Saving Water and Helping Customers Remotely – Plumbing in the Time of Covid-19

This Water Saving Week, new WaterSafe member Lee Ekins, owner of Surrey Plumbing Solutions in Warlingham, talks about rising to the challenge of helping customers deal with leaks without making a home visit.

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“Before the coronavirus outbreak I was busy with my regular clients: fixing taps, toilets, ball valves in loft tanks, fitting bathrooms and servicing boilers – my bread and butter work. Since lockdown I’m doing emergency calls only: burst water mains, blocked drains, fixing immersion heaters and gas leaks.

I’ve contacted all my regular clients and pushed all non-essential projects back – I keep in touch regularly to check in with them though, to let them know they haven’t been forgotten about.

I recently helped a family via Facetime with a broken washing machine they’d disconnected that was spraying water everywhere. They’d thought they’d shut off the water using the internal stop tap under the stairs, but due to a faulty handle the stop tap hadn’t shut off the water completely.

Thanks to Facetime I was able to identify the problem and guide them to successfully shut off the stop tap and not waste any more water. I was happy to be able to provide a solution remotely – it’s all about adapting to the current situation and doing what we can to help while keeping each other safe.

I’ve also recently helped a customer by email who was worried about a basin tap that was dripping. As parts are difficult to get hold of at the moment the best solution in this case was to shut off the hot and cold isolation valves and leave the tap out of action until it’s safe to fix. Thanks to some emailing back and forth of photos, I was able to guide my customer to do this himself.

When it’s not possible to do this, to save water I’d advise people to collect drips from leaky taps and recycle the water in the garden or on indoor plants until it’s safe for a plumber to get them fixed.”

For tips and solutions to preventing plumbing problems during Covid-19, from finding and checking your stop tap to only flushing loo paper down the toilet to avoid blockages, click here.