When we had the extension done we got a plumber in to do some stuff. Turns out he’s an absolute bell end. Monumental dick. Nearly ended up costing me a new boiler because he couldn’t be arsed flushing the system. Anyway. One of the other things he did was to fit a stop cock so that I could turn off my outside water supply when the weather gets toward freezing.
The input to the stopcock is a 15mm pipe. The output from the stopcock is a 25mm MDPE pipe that goes down the garden. So he fitted a 25/15mm stopcock. All good so far. The only minor problem is that the stopcock is unidirectional. It’s designed to stop the flow of water FROM a 25mm pipe to a 15mm pipe. The exact opposite of the situation we have. The upshot of this is that I could not stop the flow of water down the garden. This wasn’t such a big deal, I could cope with it, until the builders next door offered to remove my bamboo problem [ more on this later ] with a massive digger. The bamboo is growing directly above my water pipe and I was pretty convinced they were going to damage my pipe and my only solution would be to turn off the main stopcock in the house and we wouldn’t be able to use water until the pipe was repaired.
What the plumber should have done is put in a standard 15mm stopcock on the 15mm pipe and then just fitted an adaptor from the output of the stopcock onto the 25mm pipe. Piece of cake. No problem. Have it done in 5 minutes. Except of course since the pipe work has been fitted we’ve built a kitchen around it which makes access really really hard.
I had to chop the crap out of my kitchen cabinet, fit a series of 90 degree bends to avoid the waste pipe and introduce a 15/25 adaptor which can’t be seen in the picture above. All went pretty well until I had to introduce the adaptor. Getting a clean cut on a 15mm pipe is easy. inserting the pipe support on a 15mm pipe is easy. Everything to do with a 25mm pipe is really really hard. I couldn’t get a square cut with the cheap pipe cutters that the nobhead plumber left behind. I struggled to push the pipe insert far enough in. Both of which combined to give me a leak. Ultimately I bought a new pair of ratcheting pipe cutters which gave me an excellent cut on the pipe. I then fired up my heat gun on the MDPE to warm it slightly and make it just a touch more flexible so that I could get the pipe insert in.
Now the job is complete. I have a stopcock to stop the water going outside. The builders dug up the bamboo and didn’t even come close to my water pipe. It’s all been a massive waste of time.