On Monday morning, I woke up to three missed calls on my phone from a venue manager we do a lot of work for in Fortitude Valley. I hadn’t dealt with this particular wine bar before, but the three missed calls indicated that it was an emergency plumbing issue.
When he picked up the phone, I could hear water running in the background and spraying everywhere. He frantically told me there was a major water leak, and he couldn’t turn the water off.
Talking Him Through
The wine bar is in an old building, so the isolations were hard to find. We’re located up in the roof space. Unfortunately, he did not have a ladder to get up there and turn off the isolations.
I decided to give him directions to the hot water system, which was located above the office space. As he did not have a ladder to reach this spot, he had to drag over a bar table and stand on it.
Once he found the hot water system, I advised him to find the isolation over the phone, which he turned off. Luckily, the water leak was on the hotline, or he would have been in real trouble. I could hear the relief in his voice!
I had a few jobs booked in earlier that morning that I had to get to first, but we told him that we would be out there in the early afternoon to look at the issue and fix it.
Getting to The Wine Bar
We arrived at the wine bar just after midday. Upon quick inspection, it was determined that the cause of the flood was the hot flexible hose underneath the basin.
And surprise, surprise, it was a cheap Bunnings mixer. The burst hose was quite bad, and it is no wonder there was so much water everywhere. Four other toilet cubicles had the exact same basin mixer. All of them had rusty flexible hoses that were at risk of bursting.
The venue manager gave the go-ahead to replace them all, as he did not want a burst flexible hose to flood the venue again. I quickly ducked down to the suppliers, grabbed all the stock, returned to the site, and installed the new mixes.
Click on the video footage to see how bad the water leak was. It had been running for several hours and was only picked up in the morning when a worker at the nearby property noticed water flowing out the front door of the wine bar.
Getting Help & Quality Parts
It is always recommended that you check your flexible hoses annually to ensure there are no signs of rust and to prevent this from happening. If you have any questions or want your plumbing system checked to ensure this doesn’t happen to you, please get in touch with the Brisbane plumbers on 0450 932 850.