Well that disrupted my day. This morning, we turned-on the taps in our house to discover that the water was full of small, spherical, amber-coloured particles. Well, some of the taps, anyway… after a bit of experimentation, I managed to isolate the problem to those taps that draw water directly through our water softener, which gave me a big clue. The fact that the particles were so uniform, both in colour and in approximate size and shape, was another clue that they were man-made rather than natural in origin, and I finally realised that they were, in fact, the resin from the ion exchange column in the water softener. Which means our water softener is kaput.

Anyway, thankfully the water softener is easy to isolate, so the problem is fixed, for now—although we are, of course, now stuck with hard water, which means we use more soap and also that we need salt for the dishwasher (which we didn’t have, so I had to go and get some). Plus we’ll have to descale the kettle more often.

Not the most auspicious start to a Sunday, I think you’ll agree. Still, as unexpected adventures in plumbing go, it could have been a lot worse.