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Bugging in? Plan your infrastructure now.

I’ve been busy the last few days with general household tasks. I’ve had a replacement boiler put in and I decided to do a few bits of maintenance around the house. The downstairs toilet needed some looking at as well as a couple of leaky taps. The only thing is that when I come to repair the inserts in the taps I found that they were obsolete. Like everyone else they change the designs every few years and this means you cannot repair them, you have to replace them. This went beyond the repairing a washer and I called upon my friendly plumber. He found some replacement inserts that fitted in the taps for £8 each. The alternative was to replace the whole tap system and that was £100.

It made me think about the plumbing in my home. I have no idea what types are used and if they could be replaced. Although I think it is unlikely I could continue with the plumbing as it is and I probably wouldn’t be able to use a lot of it I could use some of it. This means I need to be able to isolate the parts I want from the parts I could do without. I also think it would be easier to build a decent sand type water filter in the loft and have the output into the indoors plumbing. Hidden, under control and it could be set up and working now.

Because of this I’ve asked my friendly plumber to plumb in some stop cocks in certain parts. He thinks I’m being daft but doesn’t know the whole picture.

I’m also going to look at one indoor shower, just in case the water situation allows an occasional treat. The waste from that I will want to pipe into a new storage area instead of down the drain as it does now. I suspect that will be impractical for the current shower room but may be possible elsewhere.

As you may know I am planning to move into my neighbours house while we ride out the aftermath of an event. My next door neighbour has a similar shower room with one key difference, their outflow leads outside and could be tapped. I couldn’t really use the plumbing in his home but it could be used for other things in the same way mine is. More roof space, more water. To make sure I can collect it I need to sort out the materials now. Butts will be available around the area but certain piping may be more difficult to find.

After that is complete I’m going to restart the similar project I have for the electrics. It’s a lot easier and all I’m going to do is isolate them with in line fuses I can just pull when I want to disable them. I already have installed a small 12v wiring loom around the key areas and now I’m thinkning I could easily link that to the mains when I have isolated the circuits and use the whole loom at 12v. I couldn’t link to my neighbours easily because he is on a different circuit but with the right wiring put aside I could easily set it up in a similar way to mine and link them at roof level where it is likely they would go unnoticed.

I don’t see any benefit in doing anything with the gas pipes. I’ll just leave them.

For those considering Bugging In I think it is well worth considering and making a few preparations up front.

3 comments to Bugging in? Plan your infrastructure now.

  • Sarge

    Good luck picking all the new bits out of the rubble that was once your home

  • Sarge

    Pulling your leg, sounds good.obviously depending on the attack of course.

  • fox

    I have been toying with the idea of getting the equipment to go LPG in an event, being a heating engineer/plumber it would not be too much of an issue for me to rig up the bits n pieces and keep the parts required to convert my boiler to LPG. The only problem is the initial outlay and due to my house location and limited size garden a bulk supply tank would be out of the question so I could only use 47kg canisters 4 is the maximum you could have rigged up with changover valves & I believe you can store an extra 2 on site legally although I suppose you could store them somewhere else. I have 6 electric fan heaters, but lets be honest if power is down they are not much use, thats why last year we invested in 2 of those old school butane calor gas heaters, 2 was the legal 14kg butane amount we could keep in the house, but they would come in handy even if the electricity did go off, because the boiler wouldn’t work without juice anyway.