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I returned from a recent trip to London to find a lot of water in our front garden that shouldn’t be there (Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about ‘normal’ Glasgow weather…). The border bed next to the hedge that separates us from our neighbour had a puddle of water a few weeks ago, now it has a pond.

I’d noticed it whilst cutting the hedge before, and had just thought it was drainage. However, a few weeks later and almost the entire bed is full of an inch of water, and that’s a Bad Thing in my view. So after a call to Scottish Water to discuss, they suggested it was my problem (it’s in my property), and that I should get a plumber out. So the next day I called Donald Fraser, the plumber we’d used before, and he was here within an hour, and poking about.

He used two tests to establish it wasn’t our pipe from the main water supply along the street. First was a wizzy “syphon test”, which involved switching the water off at the street, and holding a full glass of water over the kitchen tap nozzle (switched full on). If there’s a leak, it follows that it’d syphon the water out of the glass. It didn’t. They also listen in on the water main to hear leaks, and nothing was coming through. They also pointed out that the street had a lot of moisture in the ground (appearing in cracks that had been in full sunlight all day), and that the stop valve was flooded with water, plus there was no movement in our water build up which you’d expect in an active local problem.

Suggestions are then that it’s either the mains itself, the sewer in the street (joy), or some drains in the front garden that are blocked, but the likelihood (given the dampness in the street) is it’s the mains. So Scottish Water have a man assigned to visit us on Tuesday afternoon. Fingers crossed that they’ll concur with our plumbers opinion. I’ve even dug out a copy of our deeds with a map showing where the drains in the front garden are, and it should be reasonably straightforward to rule out our systems, leaving it a Scottish Water problem to be resolved hopefully sooner rather than later.

Off the back of this, I called our household insurance provider Norwich Union, and had such a dismal experience speaking to somebody, who really didn’t seem to want to help, that I’m seriously minded to shift policy providers soon. I was phoning the claim line, explained I might have a problem, and wanted to know whether they needed to be informed/involved, and got such short shrift and useless answers. Went back to the documentation and read it carefully, to find that ‘emergencies’ don’t include water problems outside the inside of a house. So they didn’t even advise me properly. Thankfully, I didn’t give my name, so there’s no need to worry about records.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Glasgow, House, Personal, Scotland, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.