct thing. I am very proud that her 50 years of me training her to buy DIY items is still working so well.
It took about 10 minutes to cut and rejoin the pipe in a waterproof manner and then there remained the problem of wet insulation. Having given a small area of the the benefit of a fan for 4 days, there was no sign of the capilliary area drying out, so today, some more of the loft boarding came up and I extracted the glassfibre layer over that area. I am so glad that I laid the loft boarding as a fitted loose lay from cut down 8 x 4 sheets, so that apart from the hassle of moving the rubbish in the loft and storing the boards it is merely a bit of a struggle to get back to the ceiling layer. I've still about another 3sq M of insulation to extract, but at least there are signs of some dry plasterboard. It makes me wish I had fitted PU foam board, but at the time it was just not available.
I do wonder how bad the problem would have been if there had been
300mm of loose blown loft insulation all over.