In the afternoon of the day before our trip to Manchester, I tried to fill the kitchen sink so that I could wash the pots from lunchtime. I noticed that the water was only tepid and thought that perhaps the hot water had been used up earlier in the day. There wasn’t time to turn the water on and heat it up because I was due to go out. It wasn’t a problem, I could wash them when I got home or so I thought at the time. However when I got home Mr C was sitting at his computer booking a gas service call. The water pump had failed. As we we had already booked train tickets for our Manchester adventure, the call had to be booked for Saturday. This meant no hot water for two days!

Mr C chose the 10-13.30 slot because we had visitors coming for an evening meal on Saturday evening and there were jobs that needed to be done after he left. At 11am the engineer had still not arrived and I suggested we ring British Gas. Mr C thought they would arrive soon so he decided not to ring straight away. When, a little later it became clear that they would not arrive before 12 o’clock he dialled British Gas and was put on hold in a queue for 25 minutes. Eventually someone took the call and we were advised that had been a lot of problem calls in the area and that the engineer would be with us between 12 o’clock and 6pm. Mr C told them that this was not good enough and that we had plans later in the day. After a bit of toing a froing between the call centre and the engineer the revised time remained before 6pm. Mr C was asked if this was acceptable to which he said ‘no but it will have to do’.

The engineer turned up at 2.15pm and confirmed it was the water pump that had broken. He then encountered a problem getting the old one off, it had apparently been soldered on. He then encountered another problem when he started to fit the new one. He was with us for nearly two hours! When he was gone we had to rush around doing the household jobs that we couldn’t do whilst he was there. If we had known he wasn’t coming in the morning some of them could have been done then! We just managed to get everything ready in time for our guests arrival at 7pm.

The new water pump doesn’t look as sturdy as the old one but at least the water is ‘very hot’ now. I think the old one had been on the blink for a while.