Shakeel has serviced and repaired the combi-boiler so the house is now warm, but at night it still loses pressure. This suggests a significant water leak somewhere, however there is no indication of damp on the ceilings or in the cellar, so today I went under the floorboards.

Our house was built around 1900 and used to be a corner shop. The cellar underlies less than half the ground floor, whilst the corner shop bit and the wood burner room have only a crawl space. The corner shop crawl space has an access hatch and that’s where I was today. As you can see from the above picture there is plenty of crap down there.

Including some complete 1970s beer bottles and an undamaged jazzy cup. I brought three bottles and the cup out and left a nest of the rest for some future explorer. No obvious leak, but I did clad all the hot water pipes with insulation which I am happy about.

More relevant to this blog topic I also pulled out around 8ft of discarded copper pipe. This equates to 16 medium pressure flakers which are really useful for workshops, and coincidentally, I have a knapping workshop on Friday.

In relation to the leak we are going to try a central heating version of ‘radweld’ tomorrow, to see if that blocks the hole. If not the floorboards in the wood burner room are going to have to come up…