HERE WE GO AGAIN - DUX QUEST*

 * No, I'm not spouting Latin. The Curmudgeon isn't one of those pretentious 3G people.

Do you remember a couple of years ago I posted on plumbing problems (not mine - the house's)?

Oh, here's an idea - I'll give you a link or two:

HERE

AND HERE

AND HERE

Happy now?

Well, it's happened again. The latest energy bill showed a big increase from the previous month and we haven't been excessively using electricity. I had a thought that we might have a hot water leak so crawled under the house to look. No, that's all OK but I decided to scout further. And further it was. At the furthest reach of the under-floor piping there was a major leak from a PVC joint. This is one of those Dux Quest pipes that were installed in the 1970s and 1980s - a rort by the plumbing/building industry as while being cheap they failed abysmally.

The crawl space under the house is very tight so, to get to this latest leak I spent several hours digging and scraping away the dirt level to make a bit more room. This was hard work as the ground was hard with impacted mud (from the previous floods before we had the driveway ditches dug) and rocks and, near the water leak it was like pottery clay making it very difficult to dig and scrape.

Eventually I must have lowered the level by about 6 inches (two Phillip Nis's penises). I didn't want to dig too deeply near the house piles as the 'rule of thumb' (American, hence the non-metric scale) is one foot away from piles no more than 6 inches to dig.

Here are some images. I know that you like images almost as much as you like graphs**

I'd turned off the water and with difficulty, actually a lot of difficulty reached under two large drainage piped to get to the narrow water pipe to wrap Magic Wrap around the pipe and the join.

Magic Wrap, according to internet reviews is marvellous stuff:

That was from a Magic Wrap website but 'independent' reviews (probably written by themselves) say similar things. Unfortunately it's all crap. The product doesn't work.

I'd run out of daylight so made sure the water was turned off and gave up for the night. That was yesterday.

This morning I crawled under the house again and, as I'd bought two rolls of Magic Wrap from Mitre 10 I decided to use the other one as well, tightly binding the pipe and the joint. When I turned the water back on it still pissed out! Bugger!

I contacted a local plumber, well aware that it's a holiday weekend and arranged for him to come tomorrow to make the repair. Also I said I'd like to book in a time for him (probably a two or three day job) to replace all the Dux Quest and any other dodgy piping. It's a big house and access is restricted so it will be a long (and expensive) job. He asked if I'd tried to  wrap the pipe and I told him about Magic Wrap. He laughed and said that he'd tried it on his place and it doesn't work.

C'est la vie. ***

** Sorry I don't have any graphs for you.

*** That was French.