Plumbers & electricians in Rochester

Rochester is a small city with a castle and a cathedral at the top of the High Street, and a street plan that has been there far longer than the buildings standing on it. Behind the old frontages the ground fills in quickly with Victorian terraces, up the Delce and across the slopes around Star Hill, put up through the decades when the dockyard downriver was at its height and men needed somewhere within walking distance to sleep.

Borstal sits below the city on the riverside, a hamlet of a few cottages at the time of the tithe map in the eighteen forties, which grew into a village of terraces and then had a second wave of housebuilding in the nineteen thirties when it became a suburb. South of that the district keeps going. ME1 runs a long way down the east bank of the Medway to Wouldham and Burham, which are lime and cement villages rather than suburbs, and the older half of Wouldham was built for the men working the kilns, the pits and the barges.

Only Peters Village breaks the pattern, around a thousand homes raised over the past decade on the ground where the Wouldham Hall works and Peters Pit used to be. The rest of ME1 is older than most people assume.

How to tell whether the pipe coming into a Rochester house is lead

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Lead was the normal material for a water service pipe in this country until the nineteen seventies, so in a Victorian terrace on the Delce, a Borstal cottage or an old cement worker’s house in Burham, the pipe arriving from the street is lead until something proves it is not. You can usually see the top of it. Follow the rising main to where it comes up through the kitchen floor or out of the wall below the sink, at the internal stopcock. Lead looks wrong beside anything modern. It is a dull mid grey with no shine to it, fatter than a copper pipe carrying the same amount of water, and faintly uneven along its length. Its joints are the real giveaway, because where two lengths meet there is a swollen bulb of metal wiped round the pipe by hand rather than the neat sleeve of a soldered copper fitting. Two tests settle the question. Scratch the surface with a coin and lead turns bright silver, then dulls back to grey within minutes, while copper scratches copper coloured. Hold a magnet to it and lead will not take it at all, which separates it from the galvanised steel also used in some of this stock. Lead dissolves slowly into water that stands still in the pipe, which is why water companies treat the supply to hold that down, and why the sensible course is to take a lead pipe out when the opportunity comes rather than leave it for the next owner.

Where the responsibility sits catches people out. The water company owns the communication pipe, from the main in the road as far as the boundary stopcock by the gate or in the pavement. From there into the house, the supply pipe belongs to the property.

So a full replacement is two jobs and two parties, and your half of it is groundwork more than plumbing. The usual method is a mole, a pneumatic head driven underground from a small pit at the boundary to a second pit at the house, pulling blue plastic pipe in behind it, which leaves a lawn or a drive largely intact. Where roots, made ground or other services are in the way it turns into a trench instead, and putting a block drive back can cost more than the pipe ever did. In a terrace there is a further wrinkle, since some older streets were laid with one lead run feeding several front doors, and taking a single house off it is a longer conversation with the neighbours and the water company than a straight swap. Running the tap for a while before filling a kettle clears water that has sat in the pipe overnight, and it is worth doing, but it changes what comes out of the tap rather than what the tap is fed by. Which of those two jobs yours turns out to be depends on the property, and it is answered by lifting the boundary cover and looking, not by guessing from the age of the house.