About a year ago, I moved out of my old unit to a new unit due to major leaks. The new unit, although given a the name ‘new unit’, also suffer leaks but very minor if compared to the old one which you can see here. One particular leak which was apparent was the one above. The leak was so obvious, I actually asked the contractor entrusted to fixing these sort of problems for the school, to deal with it, and he did, using silicon gel.
Now, you don’t need an engineering degree to know that ‘sealing a leak from the outside with silicon gel will not get the leak fixed’, but there he was, sealing the leak with something he said was ‘good enough’ to do the job. A month after his ‘done job’, the seal gave way, and drainage water from my neighbor above started dripping down every time he was dealing with water in his kitchen.
Last Wednesday, it got worst. I was in my room doing some web-designing work, when I heard rainfall indoors. My initial findings proved that the leak had worsen. The fact that my upstairs neighbor sometimes poke his drainage hole for some unknown reason may have made it worst than before but he doesn’t admit it. I really wanted to inform the people concerned, but the last time I did that for my older unit, the response was cold, so I decided I should address the problem personally.
I didn’t want to spend money on the problem because I already planned to start looking for a permanent house by the end of next year (2011), and hopefully move into that house by mid-2012. So it doesn’t make sense to spend huge sums of money on the repair, more importantly since those concerned do seem not to have the funds to do such maintainace themselves. With that in mind, I came up with this after an hour:
Yes, you do see a bottle of Ribena, a mineral bottle, and a hose. To keep it leak free… I used the DHL plastic bag which melts easily, and the hose was bought a year ago when I was cleaning my new unit before moving. To tie the whole thing up, I used the wire cord from an old spoil mouse.
I tested the ‘device’ and it works fine. It functions as a funnel, leading all the water from the leaking pipe into the nearby drain. So, how does it look when it’s already fixed? Check this out:
I know, it’s not pretty, but it works and that’s the whole point.
