Moving the watermain

To move the bathroom to the front of the house, I needed to put in a new soil stack and connect it to the existing soil pipe which runs between the my neighbour's house and mine.

In fact - 2 rainwater pipes, 2 water mains, 2 soil pipes and our electrcial supplies all run in this narrow space and accessing the soil pipes - which are right at the bottom - is a pain. I knew from connecting to the exisitng soil pipe when I did the downstairs loo that, the water main gets in the way when digging, and being old lead I was worried that I might break it at a really annoying moment and end up with water filling the hole and none in the house.

So I decided to reroute it out of the way and at the same time put in a larger bore pipe to aid flow as we now have a Torrent Solar Thermal Store and all water is mains pressure. I was hoping to remove all the lead but it disappears under the new bit of drivelway I laid and I do not want to dig that up up just yet.

Slabs lifted Phil hard at work!	Channel dug Left pipe is the gas main, right is water. The covered channel to the right is for removal of the old main.	Channel Looking forwards.	New pipe!
New pipe! Now passes under sitting room, hall and downstairs loo.	New water main connection I found that a Wickes 22mm pushfit connector bored out to about 22.5 mm worked perfectly.	Downstairs loo under basin. Showing new 'fatter' incoming water main and full bore 1/4 turn shutoff valve after the stopcock. I have since modified this subtly.