The Pumps Failed at the Worst Possible Time 😳

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome back once again to another video. In this one, you join me in the Canga, my own personal van, and I am heading to our yard to go pick a tanker up on a Saturday, on a bank holiday weekend, to pick the four-wheeler up.

[00:00:15]2,000 gallon DAF, and we're heading for a failed pump chamber.

[00:00:20]After that, we are back in jetting van for Tuesday's work, where we have a blocked drain on a trading estate. I hope you enjoy the video. If you do, please leave a like. Please leave a comment. Click the heart button, and please subscribe. Thank you.

[00:00:39]Hello, I'm on TV.

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[00:00:47]So, yeah, as I said in the intro, we are heading for a failed pump chamber. It is a nice Saturday morning, nice and sunny.

[00:00:54]Little bit of cloud, but nothing too much, and hopefully we should have a nice day.

[00:01:02]Well, this pump chamber is on a housing estate. We've got a housing estate like this, and there is a road that's been built just off of it. There's a row of new houses down there, and all the drainage leads to a pump chamber at the bottom, then pumps back up to this road.

[00:01:17]Of course, when a pump chamber goes down, it's never a convenient time, and being a bank holiday weekend, as you can imagine, getting a pump engineer out for this isn't going to be the cheapest thing in the world, or wherever you can even get one. So, they've called us in to just try and drop the levels.

[00:01:33]So, we'll be in today. I believe we came back in on the Monday as well, and pumped a load out, and then the pump engineer came on the Tuesday and got it fixed. But, yeah, this is the first call out.

[00:02:04]>> Of course, I forgot to turn the switch on in the cab of the truck, so I popped around and then switch that on and come back.

[00:02:13]Right, I better get this pump down anyway.

[00:02:16]Yeah, man.

[00:02:17]All right, mate.

[00:02:39]Of course, I'm not going to make you sit here and watch all the levels drop very slowly and you will get very bored, so I'm going to cut loads of this out, speed it up, and all the usual stuff, so you don't get too bored. Of course, I want this video to be entertaining, but I also want it to be a bit educational and all that stuff that YouTube likes. Um I'll try and explain to you what is going on and everything as we um So, the reason for having a pump chamber is when the site drainage is too deep to get to a main or it's got to go too far to get to a main. In this situation, you'll have a big sump like this with pumps in the bottom.

[00:03:24]And the pumps will pump all the liquids and all that up to the main, therefore getting around the fact that it's not going to have a gravity fall on it to the main. There's different sizes of pump chambers.

[00:03:37]This one's about enough to take hours in this state.

[00:03:42]I say hours in this state, it's a small hours in this state.

[00:04:05]>> Like with anything, maintenance on pump chamber is very important. If you have a pump chamber, generally what happens when you get these serviced is we will come in as a tanker company, we will pump out the liquids out of this chamber, pump any solids out of there, things like rags and you find all sorts in these pump chambers.

[00:04:24]So, we'll pump all of that out, give it a good wash around.

[00:04:28]Then, a pump engineer will then lift the pumps out.

[00:04:32]They will check all the impellers on the inside, make sure everything's working in order.

[00:04:36]And they will also check the electrics over, check the floats over, and make sure everything is working as it should be.

[00:05:17]So, we've currently got about 1,000 gallons on the truck.

[00:05:21]The next interesting thing that happened was kind of my own fault. I managed to get the float stuck in the end of the vacuum pipe.

[00:05:28]Um it's always best practice with these when you're cleaning out these pump chambers is to pull the cables up with the floats on the end because they fit perfectly in the end of the vacuum pipe. As you will see now as I pull this up.

[00:05:56]>> So, yeah. I got a screwdriver and had to pry that out the end of the pipe.

[00:06:01]Not long putting the pipe back in, I then did it again. Now, these floats are the floats that control the pumps. So, when that float is up in the air, that should be when the pump is on.

[00:06:12]In this case, when those floats come up in the air, something electrical's going on here and it trips all the electric out for the chamber.

[00:07:08]So, I just kept pumping the chamber out until I ran out of space on the truck.

[00:07:11]Now, this truck will carry 2,000 gallons of sewage.

[00:07:15]And that is us full now. So, I'm going to pull the hose out, get the pipes wrapped up, and I can't even go and tip this because it's weekend.

[00:07:24]So, all I can do is take it back to the yard. That'll be stored on the truck.

[00:07:27]It's a bank holiday weekend, so Tuesday will be when this gets tipped.

[00:08:56]>> So, all that's left to do on this Saturday is get photo of how far I've got with it and send that back to the office and how much is left in there.

[00:09:04]Drop the floats back in and we can put the cover back on.

[00:09:55]>> Right, let's get back to the yard. We are going to pick my little van up. I am going to go home and then I am going to join you on Tuesday.

[00:10:04]Back in the jetting van.

[00:10:15]One bank holiday weekend later and we are back in the jetting van heading for an industrial estate that's or trading estate, whichever you prefer, that has a blocked sewage drain. It's a 6-in drain. They rang me up and said, "Can you come and take a look? It's holding some water. We don't know if it's blocked. Whatever it's dropped.

[00:10:35]We've had some building work done here.

[00:10:37]We've had a new gate put in. We don't know if we've damaged the pipe. Can you come and have a look?"

[00:10:41]So, we are going to go there, jet the pipe through, and whilst we're there, why not stick the camera through it and see if there's any problems going on.

[00:10:51]If you look between the two people stood on the left, just behind the left-hand person's left leg, is where our manhole cover is. The other side of that gate, the other side of the fence.

[00:11:04]Is that a good description of where it is? Do you get the idea? It is that direction. And under this cover, we have the downstream manhole. So, we're going to pop this cover up and hopefully jet back from here and get the blockage cleared.

[00:11:25]Although this manhole's been run over an awful lot of times and the cover didn't want to budge just with a normal manhole key.

[00:11:32]This is going to be somewhat rare. I'm going to use a pry bar as a pry bar.

[00:12:12]And I had an idea at this point. Why not get the cover up key out? I don't think we've used it for a while, so why not use it on this cover cuz this is exactly what it's made for.

[00:12:26]For those of you that are new here, the cover up key is essentially a big key that is a sliding hammer that is great for breaking seals on manholes.

[00:12:35]It just makes it easy work.

[00:12:37]You pop it like that, you get your normal key, and you should be able to lift it. In this case, I'm just going to lift it up without the key and lift it out of the way.

[00:13:01]There were an awful lot of spider webs in this manhole. Now, I would have thought somewhere on here I've caught the big spider on camera, but let me know in the comments when you see it if you don't hear us pointing out when the big spider is on camera. It was massive.

[00:13:25]Of course. Come here, Andy.

[00:13:28]So, this is our branch and we're going to jet back towards our full up manhole.

[00:13:32]We're going to jet with our tulip jet. I still don't know that it is called a tulip jet, but we're going to call it a tulip jet.

[00:13:40]And that should drag everything back towards us and get this line nice and clean. Once we've got it clean, we will get the Scanprobe X60 up there and we will take a look at the line and make sure it's in good condition still.

[00:13:58]I know I said about the big spiders.

[00:14:00]So far I've counted three.

[00:14:03]I'm going to put the gully grabs in here just in case anything comes down this line cuz we're suspecting it's from building work. Makes me think there's going to be rocks or something like that in here. So, yeah, we'll put the gully grabs in there. That should catch anything coming down rather than letting it go further down the line and cause some bigger problems.

[00:14:41]Now, I know it looks like there's not a lot of water holding in the manhole the other end, but we do get a nice rush come down on this one and yeah, you've got to remember it's quite quiet on this estate at this time of day.

[00:15:19]So, I'm going to carry on jetting up the pipe and we're going to keep going until we pass the manhole at the other end.

[00:15:25]I've got the guys over that way. They're going to shout to me when they see the jet go past the manhole.

[00:15:52]Before I use all the water.

[00:15:55]So, I'm just going to stop here and move the gully grabs out the way and see if I've caught anything.

[00:16:08]Remember when I said about the big spider a little bit earlier on?

[00:16:12]Yeah, keep an eye out for it. It's coming soon. You cannot miss it, promise you. It's looks bigger on camera than I thought it was going to, to be honest.

[00:16:28]So, I managed to get our jet all the way up to the other end and we're going to slowly pull it back towards us, dragging that line nice and clean.

[00:16:37]I think we'll put the pressure up a little bit as well.

[00:17:09]So, of course, as always with jetting, the slower you can pull the jet back, the cleaner you're going to get the line.

[00:17:16]That's generally the rule with germs.

[00:18:00]Okay, the next video coming out is going to be on the 1st of June and we're going back to the hospital. This one's not out yet, by the way. I'm just telling you what is coming up.

[00:18:11]I filmed a very good blockage at the hospital. It's been a while since I've been to the hospital, so you're going to want to come back for the next video.

[00:18:17]But, what I was going to say is if you want to see that video up front, you can do that now by becoming a member of this channel. That gives you access to three videos up front, but you don't have to.

[00:18:27]I'm just here.

[00:18:29]I've done it again.

[00:18:31]I'm just happy you're here watching the videos, liking, commenting, subscribing, and clicking the heart button. There we go. I got there in the end. I record that every time over and over again to get it right and I still get it wrong.

[00:18:50]Don't forget as well, our competition to win absolutely nothing. Let me know when you spot the spider in the comments down below.

[00:19:34]>> So, the jet's nearly back, so let's see if we dragged anything back with the jet. I can see some little bits going past now, so looks like we have caught something.

[00:20:07]Yes, we definitely had some rubble in this line, so we're going to use the jelly grabs to get this out. Nearly knocked the GoPro in.

[00:20:14]And like I said, we will get the Scan Probe X60 down the line and we'll make sure this line is nice and clean.

[00:21:09]Now, I can still see there's a couple of stones in the upstream line, so I'm just going to chuck the jet in once more and send it up a tiny little bit and pressure it up just to wash them down so I can get them out of the gully grabs.

[00:21:49]I've got them all out. Yeah.

[00:21:52]I don't think I don't think there's anything wrong with that structure, mate. No. No. You do what you've got to do, mate.

[00:21:57]We're second in block. Yeah.

[00:22:03]Yeah, it seems like a You're doing it.

[00:22:08]Yeah. I think what we'll do is put this cover back down and we will camera from the upstream manhole down to here. So, firstly, we are surveying downhill and also we're not in the middle of a road.

[00:22:50]>> [laughter] >> Not a decent coin.

[00:23:02]Now, there's some Well, back up at this end and we're going to put our scan probe X60 down through the drain and see what's going on. We're going to put into look see mode.

[00:23:17]This is more for my benefit and the maintenance staff who are with me.

[00:23:22]Just to double-check there's no big defects in there.

[00:23:26]Now, as I'm only doing this as a look see and not a proper full survey, I'm not going to bother change the skids on the camera head over to the 6-in but if this was a full report, then I'd definitely be changing these for the 6-in skids, but all that does come with this camera. Got a lovely little bag full of all the different skids and stuff. But, most of my work's 4-in hence why you usually see this camera with 4-in skids on.

[00:23:54]Now, before we even started, we knew this pipe is very shallow and yeah, we were expecting a few little bellies in it. There's nothing horrendously bad, but it could have done with a little bit more fall on it, but in the future, they may wish to alter this drain and they'll put more fall on it.

[00:24:23]Again, we got a few little bits of limescale, but nothing major. There's generally limescale in all the drains I camera.

[00:24:29]And we've got this belly of water which is a little bit bigger than the other one.

[00:24:34]Could be causing some problems, but they're going to keep an eye on it. If this drain keeps becoming a problem, I'm sure they will relay it and try and get the fall a little bit better on it, but it's only in gravel anyways.

[00:24:46]It's not really the worst one to relay.

[00:24:49]We'll skip a few meters here because I started chatting and pushing it really slow.

[00:24:53]But, carrying on, we We end up in the manhole. So, we are all clear right the way through and I see no big defects in that pipe. So, that is all good.

[00:25:06]I'm assuming you want this camera down.

[00:25:07]Yeah.

[00:25:12]You might have to As always, I hope you've enjoyed this video. If you have enjoyed this video, please click the like button. Please leave me a comment down below. Make sure you tell me that you've made it all the way to the end of the video. Please click the heart button. Apparently, that helps in some way. But most importantly, please click the subscribe button. I'm trying to get this channel as big as possible. My daughter wants a play button. What other reason do I need? So, please click the subscribe button. Thanks for watching.

[00:25:36]I'll see you on the next video. Remember it's Hospital.

[00:25:41]Please like and subscribe and leave a comment.