Enter the plumber...

Nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems.

After the 'mild' jostling that the hotwater cylinder received yester-evening, I woke in the night aware that the cylinder sounded like it was still filling up from after the dishwashering. Upon inspection (at midnight, of course) I discovered a very small leak from the pipe leading out of the top of the cylinder. And the sound of a lot more water running somewhere else - probably under the house (where our overflow empties to).

hmmm.

Still, there is nothing I could do about this at midnight in my PJs (or in fact at any time in any attire, since I have zero skills as a plumber), so I put a small plastic container out to catch the drips from the inside pipe and went to bed.

About morning tea time I ventured under the house to see if the water was still flowing down there. Oh yes. Oooh yes.

One call to the plumber, 2 1/2 hours of plumbering time, and a few bits of pipe later, we have a happy cylinder again. We had inadvertently cracked the joiny-up-bit of the inlet pipe (note my extremely technical jargon). So at least it wasn't hot water that was filling up our cellar.

Yay.

So, not as straight-forward as it first seemed. Nor as cheap. Nor as energy efficient in the immediate term, given that we had to empty the entire cylinder of lovely hot water for the nice plumber man to fix it. But still probably worth it in the long term.

or so I am led to believe.