I decided before pulling the wall next to the bathroom apart I would purchase an endoscope attachment for my phone so I could make a small hole to check if there was a leak running down some pipes from the tap piping inside the wall.
I measured the distance approximately to the pipes stepping the distance out. Then gingerly drilled a 8mm hole to punch through the lathe and plaster to get access to the cavity to work out where I was. I drilled through and I'm going deeper than I though I should and still in wood. I must have hit the stud, so moved over 30mm and drilled again, Same thing wood! Then whosh out floods the water. I leg it down stairs to turn of the mains and cursed like mad.
Once I had managed to mop up all I could I decided to rip of the plaster to see what happened. It turned out that there was a horizontal stud. It had 2 holes vertically for the hot and cold pipe. The first hole went into the first pipe but did not all the way through. The second hole hit the second pipe and went through. Talk about being unlucky!
So now I made a bigger mess and still no further forward to finding the cause of the initial leak.
I decided to dry everything out first before continuing and bolted a fan to the ceiling to blow air in to dry it all out as much as I could.
A week later after it dried I was looking under floor boards and in holes in the ceiling to to find the original leak. I could see it was not from any new plumbing. And there were no leaks I could find. I had a pair of heating pipes that were terminated via a 1/4 turn valve and the other side plugged with an insert. The fittings lent up against joist that had what I thought looked like a stain. I though Ok might as well remove the valves while I'm here. Went to the combi boiler to turn it off before draining down. Then I saw it. I had left the mains filling loop on. The heating system was at mains pressure. The last time I was here was after fitting the rad in the bathroom over month before.
I slowly figured out what happened. During the night the mains pressure increases. Enough to get past the valve and plug to leak onto the joist. That was the first patch. The pipes were curved up to the valves so some of the leak dripped done the pipes to the a tee joint. My house is constricted so the downstairs walls do not match the upstairs so the room I was in straddled 2 downstairs. The pipe went over the wall downstairs. So the second patch was formed. The heavy coving prevented it showing up where you would expect.
I left it all live for a couple of weeks to ensure it was no longer leaking and filled the holes and re painted.
What can you say? If you make no mistakes your not learning. Better still though you learn from others mistakes, hence me posting this.
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- leak in hall.JPG (21.9 KiB) Viewed 2227 times
- Fan.JPG (23.44 KiB) Viewed 2224 times
- Leak.JPG (19.94 KiB) Viewed 2227 times
If gloom had a voice, it would be me.
