Wonderful timing for a failure.

What's that cost, about 40p? Maybe you get charged for taking it away as well ...

Tell _her_ that...

Andy

ISTR its even less than that

NT

I turned off the tank inlet, and waited for it to run out in normal use. First time it wasn't a convenient moment, so I refilled the tank once, and did it second time it emptied out.

Since I'm un-metered, I let Google randomly pick a waterco's prices for me (Cambridge 85p/m^3) ... sounds cheaper than spending diesel to go buy corks or suitably shaped root vegetables.

Buy corks? Free in various sizes with 0.7l purchases of wine/prosecco/port. Last emergency bung here was a plastic wine cork with a few wraps of insulating tape to bring it up to size and cross pierced with a nail as a depth stop. No meter here, just the time it takes to drain.

most wine I get comes with a screw top. no use as a bung

If the tank is not too deep/inaccessible, you can isolate by putting a wine bottle cork in the outlet pipe from the inside of the header tank. You might have to drain a bit of water out of it. Don't poke it in too far/use one that's too small or you will be really f****d!

Count yourself lucky; round here water plus sewerage charges total about £6:50 per cubic metre, so 100 gallons would be £3 of water.

OK everyone, it's New Year's eve so the boss let us leave early.

Yesterday I turned off the feed to the tanks -_before_ she had a bath, and this morning I washed my hair in the shower so there was only a third of a tank left. Application of a couple of ineffective stoppers then turn on the cold bath tap. I wasn't going to try wine corks - these are 22mm feed pipes, and they'd probably disappear down the pipe to stop at the first junction!

Pull off the knobs, take off the cover, pull off a gear wheel - and that looks like the top of an ordinary tap on the outlet to the horribly expensive bit. Things are looking up. They look up even further when I twiddle the top of it and the entire thing goes around - it turns out that accumulated scale has stiffened up the tap part, and it has unscrewed from the body. Take it off - it's a standard quarter-turn tap body - descale, turns fine. Partial reassemble (no knobs no cover) add water and it turns off fine. Can't quite work out how the little cam thing to turn the motor on and off works - it seems to be the wrong way around.

Gradually the penny drops.

I didn't know you could assemble quarter turn taps so that on/off can be reversed. I do now.

By this time of course the tanks are nearly full again :(

Ah well, now I know how it all works I'll have it apart in a jiffy to reverse the tap direction.

Andy

A dead mouse might work, too. Don't use a vole, because there's less tail to pull it back out with.

t =A36:50 per cubic metre, so 100 gallons

Well if it's 22mm you can use a champagne cork with the bobble on the end. I expect you have plenty of those.

One or two. I kept the one my mum gave me for my 21st birthday (and was then horrified when I split it halves with the girl I married) and a few other odds and sods. Do actually have one full bottle, it was half price when I went to buy some bread.

Anyway the shower is fixed, though I'm not entirely sure it doesn't have a slow drip.

Meanwhile the dishwasher has died. As kitchen refurb, including new appliances, is scheduled for Feb I can't be bothered to try and fix it.

Andy