Practically Classics Forum

as a part of my job i get to unblock peoples drains sometimes if im really lucky i get to replace them.. this is what i found last week, id thought i had seen every bodge possible but this one tops them all..yes sometimes i have a sh#tty job....but someone has to do it..

this is the earth spike through the pipe, it helps to increase the conductivity




spike cut off i replaced it...

the original problem was the pipes were split and badly installed, running uphill in several places.i couldnt belive the spike effort. all has been replaced & is now running the right way.. not anything to do with cars but a bodge i thought you may apreciate

Hmm, we've both been in the Sh***y jobs. My upstairs loo was holding water when it was flushed; so I tried the lazy methods first, but had to get the "springy rod" out and get my hands mucky. The blockage was near the junction with the soil/vent pipe and I suspect the modern low-flush loo and only one person using the loo were the cause - the freezing weather making the cast iron pipe cold enough to freeze the water as it passed along the pipe until there was enough frozen stuff to block it.

At least we have glazed clay drains outside (and they were put in properly to MOD standards!); so there's no problems with accidentally knocking a post or spike through them - though there have been plenty of cowboys who have tried! I drained a field behind the house some years ago. The top half is on clay (like our garden) but the bottom end was peat and the tiles had moved within a year on the peaty stuff.

What was the earth from - mains or a lightning conductor?

mains earth spike...

One of my friends bought his house about twenty years ago as a virtual ruin without electricity (and still hasn't finished it). When the local electricity people came to connect, they refused to put an earth stake in because the distribution board was only a temporary affair (there wasn't a lot of wall to fix it to!). He is a time-served electrician (though works as a heating engineer now) and got a four feet long length of steel water pipe, hammered it in and used that as his spike while he got on with the house. Being a bit of a worrier, he went over the top with the rest of the installation and put a split-rail box in (uncommon at the time) and made one of the neatest dis boards I've ever seen!

About two years ago, after doing all sorts of other work and having converted some buildings into a holiday let (which needed Part P testing), he remembered the temporary codge and that the meter installation hadn't been signed off by the electricity people. So he rang them to say that the earth spike needed signing off and, after denying that it hadn't been done - because he couldn't be connected if the spike hadn't been signed off - they came and checked it. The man was most surprised to see the codge (instead of a proper spike) but tested the system and signed it off without any problems, saying it was one of the better installations that he had seen.

Rich.

Yikes!