Plumbers & electricians in Barming and Allington

The ME16 side of Maidstone begins almost at the town bridge and climbs west. Fant is the nearest of it to the centre, streets of terraces off Upper and Lower Fant Road, a good share of them up before nineteen hundred and the rest infilled between the wars. Further out at Barming Heath the ground was taken by the county asylum, raised between eighteen twenty nine and eighteen thirty three, which ran until nineteen ninety four and is now the St Andrew’s Park estate, listed blocks carved into flats with newer houses laid out around them. Maidstone Hospital stands along Hermitage Lane on that same ridge.

Allington, north west along the A20, is almost entirely modern despite its castle. A hundred and fourteen people lived there in nineteen thirty one and close to seven thousand by two thousand and eleven.

Barming itself is a parish rather than a suburb, the Medway forming its southern boundary and the eastern end long ago swallowed into Maidstone. West of the Norman church the lanes give way to orchards and the housing thins out.

Why one plastic repair can undo the bonding in a Fant terrace

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Somewhere near where the water enters an older house here there should be a green and yellow cable clamped to the pipe, and another on the gas pipe by the meter, each held by a clamp carrying a label that reads safety electrical connection, do not remove. That is main bonding, and it is not an earth for the plumbing. Its job is to hold every piece of metal in the building at one potential, so that if a fault does put a voltage where it has no business being, no difference is left between a tap and a radiator for somebody to bridge. The clamp belongs on the consumer’s side of the meter and as near the point of entry as can be managed, six hundred millimetres from the outlet union being the figure quoted on gas, since a clamp fixed halfway along the house proves nothing whatever about the length ahead of it.

The difficulty in ME16 is that the older houses were all metal when built and hardly any are all metal now. A Fant terrace that began with a lead or iron main, a copper rising main and copper drops to every tap has since had a bathroom shifted, a kitchen pushed out at the back, and a weeping joint cut out beneath the floorboards with a length of push fit plastic dropped in to save lifting the entire run. Each of those was sound plumbing and none of it shows once the boards go down. What the plastic does is sever the metal path the bonding was relying on. The clamp still grips the pipe by the stopcock, the cable still runs back where it should, and the copper upstairs is joined to none of it. Nothing trips, nothing leaks, nobody feels a shock, and the house looks exactly as it did yesterday. It goes the other way round too, when the main in the street is renewed in blue plastic and carried into the property in plastic, because the incoming service is then not conductive and may no longer be anything that requires bonding at all, while the metalwork inside wants considering on its own terms. And a bonding conductor unclipped to let a plumber reach a joint has to go back onto that pipe. Left dangling behind a bath panel it is worse than never fitted, because it looks finished.

What settles the question is measuring continuity instead of admiring the clamp. A reading taken between the bonded point and a tap on the landing answers in seconds what no amount of squinting at pipework ever will, and where it fails the remedy is generally a conductor run to whatever metal got orphaned, or a link bridging the plastic section. Whether a house also wants supplementary bonding in the bathroom is a per property matter, turning on which protective devices are fitted and on the installation viewed whole, and it is inspected rather than assumed. We do both trades, which counts here for a plain reason: the person cutting the pipe is the person who sees the clamp on it.