What a weekend… This isn’t a pleasant story.
A couple of weeks ago we started to get bad smells around our house. These weren’t the normal, temporary bad smells that arise from time to time (you know what I mean), they were all-pervading sewerage smells that increased in intensity over a number of days to the point where there was nothing for it but to call in a drain clearing company (because we were in a hurry and without any other means to select who we called we plumped for a big, well-known national one ending in “Rod”). I wasn’t at home at the time but evidently when the man-hole cover was raised the entire space beneath it was, how shall I put this delicately,… full. I am led to believe that it was quite a struggle, but eventually the blockage was cleared and we got back to some kind of normality.
However, a week later the smells started to return and, feeling brave, I decided to open up the man-hole cover myself to do a quick check. There was some stray material, but it didn’t look too bad until I ran some water down the pipes and watched as the level slowly rose and having risen, stayed risen. Uh oh, I thought, and because it was Saturday evening and we couldn’t risk the level continuing to increase overnight and through Sunday we called “Rod” back. One and a half hours after Rod arrived the blockage remained and the gully was full of filthy, smelly water. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the gully, similarly foul stuff was beginning to bubble up through the slate tile-covered concrete floor of our utility area. At this point, after a quick phone consultation with the boss, Rod decided there was nothing more he could do, advised us to phone our insurance company and withouth much further ado vanished.
At this point I’m going to cut the long story short. This morning (Sunday) we ended up with the boss of a local drainage company coming round (coincidentally he lives opposite and knows some friends of ours). He cleared the blockage in a couple of minutes, removed a considerable amount of material from the pipes, carried out a camera inspection and discovered damage to the underground pipes which we now have to get fixed – a job that will entail digging down through our concrete floor to find the broken part and make the mend. It’s bad news but at least we seem to have stumbled on a great drain clearing company and the nature of the problem is such that, for the time being at least, we’re free of blockages.
The funny thing is that looking in the Yellow Pages, our new-found local company is one of the ones that hardly has an advert, whereas Rod’s company has a huge, flashy advert. There’s clearly a lesson here – good companies don’t need fancy adverts…
Tim O'Hare 