Plumbed in

As a test run, the good lady wife her indoors and I, accompanied by the four spaniels, piled into the car, hitched up the caravan, and went off to our secret little hideaway in the middle of a field in the north Lincolnshire rural nowhere. We only stayed for a couple of nights, it was all about seeing how we could cope with the spanners (and seeing how the spaniels could cope with being in the caravan because in the house they have 24/7 access to the garden through the dogflap). Anyway, the long story short is the dogs adapted well, and the humans coped equally well with the dogs. Yay!

However, we did have one issue and it was a proper problem. A little while after we’d arrived, and I’d coupled up the gas (LPG), the electricity supply and the water, the good lady wife her indoors asked me where all the water was coming from. A rapid inspection identified the bathroom sink mixer tap as the source which was odd, because we hadn’t run any water through that tap yet. Anyway, we were long on (dog) towels, so there was some mopping up. Except the water kept coming. A much more detailed examination showed us the water was leaking from more than one place *in* the mixer tap, even when the tap was unused. I flipped the water pump off and the leak stopped. So even under the gentlest of pressure, and even when the tap was firmly ‘off’, the tap was leaking. Obviously this put a dampner (ha ha ha) on our little stay, but it was good to identify the problem before we undertook a more serious journey.

In the best historical tradition (behind every great man, etc), I was ‘encouraged’ to fix the problem myself, rather than put money in the hands of a caravan engineer. When we returned home a few days later I went shopping. A very helpful young guy (Tim, at Kimberley Caravans, Nottingham) invited me to email him a couple of photos and he’d sort out a tap for us. He emailed back within an hour to say he probably had the right model, but we needed to check which size we needed because the cunning tap manufacturers sold the same-looking tap in two sizes. So I did the tap removal, which meant I had to remove the sink from the vanity unit, which also meant I had to uncouple the hot and cold water inlet pipes and the waste water outlet pipe from the sink. And then I could remove the tap. With the defective tap in my rucksack I jumped on the Ninja and (observing the speed limit every single moment of the journey) I motorbiked over to Kimberley Caravans. Young Tim measured the tap in all directions, pronounced himself satisfied and produced a very near-identical example. Relieved of just under £100, I Ninjaed back home (speed limits observed as before), put the bike away and put my feet up and thought about things. This last stage is a very important part of DIYing. You can’t do enough thinking about jobs before you tackle them. At least that’s what I find.

The next day I fitted the shiny new tap into the hole in the top of the vanity unit. Then I connected the microswitch to the caravan’s power supply (caravan taps don’t work by water pressure, each tap has a microswitch which tells the pump when the water valve has been opened, and that’s when the water pump swings into action). Then I connected the hot and cold water inlet pipes. Then I put a bucket in the hole where the sink should be, connected water to the caravan, flipped the pump on, turned the tap on and yes, the tap worked. Yay! And it worked without leakage. Double yay!

The next day, after some more considerable thought, I cleaned the old silicone sealant from the sink and the vanity unit, applied a more sparing layer, and refitted the bathroom sink. And that’s how this story ends. One plucky man’s first attempt at combined caravan plumbing and 12v microswitch DIYing. And successful at that!

Stay tuned for more DIY and/or caravan-related updates. In the meanwhile, here’s some riveting photography which pictorially describes the events:

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