Advice on a water claim

spamarooni

Hi

Im wondering if I can get some advice. The long and short of it is I heard the sound of water rushing through the pipes in my bathroom, when no water was turned on so believed there to be a leak. I had various people look at it, of which one was Affinity water.

They informed me that the leak was on my property under the concrete in my back garden where the mains water comes in and I needed to contact my insurance to resolve the matter. So I have paid £250 excess and had my garden dug up to find that there is no leak and the leak is actually on the main road and the sound is vibrating through my pipes, which even though they said it was not their issue they random turned up last week and started digging the road up and have fixed the problem.

I have drafted a letter below as I would like to try to claim back the money I paid to the insurance company as it was an unnecessary job

Is this the best way to address this and is the below letter the right way to approach this

To whom it may concern,

I would like to make a complaint concerning an issue I had with regards to a leak that has cost me a lot of money and inconvenience, that it transpires was actually never my problem and I was advised incorrectly. There is a breakdown of what has occurred:

wc 11/01/16
Could hear a noise like water moving through my pipes, had a quick check and though not much of it. During the coming week the sound grew louder. Had a look around and couldn't see any evidence of a leak.
That weekend I went down into the cellar and under the kitchen floor searching for evidence of a leak, but could find any.

25/01/16
Contacted a local plumber.

28/01/16
Plumber came around a looked about and said the sound was coming from underground before it came into my house so to contact the water board.

28/01/16
Phoned Affinity Water to arrange for someone to come out and asses the problem.

01/02/16
A person from Affinity Water came to try to identify the problem
He could hear the issue and said that it was underground near my bathroom and that it was on my property so was not Affinity Water's responsibility.
He informed me to contact my insurance company to try to resolve the problem.

01/02/2016
Contacted my insurance company to inform them of the issue and setup a claim and had to pay a £250 excess. Arranged for a company they work with UKDN Waterflow to come and look at the problem.

05/02/2016
UKDN Waterflow arrived to look at the problem and concluded that they needed to dig up the concrete at the back of my house where the person from Affinity water had said that the sound was coming from. Chatted to UKDN to arrange when then could fix the problem.

19/02/16
Workmen returned from UKDN to start work on the problem. They dug up the concrete in the back of my garden and found no problem. They went to the main stop tap on the road that leads to my property and switched it off. They tested to see if any water was coming through to my house and there wasn't yet the sound was still in the pipes. They reasoned with this simple test that the leak was likely on the main pipe on the road and due to it being an old house with steel pipes the sound was vibrating through the pipes.
Also on this day without any notification National Grid and Affinity Water turned up and began to dig up the road outside my property and evidence of a leak was found.

24/02/16
I returned home from work to see that the water in the hole that had been dug up on the road had stopped running and was no more. I went in my house and the sound of water rushing through pipes had stopped.


So the long and short of it is I paid £250 excess on my insurance and have had to put a claim through and had the concrete in my garden dug up, which has caused a lot of inconvenience for my family as well as me having to use up holiday time to take time of work when none of this was necessary and was not my problem.

As you can imagine with a young family having to fork out £250 for a problem that was non-existent from my point of view is extremely frustrating. I look forward to your reply.

Yours faithfully

Many thanks
Andy

Nathan94

Good luck!

Cardew

If Affinity Water admit to wrongly diagnosing the area of the leak(a big if?) then I would get your insurance company to claim from Affinity Water. However I suspect Affinity will 'wriggle'.


There is also a good argument that UKDN are liable. They are the experts and should be able to diagnose the approx. area of the leak.

spamarooni

Thanks for the advice

The addendum to this is that when UKDN dug up my garden they found that the soil pipe had partially collapsed, so was leaking waste into the soil
So I had to put through another claim to get his fixed
This has since been fixed and the original guys who were dealing with the clean water side of things are coming back next week to replace the pipe work leading into my house and put in a new stopcock as it's old pipe work (victorian house) and in the process of switching water on and off over the past few weeks the archaic stop tap I have has started to drip

So if they come back to replace this then can I still claim again UKDN as they will have carried out work, not necessarily repair work but will still have done some work

I need this to be completed first as there is still a big hole in my garden where the sewage team have left it still dug up so the clean water team can finish off their work and concrete back up