Plumbing (Sils192)

Gill has been asking for an outside tap in the front garden for a while - and with the weather not being so good for anything outside,  today was the day!

The easiest place to get a supply is in the downstairs loo, where to get at the pipes it would be easiest to take the cistern off.  Well that would be convenient we thought, it could do with a quiet replacement fill valve and we could put a half flush syphon in too :-)  There is even a service valve at the end of the pipe so it ought to be easy to turn off the water and just work on this section leaving the rest of the house supplied ... and .. I have the new fill valve and syphon and ... a spare coupling doughnut - what could possibly go wrong?

You can tell where this is going can't you ....

Stop tap would not close completely - so we had to replace it
The olive for the stop tap had to be cut from the pipe - but only after clearing various layers of paint.
The mounting plate for the close coupled cistern had rusted - as had one of the bolts  so two mole grips needed to get the cistern off.
The old doughnut washer is an odd stepped size - not something Screwfix have in stock
I did have enough bits to get the new pipework in place and reconnect to cistern to the water supply - with no significant leaks!
The valve for the outside tap is in place, but you can see in my blip that the compression nuts need a little more tightening.

The hole for the outside tap will have to wait - I spent a happy hour freeing up the chuck on my big drill - and sprayed release oil up two walls in the process :-)

The really annoying thing is that when I was a field engineer, I spent a lot of time fixing leaks in cooling systems, so you might think I would be a competent plumber!

Does that sound silly enough for a silly Saturday entry?

Thanks to Admirer for hosting.

Thanks also to everyone for the positive comments on my Chesterton blip yesterday.