DIY-ers give way to those who’d prefer someone to do it for them

There was a recent loss of water running through the taps in our house; we still had drinking water from the kitchen but the rest had dried up without warning, leaving us to face the weekend without washing.

The lack of warning was easily – if not quickly – explained; this didn’t turn out to be a general water outage and Irish Water were blissfully unaware of any problem.

An operator on the other end of the phone – a lady considerably more polite than the irate caller – suggested there might be an airlock and steered said caller/customer in the direction of their website where there were clear and easy instructions to follow with a view to unblocking it.

This involved trying to flow the cold-water tap back up the hot-water tap until it found the aforementioned airlock and removed it by sheer force of backward flow.

And because – in our case – the hot and cold water flows through the one tap, this involved effectively blocking the spout with a sponge to force the water back where it came from.

Now, on a day you’re bored or curious, you should try holding a sponge under a freezing cold tap for two minutes in winter; shortly before frostbite sets in, you’d probably confess to any serious crime just to get the feeling back into your fingers.

But there seemed no other way, so – forgoing all feeling in both hands – we persevered for an hour. But to no avail.

I’m the first to admit I’m no plumber – and to that list, you can add carpenter, electrician, joiner, shelf hanger, Ikea constructor and gardener.

So eventually I admitted defeat and attempted to defrost my paws in front of the cooker which thankfully hadn’t run out of gas in some kind of sympathy with the water supply.

And we did what we should have done in the first place; we called a plumber.

Thankfully we knew one because this was Saturday night and the chance of finding one randomly was as likely as the winning Lotto numbers turning up unheralded on your phone.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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