Plumbers & electricians in Woolwich

The riverside end is the Royal Arsenal, where the old munitions works has been rebuilt as housing around restored listed buildings, with new blocks behind them running from a dozen storeys to around twenty. Woolwich town centre has an Elizabeth line station, a DLR station and a pier, and almost everything built alongside that is tall.

Behind it the picture changes. There are post-war council towers and slab blocks from the fifties and sixties, several of which have been knocked down and rebuilt over the past decade. East towards Plumstead it is Victorian and Edwardian terraces, most of them put up between the eighteen seventies and the nineteen tens for people working at the Arsenal. South the ground climbs to Shooters Hill, which at a hundred and thirty two metres is the highest point in the borough.

So the stock is genuinely mixed. A bathroom or shower room in a Plumstead terrace is a different job from the same room in a flat six floors up, and the difference is not the fittings. It is that a large share of homes here sit in blocks, old and new, and blocks have a water supply problem that houses do not.

Why the top floor of a Woolwich block runs out of water first

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The incoming main will lift water three or four storeys and no further, and the exact number depends on the street. Anything taller needs help, so the block is built with a break tank, usually in a basement or ground floor plant room, and a pump set that draws from the tank and pushes up the risers. Two pumps, one on duty and one on standby, alternating. Older blocks often do it the other way and pump up to tanks on the roof, then let gravity feed down, which is why in those buildings the top flats are the weakest and the ground floor is fine.

When that plant goes wrong the top floors notice first and nobody else notices at all. Three faults cover most of it. The duty pump fails and the standby quietly carries the whole building for months, so nothing is reported until the standby goes too and the block loses water in one go. The strainer ahead of the pumps silts up with grit and rust off the tank, flow drops, and pressure sags at the top in the morning then recovers by lunchtime. Or the pressure vessel loses its air charge, so instead of buffering demand the pumps start and stop every few seconds, which you hear as hammering in the risers and feel as pressure surging while a tap is running.

None of that is fixed inside a flat. The tank, the pumps and the vessel are communal plant, so the work sits with the freeholder or the managing agent, and the useful thing a leaseholder can do is get the fault identified before the block spends money guessing. Recharging a vessel is an hour. Cleaning a strainer is not much more. A pump set that has been running on its standby since winter is a different conversation. From inside the flat all three look identical, which is why the answer comes from the plant room and the pressures at the top and bottom of the riser, not from the tap.