It all started simply enough, with blocked downpipes on the house. In a heavy down pour over the Australia Day weekend I discovered that I had a lovely waterfall as the gutters overflowed.
A few days later I got out a ladder, cleaned the gutters out, which had about 6 years worth of debris in them and then looked at the downpipes.
I quickly established that it was beyond me to clean them out. So I called in a so called expert. To my dismay he put a hose in the pipes, as I had done, watched them fill up, as I had done and pronounced the problem to be beyond him to fix. He charged me for doing what I had already done myself.
Not impressed I engaged a plumber with an "Eel" to come and clean out the storm water pipes. The plumber had to cut access holes, then quickly told me that it was beyond him to fix. He also charged me for the cost of doing nothing. He wanted cash for this work and to add insult to injury could not find $2 to give me change when I came up with the money.
The plumber telephoned his manager and they then suggested that the current storm water system should be bypassed and quoted over $6000 for the job. What a croc!
I got some other quotes and found someone to do the job at less than half the cost of the original quotation. For this price he was going to connect 2 downpipes for the house and 2 downpipes on the garage and link them all into the storm water system. An excavator would be brought in to do the trenching.
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| Front down pipe. Hole cut by the drain cleaner to allow the eel in |
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| Commencing the digging. |
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| Before shot of the garage.Pipes need to be in before the concrete driveway is poured. |
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| Tree roots did not stand a chance with the excavator. |
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| Exposed electrical wires, we knew they were there somewhere, so this was not a surprise. |
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| Garage with an inlet for the drain in the driveway. |
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| Joining the pipes. |
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| The garden afterwards. Sigh another job to do. |
That work was completed this morning. All up about 5 1/2 hours work.
The Bludger is pleased to tick off another task.
Cleaning may be an exhausting job, but with all the convenience it can give, it is worth all the hard work. But to avoid plumbing, one should always make sure that their gutters and storm pipelines are clean and unclogged. Not only will it function very well that way, but can also extend the lifespan of your pipes and gutters. It’s certainly a great assurance that you won't have to worry too much about flooding once a storm passes by.
ReplyDeleteSharon Strock @ StormChamber®