Knackered stop cock.

[Fraserb]

We don’t have gas here. The boy I gave the clamp to ripped up a gas pipe the very next day. It’s yellow plastic. He got away with it because it was only 500mm deep but it was a hell of a show the gas board put on. Some sort of response unit and all sorts. Loads of men and machines. I was visiting him and had given the clamp the day before and turned up where he was working and walked into all that!

Had that with an electric cable that was 225mm deep across the corner of one of our fields with no markings, Scottish Power tried to bill us for it though.

 

[Barlidge]

I have thought about freezing the pipe below the valve, cut it out cos it's soldered on , it's a copper main. Then fit new valve etc. But I hate being under pressure and if it thaws or doesn't freeze properly or even splits I'm in trouble. I also only have around 5" under the kitchen units to freeze, working from the removed kick panel. I think it best to wait for the water board!

With the only other means of turning it off buried under tarmac? No pressure then

 

[earthman]

This story reminds me of a situation at my previous house, contractors/the water board screwed up basically, next door wanted their supply on a water meter, they connected the meter to the pipe to my house. Lol

 

[Kayos]

Swap the guts, do it live

 

[8ob]

I have a couple of squeeze off tools in the digger, last week while home schooling Ben was to draw a picture of his favourite thing he saw that day.
View attachment 270605

We keep squeeze off's up to 6" and a full range of joiners just in case There is a newish range of couplers that have more scope than the old Johnson couplings and are good on every type of pipe, enough scope to be able to get them on a burst water main with ease while live .

Bob

 

[James1979]

We keep squeeze off's up to 6" and a full range of joiners just in case There is a newish range of couplers that have more scope than the old Johnson couplings and are good on every type of pipe, enough scope to be able to get them on a burst water main with ease while live .

Bob

My mate wanted them for his stump grinder more than the digger. These worked on one side one way and you sort of swivelled them to change sizes?

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

We don’t have gas here. The boy I gave the clamp to ripped up a gas pipe the very next day. It’s yellow plastic. He got away with it because it was only 500mm deep but it was a hell of a show the gas board put on. Some sort of response unit and all sorts. Loads of men and machines. I was visiting him and had given the clamp the day before and turned up where he was working and walked into all that!

This was fun.
https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/sto...s-without-gas-following-leak-in-bedfordshire/
100s of vans in the area.


Bovis or someone hit a gas main while digging and promptly filled it with concrete which traveled down the pipes a long long way

 

[Fraserb]

We keep squeeze off's up to 6" and a full range of joiners just in case There is a newish range of couplers that have more scope than the old Johnson couplings and are good on every type of pipe, enough scope to be able to get them on a burst water main with ease while live .

Bob

Yeah I have a fair selection of joiners as well, we use the Philmac joiners as they do the black pipe as well as blue.

 

[8ob]

My mate wanted them for his stump grinder more than the digger. These worked on one side one way and you sort of swivelled them to change sizes?

We come across a lot of really shallow services while stump grinding I will take a snap of one of the couplings. The small £30 squeeze off will do most things.

After that they need to be hydraulic
.

 

[James1979]

This was a funny thing. Not seen one before. I’ll try and find a picture

 

[James1979]

It was like this but better built.

 

[striker]

Swap the guts, do it live

There will be water everywhere. I don't want to ruin my kitchen.

 

[pedrobedro]

Yeah I have a fair selection of joiners as well, we use the Philmac joiners as they do the black pipe as well as blue.

I used a Philmac universal to blank a burst lead pipe which was redundant. It has been hammered flat and soldered so I had to cut it back to a round section but the joiner and blank did a great job.

 

[Bryan Williams]

I used a Philmac universal to blank a burst lead pipe which was redundant. It has been hammered flat and soldered so I had to cut it back to a round section but the joiner and blank did a great job.

I wanted to blank off a lead pipe in an old outside toilet, I wanted to solder a plug in it.
Trouble was the water kept creeping up and ruining the solder.
With absolutely no experience doing this I asked my dad, old school brickie what the plumbers did on site, he said soak up as much water out of the pipe then plug it with bread, then solder it.
It worked.

 

[striker]

I wanted to blank off a lead pipe in an old outside toilet, I wanted to solder a plug in it.
Trouble was the water kept creeping up and ruining the solder.
With absolutely no experience doing this I asked my dad, old school brickie what the plumbers did on site, he said soak up as much water out of the pipe then plug it with bread, then solder it.
It worked.

Bread, good for removing spigot bearings too!

 

[indy4x]

Many years ago I used to do property maintenance. Kept a few push fit stopcocks for this very eventuality.

Prep a push fit stopcock with a short piece of copper on the out port and run this out of the house with some hose pipe

Pipe slice the incoming copper and quickly ram the push fit on. You do get a little wet but most of it goes out the hosepipe

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Many years ago I used to do property maintenance. Kept a few push fit stopcocks for this very eventuality.

Prep a push fit stopcock with a short piece of copper on the out port and run this out of the house with some hose pipe

Pipe slice the incoming copper and quickly ram the push fit on. You do get a little wet but most of it goes out the hosepipe

Remember having to slice live in a flat

Only way to isolate if you can believe it was to turn everything off for all the flats.

Got wet doing the bath. Always awkward with poor access

 

[Agrismith]

If they marked the location of the stopcock in the pavement just take a pick to it
Pavement tarmac is fine and can be laid very thin so it's really easy to cover a stopcock lid and not notice
Whereas the base tarmac is chunkier so it's obvious a cover is under there so should be less than an inch over it
A pick will easily deal with that and let the water board tidy it up later

 

[striker]

Had a call from Northumbrian water today. They are coming to sort it on Wednesday next week. I can wait that long no probs, thanks for all the advice though!

 

[Nick67GT]

Whilst refurbishing our first house, I’d had some floor boards up in the lounge for some reason which escapes me, and spotted a huge length of lead piping snaking from the front of the house all the way to the back. Having earlier removed all the lead sheathed wiring as well as some old gas lines, the prospect of weighing this lot in at the scrappy as well was too much to resist. It was only when I was about a third of the way through it with the hacksaw that it became obvious it was very much a live water line.

I had to call Severn Trent out because the stopcock outside on the pavement was fubar and the only way I could stop it leaking was to bend the partially cut pipe together to close the gap caused by the cut.

To be fair, they were out in a couple of hours (there’s a service depot less than a mile from where we lived at the time) and replaced the head on the valve in the pavement, which at least isolated the house to enable a repair on the old lead pipe.

When I explained what a clown I’d been, they took pity on me and made a repair with a sort of in-line compression coupling.

How I’d have fixed it if they’d just cleared off I don’t know, but I’ve been extremely careful with old pipes ever since.