Leak Detection Hammersmith and Fulham

The terraces of Fulham, Brook Green and Shepherd's Bush are almost all divided vertically or horizontally into flats, and a great many of them have a lower ground floor dug out below pavement level with a light well at the front. Gravity makes that flat the collecting point for anything happening above it, and a light well with a blocked gully turns heavy rain into the same symptom as a plumbing leak. Along the river at Fulham Reach and Imperial Wharf the picture changes to managed blocks with overnight cover and labelled valves, while the mansion blocks around Barons Court and West Kensington run on a porter whose hours may or may not reach midnight. Establishing whether water is arriving from a pipe or from outside is often the first useful thing done on a night call here. Another feature of these streets is the sheer number of rear extensions built right up to the boundary with a neighbour, often with a valley or a parapet where two roofs meet. Water finding its way in at that junction lands in exactly the same place a failed pipe would, and in a converted house it lands in somebody else's flat. Establishing whether it follows the weather is often the quickest test available at night.