On Monday morning, I woke up and had three missed calls on my phone from a venue manager that we do a lot of work for in Fortitude Valley. I hadn’t dealt with this particular wine bar before but three missed calls gave me an indicator 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 that there was a major water leak and he couldn’t turn the water off.
Talking Him Through
With the wine bar being in an old building, the isolations were hard to find and we’re located up in the roof space. He did not have a ladder to get up there and turn off the isolations which were unfortunate for him.
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 get up into this spot, he had to drag over a bar table and stand up on it.
Once he found the hot water system, I gave him advice over the phone to find the isolation which he turned off. Luckily, the water leak was on the hotline or else 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 have a look at what the issue is and fix it.
Getting to The Wine Bar
We arrived at the wine bar just after midday. And on a quick inspection, 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. There were four other toilet cubicles with 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 and grabbed all the stock and returned to the site and installed the new mixes.
Click on the video footage and you can 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 to check your flexible hoses annually to ensure there are no signs of rust to prevent this from happening. If you have any questions or you would like your plumbing system checked over to ensure this doesn’t happen to you, feel free to get in touch with the Brisbane plumbers on 0450 932 850.