Leaking: It’s a never-ending saga.
The plombier came this morning and checked things over. He checked things out in our kitchen, which is essentially directly above the guardienne’s residence. Then we alerted him to the suspicious sound in the bathroom, which is a good 10~15 meters horizontally displaced from the problem downstairs (and over the parking garage). He took a look at the pipes under the bathtub, which is afterall easily accessible by popping out a set of tiles (something I really didn’t want to do myself in case I were accidentally to break it…). We had clear access to view all the pipes of the bathtub. As suspected, there was a nice steady leak coming from one of the joints in a cold water pipe. There was quite a bit of water that must have gone somewhere, probably into the guardienne’s apartment.
(Incidentally there was also a small amount of water leaking from the joint on a pipe going into the toilet. It was the first time we had ever seen that. What the heck is it with leaks multiplying like that??.)
The plombier said that the farthest he has ever seen water from a leak travel from the source to where it was manifest was something like 24 meters.
They replaced the leaky joint. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Early in the evening, the guardienne came back to our apartment to tell us that the leaking had never stopped downstairs. Instead, it had continued with the same intensity as before, without stopping. Furthermore, it had been like this for more than a month now since when it first started leaking (April 22nd, to be exact, the day of the first round of presidential elections). She’s left with a hole in the ceiling and has to empty out buckets of water every day.
It seems that when it first started leaking they fixed some small leak in the neighbor’s apartment above where it was leaking downstairs. However, this must have been a coincidence, as the leaking downstairs continued.
Now, they’ve fixed a leak in our apartment, but perhaps this was only a coincidence as well. We’ll shut off our water here overnight to see if it has any effect. I doubt that anything will change since the most likely candidate from our apartment had already been eliminated.
…to be continued…
** Important: If you live in France, you must get an insurance policy for your domicile. Above all, this will cover the damage very likely to occur from a leak…