Plumbers & electricians in Greenhithe

The old village of Greenhithe runs down to the Thames and is small, tight and old. Around and above it sit the chalk pits, the retail park at Bluewater, and a large amount of housing built in the last thirty years, including the riverside development at Ingress Park. Stone shares the district’s western end and shares it with DA2 as well.

So a Greenhithe address can mean a nineteenth century cottage or a house whose first owner is still living in it, and the plumbing inside them has almost nothing in common.

How modern estate plumbing actually works

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If your house was built in the last couple of decades, the pipework behind the walls is probably plastic rather than copper, run in continuous lengths from a central manifold rather than teed off a spine. There is usually an airing cupboard or a utility cupboard with a board of valves in it, one per outlet.

That is a good system and it has one enormous practical advantage: you can isolate a single tap, a single toilet or a single shower without shutting the house down. Most people who own one have never opened the cupboard and do not know the valves exist.

Go and look, and label them. Ten minutes with a marker pen means that a leaking basin waste on a Sunday becomes a valve you close rather than a house with no water until Monday. It also means that when someone does come out, the isolation is already done and the job starts sooner.

The old village end is the opposite problem. Down by the river the houses are small, old and tightly packed, and the plumbing in them has been added to rather than replaced. Copper into lead into plastic, sometimes inside the same metre of wall. Those joins are where leaks start, and they are why a repair in the old village takes longer than the same repair on the estate above it.