Ruptured water main
Yesterday we returned from De Eemhof where we had a vacation for a week. We had such a great week. There was a tropical swim paradise including a wild river, Anna loved that and wanted to go again and again and again :)
But... last night when I went to bed and turned everything off I heard a whoosh sound. It was hard to locate at first. But after I got down on the floor and put my ear against the ground Indian style I heard it was coming from beneath the floor. The only thing I knew it could be was the water main. After shutting of the water the noise stopped.
This morning we phoned the insurance company which then contacted a plumber. Before the plumber arrived I had to open up the floor cause that was the only way to get to the leak. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to take the laminaat out without damaging it because it was the glue type instead of the click type. After opening the floor we soon found the leak, but we also discovered that the water main was made of lead. Because it's an old house they still used lead back then (pre 1960). It would be best to completely replace it with either a copper or plastic main because it's possible it'll leak again.
In the afternoon the plumber came and had to cut the leaky piece out and replace it with a copper tube. This involved some advanced soldering, you can see the result below. Other pictures can, as usual, be found at fotos.vzuijlekom.com (stuff->waterlekkage)

2 Comments:
what's under the "pipe"? something brown....is your house build on just soil? And no protection at all?
That's crap! But while you were at it, why not replace a larger portion of the pipe?
We've had leakage once as well, in the shed in our old house in Utrecht. The neighbour woke me up in the middle of the night, asking if we had a leak. He was soaked, so I guessed he wasn't kidding ;-)
I turned off the water and went to the shed. The waterpipe to the washingmachine had broken off because of the cold weather (freeze, thawe, freeze, thawe). Luckily the water spouted out of the shed towards the door. Our neighbour had heard a strange sound when coming home at night and went to inspect. He climbed over our fence, opened the sheddoor and was instantly wet!
As he was into iron and welding, he fixed the waterpipe - it broke just at the connection with the faucet. An hour later we were both dry and sound asleep.
Good luck with laying down a new floor ;-(
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