A Sign of the Times?

Sean Regan

Sean Regan

Well-known member
On two occasions this week, United Utilities have visited different houses this week, on the other side of our road, to clear blocked sewage pipes in their drives. This is a service free to house owners in the Trafford area.
So obviously conscious are they of a particular problem that has increased over the years. Their vehicles look like this.



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Oh yes, we have the same issue here: Failing infrastructure. My neighbor behind me has had ongoing visits from the "Vaccon" truck. They've been sucking out the clogs in the sewer out front of her house for almost a year.
We have frequent incidences of water running over the road as well. They dig up the pavement, do something, pave it back over and then it leaks again. All the pipes need changing. They are just rust buckets morphing into sieves.
 
In the UK, sewage pipes from your house are in most incidences "loose laid." The traditional form of pipe are earthenware, which inter-connect, but are not sealed.
We had a problem a few years ago with the toilet backing up.
It turned at that there was a lump of concrete in the pipe between the down pipe and the inspection hatch between the two drives.
The drain guy found it with a camera sent along the pipe from below the hatch. It had been there since the house was built in 1965, but had been dislodged over time and was now ljammed, at one of the joints. They had to cut through our concrete drive, dig out a lot of soil, smash the offending pipe, remove, the bit of concrete, replace the pipe and re-concrete the drive.
I could have got some green cement dye and "tarted it up," but I couldn't be bothered.


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I've noticed the adverts on the radio every 10 minutes talking about only flushing poo and paper 🙄

As if that's going to solve the crumbling infrastructure and the constant deliberate dumping of untreated sewage into the rivers and seas on a weekly basis.

They tried to claim it was excess rainfall that caused the treatment plants to overflow....

...during a drought 🙄

It's cheaper to pay the fines than upgrade the Victorian sewers into the 21st Century.

They pay the shareholders and water company bosses a fortune and then say they haven't got any money to improve the system.

Our population has increased by 10 million in 20 years (officially) The supermarkets are saying our population has gone up 20 million.

More poo, same sewers 🙄
 
Unfortunately, as you say, much of the money we pay each month goes to shareholders as bonuses.

But United Utilities did give me my thousand quid back, after I had a new supply fitted, when they said the low water pressure was a problem on "my side" (twice).
When I complained that the pressure was still rubbish, they investigated and found that it was an incorrectly fitted water meter on, "their side."
 
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Not to mention Thames Water - our provider. Billions in debt and heading for administration. Loads of discharges into the Thames. They still paid their shareholders and then announced their loss. Another inherited problem for the government, I suppose!
 
blenor 2 said:
Not to mention Thames Water - our provider. Billions in debt and heading for administration. Loads of discharges into the Thames. They still paid their shareholders and then announced their loss. Another inherited problem for the government, I suppose!
Click to expand...

Could be another 22 billion pound poo hole 😬

We filter our tap water, the filters come out brown 😬
 
DrCase said:
say no to wipes
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I really don't think it's all down to wipes though, more to the failing water companies who steal the money they are paid, and don't do the work with it as they should.
The sea around our coast has so much effluent in it now because of the amount of sewage they pump into it, it is unsafe to swim. Our rivers are in the same state for the same reason.
Recently, the water supply (for what it's worth) has been cut off for days at a time in several local villages because of severed water mains.
 
Sean is right, sewage pipes are usually ceramic, and should last practically forever, but the wipes snag and then catch other stuff building up to a blockage because they don't rot. The original water mains on the other hand are usually cast iron, probably what makes your water filters turn brown, Zigs. A bit of extra iron probably won't hurt you, it's the things you can't see that you are probably best off without.
We live in a close that runs downhill from the main road and were originally connected to the sewer, but there was not enough drop and it kept backing up, so we now share a septic tank with next door, that's a problem that really should have been foreseen, the drop necessary for drainage is well established.
The Victorians laid most of the cast iron mains, so they have lasted over a 100 years, no wonder they are leaking a bit, they have done very well. Modern MDPE and rigid PVC pipes will probably last even longer, and compared to old style copper and lead piping the MDPE household pipes have no poisonous contamination.
Dad used to say "A good sewage plant manager will drink a glass of the water coming out of his plant" trouble is we are expecting the same plants to cope with a much higher volume of waste, and they just can't cope, we need new reservoirs and new sewage treatment plants building, and it is hard to see how the money could be better spent, water is the basic of basics.
 
This was when United Utilities came to put a new water meter in after I'd spent £1080 on a new 25mm alkathene supply pipe.
As you can see, the diameter is not much thicker. The big blue pipe will be gas. You can see the pipe which supplies the 40 houses on our side of the road is not that much thicker. This will have been there from 1965 when the road and houses were built.
The original connection to all the houses would have been 15mm copper.

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So the mains needs to be changed to plastic.

The engineer in charge of this dig admitted that the pressure in the Trafford area has been reduced, simply by the addition of new builds with out any uprating of the supply pumps. I think the logic is "higher pressure, more leaks." They reduce the pressure during the night anyway, for that reason.
 
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I remember when there was a world championship boxing match in America that was broadcast here in the middle of the night. Thousands of people getting up, flushing the lavatory and putting the kettle on at the same time played havoc with the water pressure.
 
It was similar in the UK in some years, at half-time in the Cup Final, when the millions watching it on TV went to make a cup of tea. A big drain on the electricity supply.
 
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