It has been one hell of a long day. Which is funny, because it’s not been that long-a day overall. I mean, I work 12 hour shifts, and I only put in 10 hours at the house today. But it felt long.
‘Our’ plumber came by today and let me know that:
- Our installation is very neat, particularly for a first timer.
- We don’t need a neutraliser for city of Olympia, so I should cut that out of the circuit. More irritatingly, despite what it says in the manual, it Olympia it can just be vented to air, like in the UK, which would have saved me a fuck-load of work.
- When you fill the boiler, if you don’t do it right… it will air-lock, horribly.
This last one he informed me of after our boiler spent a lot of time complaining there was no water pressure.
Anyway, since he could notionally turn up at 8am, I got up at 6am to get over to the house (because I needed to go and see Bob for some parts – mainly returning the ones I bought yesterday and buying new replacements for them).
Irritatingly, it turns out they don’t do a 3″ long brass FIP nipple (i.e. a brass tube with threads at each end).
2.5″? Yes.
4″? Yes.
But 3″? No.
This is a marked irritation because 3″ would be marginally too long, but 2.5″ is too short. I’ve put in 4″ ones for the moment. But… I’m not happy about it.
Anyhow. I got bits, and then headed to the house and started the international festival of tiling.
Our plumber arrived, complimented me on my plumbing, then left to get bits. So I continued my tiling odyssey, and then when he came back he noted that the gas was locked off. PSE apparently turn it off if it’s zero usage for a long time, and / or they may never have come back to turn it on. Thankfully, they turned up pretty quickly and while the plumber was still there, otherwise today may not have gone so well.
Anyhow, the connection process was pretty painless, and apart from needing a lot of air bleeding from the system (which it’s still working on), then we knew we had heating.
Now, theoretically, we had hot water too… but there’s no easy way to test that. Sooo I continued tiling.
Eventually I managed to tile past both the sink and the location of the toilet. Which meant that I could actually connect the sink:
And just put some valves in and turned off for the toilet and bidet.
It then took a while because in the middle of connecting the pipes to our manifold (some time ago now), I discovered that as they’d passed through the floor it had rubbed the markings for which pipe was which off. Whiiiich meant that I could only label the ones I knew. So there’s some things on the manifold which are marked, and some which aren’t.
The main bath had – oddly, the shower hot and the sink/toilet cold marked. Eventually, and after some exciting trial and error I got the sink turned on and…
I have now ordered the new “Dialese” replacement cartridges which should stop the sink leaking (and turned it off in the mean-time). Tomorrow, if I’m lucky, I’ll hopefully finish the wall tiling in the bathroom and can move on to the grouting. Then I can clean the bath, recoat it, and then I’ll start on the floor. Which is going to be my first time tiling with hexagons…
Then we can install a toilet! Plumbing. Inside. Who-da-thunk?
