Plumbers & electricians in Gillingham

Gillingham was New Brompton until it took its present name in nineteen hundred and three, and what built it was the dockyard. The Victorian extension of Chatham Dockyard, begun in the eighteen sixties, ran largely across Gillingham’s riverside, and the population of the town roughly quadrupled over the second half of that century. Speculative builders answered by running street after street of terraces up from the High Street, small houses put up quickly for shipwrights, fitters and boilermakers, and most of them are still standing and still lived in.

Brompton is older and quite different. It is a compact Georgian garrison village laid out on the plateau above the dockyard, a tight grid with handsome terraces at Mansion Row and Prospect Row, and because the Chatham Lines were thrown around it in the seventeen fifties it never spread far beyond its original plan. South and east the ground climbs toward the downs. Hempstead is later again, its shopping centre opening in nineteen seventy eight and housing filling the woodland and orchard around it through the early eighties. Bredhurst, near the top of the slope past Darland, is a small village that sits in Maidstone borough rather than Medway.

So one ME7 street can be a hundred and forty years old and the next forty, and the pipework under both has been added to, extended and rerouted by a long line of different hands.

Why clean water runs backwards in a Gillingham terrace

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The water in your pipes is only clean while it is going one way. Everything about a domestic supply assumes the flow leaves the main, passes through the house and ends at an outlet, and none of it is built for the reverse. What makes the reverse possible is a drop in pressure on the supply side. A burst in the street, a hydrant opened, a heavy draw-off nearby, a stopcock shut for work on a neighbouring house: any of those can leave the main lower than the water standing in your own pipework, and the column in the pipe then does what any siphon does, which is run back toward the low point and drag whatever is at the far end along with it. In a terrace like Gillingham’s the far end is usually outdoors. It is a hosepipe lying in a garden pond, or left in a water butt, or dropped into a bucket to fill it. It is a chemical sprayer screwed onto the tap with the mixture still in the bottle. It is a hose left running into a paddling pool with the end under the surface. Every one of those is an open pipe whose end sits below the level of something nobody would drink.

Most of the time you would never know it happened. The sign, if there is one, is a day when the water runs cloudy or tastes wrong after work in the street, and nobody links that to the hose in the butt outside.

Two things stop it. One is an air gap, a physical break between an outlet and the level the water can rise to, which is why a bath tap sits above the rim and why a cistern fills from above the spillover line rather than below it. The other is a non-return device, and the sensible way to pick one is by grading how dirty the water at the far end could be. Mains water that has only sat in clean pipework is at one end of that scale. Water off a garden, an allotment or a pond, or anything with a chemical mixed into it, is well up the other. An outside tap is the common case in ME7, and it wants a double check valve, two seals in series so that one failure does not open the route. Whether the existing tap can take one where it stands, or whether the run back into the house has to be opened up, is a per-property question, and a different question again from where a new garden supply ought to run.