Plumbing marvellous
We woke on Wednesday morning to a plumbing problem. The ball-valve in our cold water tank was not sealing off correctly, and the cold water tank was overflowing (luckily, out the overflow pipe to outside the house!).
As we have British Gas Plumbing and Drains Cover, we called them. They told us that they could send a maintenance engineer between 1200-1800 the same day. Good.
I managed to rearrange meetings and came home at 1200, and worked at home for the afternoon. The BG man did not arrive until 1830, meaning I had been waiting around for 6½ hours. But I was pleased he had arrived and could then fix the problem.
That feeling didn’t last long. He looked at the problem, assessed that we needed a new ball-valve, and asked where our stopcock was. As our house is 95 years old, the cold water can only be turned off from the stopcock out in the street. This only turns off the water to our house. But the BG man said
“Sorry, we’re not allowed to turn off water in the street, we can only turn off water using your own stopcock. When you fit your own stopcock, we’ll come back and fix the ball-valve.”
BG had inspected our plumbing in a maintenance visit in February. They didn’t mention at the time that they would not be able to cover us. That’s the second time this year they’ve forced us to take time out of work, turned up and have not been able to do the job arranged.
The only solution was for me to call our plumber, Joe. This was 7pm and he was a) bathing his son and b) about to go out. But he called round that evening, borrowed our keys and came back first thing the next morning to fix the problem. Now that’s service!
Can’t help thinking you could have turned off the water in the street yourself? Sorry you had the trouble. Think you have grounds for a refund there.
I take it you’ll be cancelling your British Gas contract now?
Not as a knee-jerk reaction, will consider it carefully though, and maybe cut down on the services they provide.