The Saga of the Water Meter

In almost every decision on restoring this house, I deliberately tended to adopt the long term solution.  After all, we expect to be living here for a fair while, so the more expensive long term solutions were always worth considering as we would derive the benefit.  One such was the sheepswool loft insulation (see this page); this was quite expensive but it allows the ceilings to breathe, and is so much nicer to work with than the glass stuff which irritates.  Another has been the acrylic secondary glazing (see this page), which has made the house so much more comfortable, and in any case will have paid for itself in two years or less.  Other investments are purely financial, based on the expectation that we will still own the house in ten or more years' time; one such item was the water meter.  We had one in our rented house in 2010, and the experience was that, with just two of us living there, the meter had saved us about £150 per year.  So it was a no-brainer to have one fitted here and, quite naturally, I wanted it done early in the restoration.

I had identified that the mains supply for the house had a stop cock under a plastic cover in the pavement; there were two stop cocks inside the house; the main one was in the hall and fed a flexible (washing machine quality?) pipe which went to the bathroom above and had supplied the cold tank (which had already been removed to the garden!).  The other supply went to the old extension, and I had had the plumber fit a new internal tap so that we could properly attach a hose for the plastering and floor laying.  When that was working I had the plumber feed the other supply through to the kitchen so that it was ready there, but out of the way of planned work.

So, early in 2011 I made an application to Thames Water for a meter.  They sent out a workman (actually a contractor) who looked at everything and asked me if I wanted an internal or external meter.  I said "external if possible", not wanting to have a meter getting in the way of the kitchen floor and plaster work about to be tackled.  Little did I know.  A crew was sent without delay, and they very speedily fitted a meter under the pavement.  OK so far!

There was an amusing small glitch later in the year - when doing the extension we found that the water supply in the old extension actually carried on under the brick wall separating our back gardens and fed our neighbour's outside tap.  This would not normally be a concern, but in fact it had been used as the sole supply for the construction of a £3 million building at the back; this was an arrangement which preceded the sale of next door, and when they purchased it, the builders had an obligation to pay his water bill for a period.  As it happens, the construction had been completed about two months before I asked for the meter, which was fortuitous.  My neighbour admitted that he had been puzzled that his water bill was completely normal!

Having moved in (July 2011), I had a very low bill the next month, followed in February 2012 by a quite reasonable one of £91 for a six month period.  You can imagine my consternation when in August 2012 I received my second six month bill for £274.  Now, the house next door (not our other half but a separate cottage) had been rented out from February 2012, having been empty for over a year; it was not difficult to do a quick bit of detective work and spot that there was no other water main cover in the pavement for 15 metres, and so clearly they had fitted the meter to a shared supply. D'oh!

I can write this now in the cool light of reflection of the last five months.  That time was regularly punctuated with me telephoning Thames Water and getting not much satisfaction.  It took a considerable amount of persistence to resolve this issue, and their first level help desk staff became predictable in their complete lack of ability to achieve anything.   Their typical response was to say that someone would call in 6 working days but nothing happened.  One really stupid thing that someone did was to rescind all their bills back to when the meter was fitted (although the meter readings WERE valid and acceptable to me for almost a year), and then send out a bill for the standard rate for April 2011 to April 2013, so that I owed them £789, payable at once!

If you have the same sort of issue, my top tip is that at the first excuse you say the magic words "I want to escalate this issue".  Once I had been passed on to the "Escalation Department" I had much better service and progress was made, ultimately successfully.  Sadly for me that did not happen until I had wasted nine weeks and many phone calls in trying.  A second top tip is to keep a good record of your phone calls; it really gets the attention of the Manager in the "Escalation Department" when you can name the idiot who failed to do what he promised four months ago, and when you give a string of names and dates they quickly realize that you do indeed have a point.  The other thing to remember is that it is (usually) not the fault of the person to whom you are speaking, but one of their colleagues, so a plaintive sob story with a hint of desperation gets a far better response than shouting at the poor unfortunate one who was unlucky enough to get your call.

The result for me was that in order to have a meter it had to be internal.  Of course, this would have been much easier if it had been done before installing our new kitchen (June 2011), so there was a bit of an issue as to where to put it.  The only sensible place was under the sink, and Thames Water said that their installer needed six inches "all the way around" to fit the meter.  Now, it is natural to fit pipes within two inches of the wall and floor, isn't it?  This is what my plumber had done, and they wanted me to sort out the pipes before they would send someone to fit the meter.  I rather griped at that generous use of space which would have used the entire space underneath my sink for just the meter, and asked if my plumber could fit the meter as well.  This did not seem to be allowable, but they sent a man to look at the possibilities; he actually brought a meter with him, which somehow I persuaded him to leave and I then paid my plumber £96 to fit it right at the back of  the sink cupboard.  Good job!  All up and running.

I have today received their latest bill and I'm £165 in credit.  They wouldn't pay my £96 but the nice young woman has used a low figure for estimating the consumption if I'd had a meter which gave valid readings.  This has (deliberately or inadvertently?) given that sum back to me, so I'll let that drop, as I am really fed up with phoning their hepdesk!

A Milestone Achieved

There is a very odd satisfaction of sitting on a settee surrounded by boxes in a house that could only be described as a mess.  There's a bunch of cables which connect me and my computer to the outside world - amazingly the broadband is working (after last year's experience with well-known company, I had VERY low expectations!); there's a TV aerial on the arm of the settee which, much to my surprise, gives a good digital picture (better than at our rented house), and we've just had a meal cooked on our new range, preceded by a well-deserved G&T.  There is no mortgage on this house, and most tasks are done.  Can life get much better than this?

We still have to hand back our 12 year old rented house, and I'm glad to be getting rid of it.  It is a cheap and cheerless modern box, made with haste and no love, using poor materials and a pretty bad design.  For instance, we could not fit our king-size bed into any bedroom with any other furniture at all, so for the last year we have been in a small bed which gave me cold feet.  I've never known a house before where the HOT water supply to upstairs could freeze in winter - OK, I know last winter was pretty cold at times but surely there are rules about where the pipes are laid?  Also, it was always cold in the kitchen - I cannot believe that there was the correct amount of insulation under the floor, and it had some very cheap uPVC doors and windows.  You could actually see daylight between the two seals on the French doors in the kitchen, and the step outside was not supported (until I put some blocks of wood underneath it).  Overall, that modern house really made me pleased to be the owner of this lovely old house, even when it was overgrown, cold and damp!

This week, we have been doing various finishing touches to enable us to move, which we achieved on Friday.  Phil and Jaye, the plastering duo, helped us to move, using Phil's van which was given its first ever spring clean in order to be fit for the purpose.  The weather was wet and so I was glad that we had not fitted new carpets throughout.  However, we had decided to have two new bedroom carpets done, and these were fitted on Friday morning; an earlier date was not possible as I wanted to fit the new bedroom wardrobe before the carpets came - it was a close run thing as I was still doing the wardrobe at 5pm on Thursday.  We also had BT come along on Friday to install a telephone line to the house for the first ever time; initially the technician said that it should have been surveyed first and he was going to leave us, but then he relented and we discussed possible solutions.  The job took him more than five hours and then he left in a hurry, leaving his ladders behind.  Consequently the first incoming call on our new number was from the BT man himself, enquiring about the whereabouts of his ladders!

I'm now making a list of priority tasks outstanding: top of the list is fitting the shower screen and sealing the edge of the bath; next the completion of the wardrobe so that all our (i.e. Jane's) clothes can be hung up again.  Hopefully our last extravagance, a large purpose built bookcase, will be installed early in August so that a lot of boxes can be emptied, and then there's just the kitchen tiling, sash window refurbishment (x7), curtains, the rest of the carpets and the small matter of the decrepit old extension which we haven't yet touched...  But it's now our home, and we love it!

In praise of Gas Men

Yes, I really do want to sing the praise of the various contractors who have installed my new gas supply in the last ten days.  I'll even name the company - Southern Gas Networks - as they have exceeded all my expectations (OK, my expectations were pretty low!).  I only paid for the work in early January and they advised that they were expecting to come in 35 days; being a pessimist I assumed that was 35 working days - seven weeks - so I was quite surprised when they said they would come on Feb 3rd.  They even tried (twice) to come earlier as they wanted to keep their emergency team busy on something, but both times the team were then called off to an emergency... I was then pleased when they actually did come as promised on Feb 3rd, and by the next day had completed laying the pipe from the road to the house.  This is about 25 yards which required five hand-dug holes to connect together using their mole (see last week's blog), plus a hand-dug trench at either end (to connect to the main and to the meter box). 

So it was last week that I had a procession of men from their contractor ("Enterprise") who is clearly on a very strictly controlled contract.  Firstly two men came to do "the black stuff" (i.e. filling the hole in the road and pavement).  Then two more came who compacted the three holes which required concrete, in preparation for a third pair who actually laid the concrete.  Special mention here for the young lad who did the concrete (the new bit, right), for carefully copying the pattern in the rest of the concrete around the manhole cover, and doing an excellent job of it.  Finally another pair came (in two vans) to collect all the signage and fencing - all done by Feb 10th.

Having moved here from Central London, I was used to large development companies leaving huge holes with temporary traffic lights on busy roads for a week or three with no work happening.  In the case of the Shard (at London Bridge), there is even a road (St Thomas Street) which has been blocked one way for a couple of years, causing even greater traffic issues than already existed in the area.  Then, conflicting for about ten months, Thames Water dug up the adjacent Borough High Street to replace the water main....  To my mind, if they cannot build a place without causing huge inconvenience to thousands of people on a daily basis for years, I'm not sure why they should be given permission in the first place. [/rant]

Anyway, the meter came yesterday (Mon 14th) so job done.  I'm very happy with the utilities here!

Gas Men and Holes in the Ground

After reaching the take-a-breath stage with the plastering, the gas man came this week.  The house has no gas (although next door does) and so they had to fit a new gas supply pipe from the road up to the side of the house where the kitchen will be.  This is quite a long route, and I am grateful that the surveyor stretched his tape measure to do it all for no extra cost.  He was well aware of the issues about not fitting unsightly meter boxes on listed buildings, and had had this debate with his own company many times before.

Of course, when the manager came last week, he had a different idea about the required route, and then the actual workers had their own variation as well.  They have to dig two holes and then use a tool called a mole, which operates on compressed air and burrows under the ground from one hole to another.  In fact, for our property they had to dig five holes and join them up like a dot-to-dot picture.  Then at either end they dug a trench for the connections to the main and the meter box.  This may sound easy and in fact they made fairly light of the issues, but I reckon I was right to be worried about the difficulty of the possible routes.  The job took over two days, and so one night the road was partly blocked by these works; Jane said, "I've never had a road blocked for me before!"

I dug a hole where the meter was to go, partly as I wanted to know how deep the "foundations" of the house were.  The answer was about a foot from the current surface!  In this photo you can see the three bottom courses of stone, which sit on a line of stones laid at right angles, sticking out about four inches from the wall.  It looks as though they laid these longer stones across ways, and then just built the wall on them.  I think this bottom level was pretty much the ground level when it was built.


The gas men found a old wall, in the gateway near our front wall but about a foot into our property and about a foot down.  Despite the availability of local limestone, this wall uses a good amount of granite - where did that come from?

The existing wall is at the top left of the photo, heading down, and the older wall is in the middle just above my toe, highlighted by the low sun.  There was also a possible mediaeval tile fragment as well as a few other bits of pottery, but clearly everything there has been disturbed over the centuries and is out of context.  However, overall, we think it shows that our house is on a very interesting bit of ground (in the archaeological sense), and now Jane wants to excavate the entire garden!