You are here: Case Study - Finding and Fixing a Leak. Part 1
Case Study - Finding and Fixing a Leak. Part 1
We first noticed there was something wrong when we returned from a few days away in Madrid. It had been a lovely relaxing holiday, and all was well until I went into the garage and discovered a lake.
Our house has a large open plan kitchen-diner with a small utility room on the ground floor which then steps down into an adjoining double garage at a slightly lower level. The flood in the garage appeared to be coming through the wall between the utility room and the garage and spreading out from there across the garage floor. There was no one place that the water was coming from and it was hard to pinpoint exactly where the problem was. There are sinks in both the kitchen and in the utility room and a radiator in each - plus a dishwasher plumbed in the kitchen. There was no sign of water on the kitchen floor or in the cupboards under the sinks. We could hear water flowing somewhere under the floor area below the dishwasher and kitchen sink.
We mopped up the water on the garage but it kept on coming - seeping through the wall between the utility room and the garage. We dismantled the cupboard under the sink, we turned off the supply to the taps, we pulled out the dishwasher and checked the hose but the water kept coming. No joy - the only thing that stopped it was turning off the water at the mains.
As it was a Friday night coming into a bank holiday weekend we decided to call out an emergency plumber. We looked on line for something local that could do track and trace. What we ended up with was a plumber who came out, took one look at it and said there was nothing he could do as he didn’t have the equipment - he charged us £95 for the visit. On further investigation it was clear that the company we had called were making false claims on their website. They operated out of Italy and refused to provide any details of the company, their address or how disputes and complaints were dealt with. This was our rookie mistake number 1 - act in haste, repent at leisure.
The water kept on coming. We contacted lots of local companies who said they did track and trace and eventually found Leak Detection Service. A man came out on 10th May. They had all the kit and injected ‘gas’ into the system to detect where the leak was. It appeared from the readings that it was a leak in a cold water pipe running under the floor below the integral fridge unit. He charged us £660 and left.
We contacted the insurance company Esure and opened a claim. They said they would not cover the cost of repairing the leak but would cover the cost of any damage caused and making good. We were assigned to the Building Validation Service (BVS) who would handle our claim and a surveyor would come out to assess the damage
Meanwhile we needed to stop the leak so contacted a local builder we had used many times and he sent someone out the next day.
The first people to arrive removed the fridge and took up the floor tiles under the unit where the track and trace man had said the leak was. They couldn’t find a leak- but we could all hear the water flowing somewhere and water continued to flow into the garage.
Then the plumber arrived. He took one look and sealed off the pipe running under the floor and re-routed the water supply to the kitchen sink. The leak stopped. He asked us why the first (emergency) plumber hadn’t done that as it was the obvious answer to the problem and would have stopped the leak there and then. It had not been necessary to take up any of the floor at this stage, but now we had a hole under the fridge.
Rookie mistake number 2 - get a proper plumber in FIRST.
Now started the long journey to get our lives and our kitchen back to normal - it would take six long months!
We were insured and had opened a claim. It dawned on us that this leak had probably been going on for some time and, for some reason, while we were away it had become worse. The amount of water leaking had increased to the point that it emerged into the garage.
Now we were looking for evidence of a leak it was obvious. The door between the kitchen and the utility room no longer closed fully and there were signs of water damage in the walls and door jamb. We are on a meter and we appeared to be using the average amount for our house - but there are only two of us and we have always been conservative in our use of water - not wishing to waste important resources. I hadn’t questioned it and put it down to the visits from children and grandchildren but now I had my doubts. I contacted the water supplier and explained what was happening. They were very helpful and said they had a leak allowance scheme for those affected and once it was all fixed I should take readings of our consumption and get back to them.
Next to arrive was the surveyor Mick Potter from BVS who had the job of assessing the damage and advising on the next steps. He arrived on 14th May. He went through everything in great detail and said in his opinion we would need to have an expert drying company come and test how extensive the water damage was with a view to removing the kitchen floor to carry out the drying process.
The expert from Polygon duly came on the 21st May and took readings all over the kitchen and utility room- the results were not good. The concreate under the floor was saturated across the kitchen and utility room, and the only way to sort it was to take up the whole floor and use dehumidifiers. He left us with one dehumidifier - a huge beast of a thing which stank of fumes and sounded like a jet engine. His advice was to leave it on all the time to start removing the damp. He left and we turned it off - it was impossible to be in the same room.
We got back to the insurers and asked what next. They said find a builder and get a quote - sounds easy doesn’t it? If only it was that simple.
It is worth pointing out at this stage that from our perspective the leak had been stopped and apart from a bit of missing tile under the fridge all seemed normal. I loved my kitchen. It is solid wood and was hand built and beautifully installed for the previous owners by a local craftsman. The tiles were terazine and look like York stone, my favourite floor tiles ever - sadly it turns out they were no longer made and now we were faced with ripping it out. I had to accept that the floor would never be the same again. What if the cabinets were damaged? Would it ever look the same? What exactly was covered by the insurance? That turned out to be a harder question to answer than it should have been.
There followed many weeks of effort to get clarity on what we could and should do.
We had a meeting with our builder Howard and his kitchen specialist Pete and they said that as the units were on legs they had not been damaged by water and they were confident that they could be removed, stored and put back. The builder gave us a quote which we submitted to the insurance claims handler BVS. This was by far and away the cheapest option as the kitchen was handmade and to replace like for like would have run into tens of thousands.
I naïvely imagined the insurance company would welcome this conservative option, but no, they argued for days with the builder that the quote was too high and eventually he gave in and cut it by £600. They insisted that he had factored in too much time to remove the tiles on the floor. How wrong they were - removing the tiles and the underfloor heat mat was the hardest part of the job and ended up taking four long noisy, dusty, unpleasant days….
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