It’s been a testing couple of weeks with leaky chimneys and our bathroom gutting and refit project, so it was great to unwind on Christmas Day and enjoy some good food. It was a fabulous day, until around 22:00 when we lost our water supply: another inconvenient and annoying water outage.
For context, we had mains water issues when we first moved in as a result of burst pipes and water network distribution problems in the area. We’ve now lodged nine complaints and reports in 14 months.
So last night’s water outage was extremely inconvenient because we couldn’t get the washing up done. Without getting into any unnecessary detail, you tend to eat a lot and the toilets don’t refill after being flushed. I won’t say any more.
We’ve now been without water for 12 hours and following up with the water provider they’ve informed us it’s a burst pipe along an A road somewhere with scores of houses affected.
Luckily, it was just my wife and me this Christmas. If we’d had guests or family it would be panic stations.
We can’t be in this situation again though, so we need an action plan.
Other water outages since this post was published
January 16, 2020: water outage since early hours. Water has come back on at 16:00.
Activating and connecting the well
We are in a rather lucky situation in that we have an original (Victorian) bricked well in our courtyard that used to service our farmhouse.
From the time that we moved into the property we have considered connecting the well to the house. That does, however, involve quite a lot of modification work to our plumbing (and UV filters) so we never went ahead with it.
What I think that we will do now given our most recent water outage is to put a pump into the well so that we can extract water and use it to refill toilets, and we can also use it in the garden next summer if we have another heat wave and less rain.
I’ll be researching water pumps this week.
A word about cisterns
We’ve purchased most of our sanitary ware for our master bathroom refit, but the toilet has not yet been acquired as we’ve considered a ‘hidden’ cistern option that hides in the stud wall to save space.
My wife made an astute observation: if we continue to experience these water outages regularly our toilets are very much affected, so a hidden cistern is out of the question because it can’t be filled manually.
Once the well is operating we can manually fill toilets with water.
I’ll be providing updates on our well.