Dead Birds

On October 23rd, I had to drain down my parents’ cold- and hot-water tanks*.  When I re-filled them, there was only trickling water available in the Dolphin Special Care™ Bathroom: an airlock was preventing the free flow of water to the bathroom taps. 

I called a local, known and experienced plumber — no point calling Dolphin; I needed it fixed this year — and he diagnosed the problem: for the convenience of Dolphin’s fitters, they had introduced a huge and ambling double-loop of pipes in taking water down from the roof-space tank, and that could only fill with air — making an airlock — when the system was drained and refilled.

Also, and perhaps more alarmingly, he pointed out that the cold water in the bathroom was tank water, not mains water.  Before Dolphin ever walked through my parents’ front door, the bathroom was fed with mains-pressure (not tank) cold water. 

A consequence of Dolphin’s unnecessary, unauthorised and unreported change of water source was that, if a bird in the loft had become trapped, and then died, in the open-topped (like yours?) cold-water tank, then my parents and anyone else brushing teeth or drinking from the cold water in the Dolphin Special Care™ bathroom would have been drinking diluted rotting crow.

On November 28th I told Dolphin about this, asking them four specific questions:

On December 9th, I received a response, of sorts, from a Mrs TM Smith.  She wrote:

“... I am unable to answer your specific questions ...”, but she did agree that Dolphin would pay the October-25th bill of the “known and experienced plumber” mentioned above.

On December 15th I wrote to Dolphin to tell them that their ‘answer’ is not good enough.  If they do think up a better answer, I shall, of course, publish it here.

 
Why on earth do we British store water in our lofts?

Good question.  There aren’t many (any? — do tell) countries that experience freezing winter temperatures where this happens.  I can’t imagine those sassy Swedes doing anything quite so daft.  The drawbacks are obvious: unless the loft is badly insulated (that is, unless the house keeps leaking heat into it) the water tank — or more correctly, the pipes running to and from it — will freeze.  And when the thaw comes … So why? ;  Pourquoi, alors?    Well, it’s a problem that was caused by Britain’s precocious industrial maturity.  Ours was the first country on the planet with piped water for the masses, and everyone else has learned from our mistakes.    While the French still had decades to go without running water (it’s alright; they don’t much like washing) our Victorian predecessors were building reservoirs, sewers and clean-water conduits in order to improve public sanitation and health.     In the early 1800s, water at last began to be piped straight into people’s houses, rather than just sitting at the bottom of standpipes — mini-wells — in the street.  As late as 1850, cholera was still a killer in London because the population principally depended on communal water pumps  [NEW WINDOW] for their water supply.  So what did the Victorians do “wrong”?    Early water supplies were not reliable; usually, water was available for just an hour or so a day, often a night-hour, when demand was low.  So even after your Victorian mansion was piped up with a water supply, you couldn’t rely on anything much happening when you turned the tap on.    The answer was a personal reservoir.  And that clever Mr Newton had already worked out where that needed to be: up high, so the force of gravity could produce decent water pressure.    So the Victorians started the practice of putting tanks in lofts, and even newly-built houses in the UK still have their ‘personal reservoirs’.  This is really just inertia, and a bad case of  “well, we’ve always done it that way”. What’s the alternative?    Easy: Don’t have a loft tank.  Pipe cold water straight to the taps, with hot water being heated on-demand through a ‘combination’ boiler.  That works well: it’s essential for flat (‘apartment’) dwellers who can’t persuade upstairs neighbours to host water tanks for them ... You only need a loft-tank if you expect the mains water frequently to run dry.    One development on the combination-boiler approach is the ‘pressurized-hot’ approach.  You have mains-pressure cold water — and mains-pressure hot, too.  Here, you need a high-pressure tank to store just the hot water.  It has the minor advantages that hot and cold are at about the same pressure and that baths fill more quickly; a disadvantage is that you have to make space available for another whopping tank.    Of course, you can also equate pressures by having hot and cold water coming from a roof tank, but then we run into the problem where we came in: and you don’t really want to brush your teeth in stale water, do you?   So a roof-tank, in this century, is essentially a very silly idea.

Dolphin Special Care Bathrooms™ are not responsible for there being a water-tank in my parents’ loft.  But they are responsible for switching the cold water supply so that the bathroom used water from this tank, rather than from the mains.  The bathroom had been supplied with mains-pressure cold water ever since the house was built, in 1956.  If Dolphin Special Care™ ever explain to me or my mum why they did this, I’ll publish their reasons here.