No mains pressure

[TopTrumper]

fellas,
im a spark by trade and fit a lot of electric showers.
Just been to a house where the pressure was terrible, in 2 years of fitting showers never had a problem, so i never ever bothered with them water pressure gizmos you fellas have.

The old guy said since they dug the road up last year it has been this bad, i got him to ring united utilities up and they have made an appointment for friday for him to check things out...

My questions are, in your experience, will the water board come up trumps with a solution, and if they dont, what are my other options??

Dont really want to install tanks if need be, any ideas

 

[Fluffster]

Becoming more of a problem now with everyone switching to mains fed systems.
I have known of neighbours in next to each other streets having diff flow and pressure rates.
To be honest I have never had much luck with Thames water they will not suddenly turn a valve that increases pressure in your street.

What feed does the house have from the streeet ie lead, size etc.
Pete

 

[TopTrumper]

Fluffster
I never bothered to look as all that was on show was a tap behind the kitchen cupboards...
house is old though 80yrs plus

 

[Paul Barker]

It's mosty likley Lead, up here it's 7lb half inch usually but in parts of London it can be very thin walled 6lb which would very easily crush.

First thing I would do is turn off in the street, remove stop tap (check for debris) connect to main and see what flow is at the house before the stop tap, if still not good, get water board to do test at their side. Round here they use Morrisons for this and usually come back with a figure like 200 lpm at their side. Next step is to dig a meter deep trench and replace lead fro the property boundary to a new stop tap with 25mm p.e. pipe. Cheapest option is to connect to the lead with a plastic screw up type compression fitting, the ones in vogue at the moment are greya nd black fluted ones. They work extremely well. Whereas it is possible to get the water board to do the final connection to their stop tap it is seldome necessary and can cost much more than your part of the job.

If you do it to the water regs you do not have to inform them. If you do not you must ask permission, if they don't reply inside two weeks you have permission.

With the right man on the trenching shovel pick and as required heavy breaker the job takes a day. It's definately a case of using someone who is used to digging holes, I would take four times as long as then man I use and he's cheaper than me per hour with bells on.