The Suspicious Puddle

On Saturday night I bent to unload the washing machine and put my knee in a puddle.

Puddles right in front of your washing machine are never a good thing considering the fact that the whole point of a washing machine is to keep the water off of the floor. I may have had a little meltdown about the fact that my four year old Beko was failing me.

Mr Click had the right idea though.

We mopped it up as best we could, with copious amounts of paper towel, and decided to tackle it the following day.

Allow me to paint you a little picture.

Our washing machine is housed in an area affectionately referred to as 'the back lobby'. I think this makes our teeny tiny cottage sound much grander than it actually is, but that's what they called it when got the paperwork for the place, so that's what it is to this day (we also have a 'front lobby' too). A better name for it is probably a mud room. This is where my welly boots live, along with the recycling, all the laundry stuff and other bits and pieces for Tara and the garden.

When you open the door onto the back lobby you face the back door. To your right are a mop and bucket, Tara's ball, all of our recycling bags (in varying degrees of fullness depending on how far from collection day we are) and some shoes. To your left is a counter with a washing machine beneath it; on the counter are the laundry bag, pegs, a lantern, dog poo bags (empty, of course), and other miscellaneous items. Above this is the boiler.

We realised that in order to find the source of the leak, we would have to pull out the washing machine. And in order to do this, we would have to pull everything out the back lobby because otherwise there would be no room to work.

This took less time than we anticipated. It wasn't long before we'd got the recycling stuff out the way and hauled out the machine.

And everything looked good.

What didn't look so good, however, was when Mr Click lifted Dick Duck (Tara's phallic duck toy) off the counter (where he's been awaiting repair for several months) and discovered he was absolutely sodden.

Turns out the washing machine wasn't to blame for the suspicious puddle at all. It was our incontinent boiler!

A bit of poking identified a drip and a paper towel beneath it for five minutes established that there was a fairly sizeable puddle was forming.

See those pipes at the back? The puddle was obviously spreading, running down those pipes, across the floor and spilling out underneath the front of the washing machine. Our boiler was trying to blame its wet patch on Bertie Beko!

A leaky boiler is rarely a thing to celebrate, but in our case it was a definite cause for joy because leaky washing machine = expensive washing machine repair bill, leaky boiler = emergency plumber covered by our monthly rent. The plumber was there within about twenty minutes and everything was fixed before my 30 minute quick wash finished in the machine (just to be absolutely certain that the washing machine wasn't somehow leaking up).

And the cause of the problem?

Something was loose and there were some pressure issues. My boiler couldn't handle the pressure and wet itself.

Poor thing.