Yesterday I had two guys call in wanting to see waste pipes at back of house because they were conducting a pollution study. They showed me ID from Thames Water but since I hadn't had communication from Thames Water about such a study I was skeptical. My instinct said they seemed legit, they stayed 5 mines and were off.
Later I rang Thames Water to confirm they were in the area doing visits and after some time got a confirmation yes.
Moral of story, if uncertain about service people requesting access to your house, best to take photo of ID, ask persons to return at later date once you have had chance to verify they are legit.
Tags for Forum Posts: misconnected drains
A photo with the individuals holding their id... As you then have a good image of them too for the Rossers if needed...
Good that they are doing this, it's needed to catch all the illegal plumbing connections, not unlike the one on a very near neighbour's flat. We had leaflets through the door here a few weeks ago. Smite the bastids who are making us all so suspicious that this kind of check becomes so much more difficult.
Pamish - if that white trunking is electrical,it looks pretty illegal too.
Not the toilet, that does actually go the the sewer. Just the bath and sink going direct to the River Lea. I have - ahem - mentioned it to the owner.
I'm not sure how much this actually means. If you track back through the conversations I've linked to with the rage I've adder under your post, you'l see some history. My experience is of a house on my road that had a real problem with misconnected drains. Thames Water seemed interested when they called on a visit similar to the one you had today. however, when nothing changed after a year or so, one of my neighbours followed it up many with Thames and they didn't seemed to care one jot.....which makes me wonder why they're doing it. Perhaps others have more positive stories that result from these visits?
A lot of the roads around here only have one sewer, so everything is going into the same pipe anyway. Presumably in some local roads there is a separate surface water sewer & this is what Thames are checking.
At one point there was a web site where you could put in your postcode & find out, but today I can only find this connect right site, which says that separate sewers only really came in after 1920.
They fixed the sewer here last year, added a second pipe, we had been on a single pipe before according to that web checker. They should have demanded to see all round every house, otherwise why bother?
The down pipe is the rainwater drain from the gutter. The soil stack is separate, two metres further along the wall of the back addition. The sink drains could have been taken across to the soil stack but that would have been more work, and finding fittings that work on both old and new pipe measurements. Any suggestions re places that sell connections to old cast iron pipes would help me in my chivvying the owner to do the right thing - even C&S don't have them. It was no doubt done in the olden days before our current raised consciousnesses.
Worth noting that the study is probably connected with the work to clean up the Moselle river, which is pretty polluted (visible in Lordship Rec) - here's a recent article about it:
After Queen’s Wood the river sadly disappears underground into a culvert and doesn’t re-surface until Lordship Recreation Ground in Tottenham, by the Broadwater Farm Estate. Being hidden as it passes under Hornsey, Wood Green and Crouch End sees the Moselle get polluted in secret. The roads all drain to the river and countless homes are misconnected. So it’s no surprise that the river in the park stinks of washing machines, dishwashers, oils and is thick with sewage fungus. Phosphate levels are very high here
Here's a previous discussion on the subject
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