Flushing the toilet yesterday - this is a post about drains, don't read on unless you're interested in grimy details - I noticed that the water wasn't going down as quickly as I'd expect. So, just on the off-chance, I lifted a drain cover and hit, errm, pay-dirt. Oh, joy. naturally, the first thing I did was to post to fb.
Picking the nearest water-related bill I could find I contacted the Cambridge Water Company who responded promptly via fb chat, which seems to be their preferred method of communication. But the answer was "we are sorry for your woe, but we deal with the inputs; you need Anglian Water for the output". So I phoned them, and they promised to send someone "within 24 hours". That didn't sound terribly urgent but I hadn't sounded panicky over the phone. And monitoring the level over the next few hours, we had ~300 mm to spare. It went up and down, going up to 240 about 4 pm when the local children came back from school then dropping back to 280 late at night.
This isn't the first time... quite some time ago (perhaps five years) they actually dug up the pipes in our back garden leading down to the old sewage works; and about two weeks ago I was happily sitting in the living room looking out over the garden when I saw some white van-like object in the field, which turned out to be a Drain Man water-jetting the drains.
In the morning the level wasn't much changed. About 11 am an orange-suited Drain Man knocked on the door and introduced himself; I told him the obvious and he set to work, and I went back to work. Nothing much seemed to happen - I'd been expecting him to take his van into the field again - but by 12 all was well Down Below. Wandering out, I found him and a friend down the lane aways, still jetting.
Rubbish picture, huh? The "road closed" stuff isn't them, that some electrical works going on. You can just make out the reel in the van, and the connection to the mains for the water. Anyway, we had a little chat, but fairly short since the machine is noisy and we had to shout. He blamed mostly "wipes", but they also had a bucket of gravel or grit or tarmac chippings that had come out. I said "so this is going to happen again?" and he said that they'd try to do a thorough clean to avoid that.
And now my drain is as clean as a rather dirty whistle, but I think that's clean enough for a drain.
He also mentioned that it had overflowed at the back, and they'd spent a happy hour or two raking it all back up. And indeed, it seems so. Note this is not the drain cover nearly-behind us, it is one over. I could not detect anything left, on casual inspection.
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