Splitting Cobra
Wonderful to come home after a weekend off-planet and discover that the house is still intact. That feeling dissipates rather quickly when the opening of a tap results in nary a trickle. Run to the pre-paid water meter to check what the problem could be. Error 41 indicates No Credit, a rather strange occurrence given the fact that I’d charged the damn thing with almost R450. R450 is a lot of water, make no mistake.
Run off to the store to add some credit to the pre-paid token, shove it into the water meter and listen for the shouts indicating I should close the main tap, pronto! Before the shouting started, I observed the rather disconcerting rundown of the digits indicating the amount of credit remaining – more than R10 gone before I could blink.
The problem? The cut-off tap at the entry point to the house ordinarily looks like this:
More than likely 30 seconds after we locked the house and left, some inexplicable event ruptured the seam where the pipe meets the fitting. End result
and water gushing out of the main pipe. Thankfully, we’re on prepaid water – this could have gone on all weekend. Within three hours, I had a plumber on site and shortly afterward, a shower running.
For a tap that’s scarcely two years old and has been operated less than four times in that period, that’s a pretty crap display of product quality. Cobra bill their products as Tried. Trusted. Perfect. I’ve tried it, don’t trust it and think it’s nowhere near perfect…
Next up: a call to their head office.
