Wednesday, May 15, 2013

A secret passage discovered

Yesterday was set aside for me and Rick to fit Herbie's new thermostatic shower mixer. Regular readers may recall that in order to get to the water connections behind the bath, we were planning to tunnel through from the saloon. A dangerous and non trivial task as it required dismantling the Tv / radio shelves and cutting a hole on the wall, hoping it would be in the right place. The escape committee had spent some hours devising a plan and a stash of tools of various types assembled for the delicate operation.

Well it must have been my lucky day because after I had dismantled the shelves and disconnected three million wires, I noticed a small board screwed to the back wall and so I unscrewed it and hey presto, a large hole in just the right place giving good hand and arm access to the water pipe fittings behind the shower mixer. So that's obviously how the original mixer had been installed in the first place. Neat.

Naturally the course of true plumbing never runs smooth. First the holes in the bath to take the fittings were too small and had to be opened out, and then the fittings I had bought turned out to be the wrong size so we then wasted a couple of hours driving around Hillmorton, Braunston and finally Daventry to get something that would fit. But we did, and when we resumed early this morning it all went pretty smoothly. By ten o'clock we were done and dusted. Well, done anyway, I did the dusting (hoovering up) later when Rick had departed for home.

So now we can have a shower on Herbie without getting alternately scalded and frozen and without having to fiddle with two taps to get the temperature right. Jobsagoodun.






5 comments:

Oakie said...

Ooooooh! Very classy! You could have saved yourself a whole lot of trouble and money by doing what I did. Fit a switch in the shower, in parallel with your pump switch. Turn on and set the shower temp before getting into the shower. Switch off. Get in the shower and then switch on and the water comes out at the temp you previously set. Gettit?

Ray Butler said...

Through trial and error I've established (and marked) the right temperature on my Morco and now shower with hot tap only rather than mixing....

Vallypee said...

That's what I'd call a roundtuit job. And I'd probably never get there. Hats off. It takes perseverance and character to get into spaces like that!

Neil Corbett said...

Oakes and the other Ray. That's a fine time to tell after we've done the job:-)

Both good solutions but I think we'll be glad to have our new mixer. I don't think our Morco on its own can provide enough water pressure or flow.

Neil

Neil Corbett said...

Oakie was what I meant to type
N