Sweetpea's pathetic excuses for not fixing the MR2

sweetpea - loving the thread! Can I ask a question about your pump? How do you switch it on and off? With a gun on the end of the hose, when you switch on the pump, what stops it pressurising the hose to the point where it bursts, or pops off a fitting? I have a similar situation where I want to pump water out of an underground tank for watering the garden.

Sorry for the thread hijack!

georgeb is quite right. Apologies not needed.

With the old pump it was never a problem because it couldn't produce enough pressure to do any harm. This one can. Judging by the height of the spray I reckon it's producing a similar pressure to the mains water so it's fine with mains water fittings but was blowing the pond hose apart.
All I did was removed the pond pipe and use plastic SpeedFit stuff right to the pump outlet. The plastic pipe has a bit of flex and there are a couple of push fit elbows and couplings which will allow the pump to shift about without breaking anything.

There is a switch on the wall to power the pump so when the missus wants to water the garden she just calls the butler who turns the pump on and sends the footman for 'support'. Then he turns it off again later. This pump has a continuous rating but I doubt it'd be happy not actually shifting water for hours. My electric bill wouldn't like it either.

To connect the pump outlet to the plastic water pipe I ground the threads off a suitable sized tank connector (or something like that). There is a very short piece of sturdy hose and 2 jubilee clips joining it to the pump outlet.
I'll post a couple of photos later although I don't have one of the contrivance in the tank. It was raining and I was getting annoyed with it blowing pond pipe apart! If you want to see it I can lift the pump out at the weekend and take a snap.

James

No problem. As a special treat for all you lovely people...


Here is the magic switch that turns the pump on.





There are two tanks hidden behind this lot.





About 1200 L each.
Here they are nestling under the kitchen windows.





The slatted top is just as a disguise and to enable you to walk on top to clean the windows.
And here is a description of the business end.





The height of the strainer sets the maximum water level in the tank. These are pretty much brimmed when they are full.

That was as good as I could get it. And even that was a struggle. Further apart and they get caught up on the mounting screws, closer together and they are hard to remove.
On the plus side they won't be unplugged very often.

The butler isn't very bright. Needs all the help he can get!

Actually those clamps don't really work on the fig 8 cable that I'm using. Bit odd for a speaker connector. So I might have to make it roughly round and heat shrink over it to give the clamp something to grip.





Anyhoo... Another time, another place.
Actually, yesterday in Canterbury.

I’d noticed that the rainwater downpipe on the front of the house had a problem. It had been raining and water was dribbling out of a joint in the pipe halfway down the wall. Meaning, of course, that it was blocked and full of water.
Hmmph. Better sort that out then.

The plastic downpipe disappeared into the garden. More than likely it ambled off to a soak away under the front lawn. Undoubtedly there’ll be some moss and rubbish off the roof clogging up the bend at the bottom of the drop. Easy win.
First job, hack down the bush that was in the way, I’m not actually sure if it was ours or the neighbours but it’s gone. Mrs Sweetpea reckons it was a weed anyway.
Next, start digging down to the bend and hope it heads off under our lawn and not towards the neighbours.

About 6 or 8 inches down, which wouldn’t have been too bad except the garden is made of builders rubble, I uncovered the top of a clay elbow. But where the plastic dropped into the clay there was no attempt to seal the joint and there were a lot of fine roots.
Hmmm.






I unscrewed the downpipe from the wall and took it down.





Roots. After a fair bit of thumping I got them out.





They went about a foot up the pipe and were very tight.
Got a bad feeling now. The top of the clay elbow…





Oh dear.
I calculated that, as it was blocked about a foot up the pipe, it was probably blocked a foot or 18 inches downwards. So I started poke the roots out of the clay pipe in the hope that I could pull the root up and round the bend.

No such luck. What I really didn’t want to do was disturb the clay elbow. My chances of getting it off the clay pipe going off under the garden with out breaking one or the other were slim. And to make matters worse it immediately went under the concrete path. Trashing the pipe would likely mean digging the path up.

So I had a chat with a mate who does landscaping for a living and has had ‘encounters’ with drains in the past. I wondered if he had experience of drain rodding companies and whether they would be able to work around the bend.
After a bit of a chat we decided that I might as well keep digging and hope the elbow comes off.

So I did, and it did.





The surprise was that it didn’t connect to a clay pipe. It connected to a plastic pipe. About 90mm OD with a load of cement trying to fill the gap. Oh and the elbow was being used backwards for good measure. That said there was not much root through the joint so it was probably ok.

So what of this plastic pipe?





With all my strength I couldn’t pull the root out of the pipe. I gave up for the night. Needed another idea.





I have a set of drain rods with a screw auger tip but the pipe points approximately at the side of the house and the hole in the garden is very small. If I dug up the neighbours garden I might just get it in.

So I made this…





Essentially a barbed hook on a stiff but flexible pipe. Ram it into the root and yank it out a bit at a time.
God help me if I have to use that… I’ll be at it all day.


But before I did that I had one other plan.
Tie a rope to the end of the roots and put my foot against it.

Suddenly it gave a little… And it’s moving… Careful. Try not to break it. Ease it out of the pipe.


Success!











That’s about 3.5 meters long, 12 feet in old money. And it does wither to almost nothing so I’ve got almost all of it out. Certainly enough for the drain to flow again.

I’m not putting the silly clay bend back on. I’m planning to use rubber sleeve connectors. But the plastic pipe is an odd size, about 90mm OD and the downpipe is 68mm. I can’t find a reducing sleeve that covers those sizes. Anyway, I’ll come up with something! For the moment it’s jury rigged. It’ll do until I can get the bits I need.

James

A definite win there. Not keen on leaky drains, especially ones that need digging. By hand. In the rain.
Could you use a pipe reducer rubber bung type thing in the bigger pipe to bring the id down ?
If you have a proper plumbers merchant they will have a solution ? Slight issue is as a DIY person I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t treated with a certain amount of disdain occasionally almost hostility in one as I’m not a time served plumber. My solution was to take the risk and send my wife in !
James

Interesting question that... I wondered for a moment if it had been growing from the far end but it definitely thins out the further down it goes. Which means, probably, it was the bush I removed. However, that entire root mass was connected to the plant by tiny fibrous roots sneaking through a couple of mm gap at the bottom of the down pipe. I honestly can't work out how such a large root system was beneficial to the plant given the bottle neck.
Nature, if you don't mind me saying so, is bl00dy incredible.



I also wondered about those internal reducer bung things but struggled to search for them 'cos I couldn't work out what their official name is. Most of the ones I did find were for 110mm pipe though. I've got 80mm ID and 68mm OD so only 12mm gap to play with. I doubt one of those bungs would work.
The job is complicated by the fact that the down pipe and the under ground pipe only approach each other in the vaguest of ways. The old clay elbow was installed backwards and squint with a good dollop of cement to get the ends to meet.
There is a good friendly plumbing shop in town so I'll pop along and see them. Won't have to send the missus in because we'll all be wearing masks so I won't be able to see them gently giggling at my ignorance.



Thanks Chris,
I spotted that web site last night. I think you are right and the 80 > 90mm one is my best bet. It turns out that the male collar on the down pipe stuff is about 80mm OD so that'd work nicely.
Probably my best approach is to get a handful of rubber couplings from that web site and a load of angles, pipe and PCV glue from the shop. Then spend a day with my head in the hole until I can get the ends to meet up.

Anyhow. I think the job is going to be the latest one to go on the back burner as something more important is going to divert my attention next week. Jobs at my house are like those Russian dolls, there's always another one.

James

Russian dolls. That’s a good analogy. You are not a lone sufferer of “exponential job expansion syndrome”, trust me.