Anyone work a water board

[whoruntheworldgirls]

If so, do they move external stopcocks? For some reason ours is on our neighbours drive?! we'd like it moving into our boundary. Lovely neighbour but don't want to have to get them to move their car if we need access or risk damaging their drive.

Most external stopcocks are out on the pavement and you can buy a long reach tool to access them. Do you share the one on your neighbour’s drive?
Do you have an internal one? If you do just look after it and you should never need the external one . We’ve been here 30 years and only ever needed the external one turned off once, ironically when Severn trent had to dig up our drive to access a blocked sewer pipe.

I used to work for a water company.

Yes, they can be moved. We had ours moved from the middle of the front lawn to the pavement. (We also took the opportunity to replace the service pipe leading up to the house as it was made of lead, too small and leaking).
The fact that it's in a neighbouring driveway does suggest that it's a shared supply (quite common in older houses).
The water company might insist on a meter if you're not already on one.

Nope not a shared drive so very odd.
The internal one has seized and needs replacing but the guy who came out couldn't access the external one, couldn't get the cover off so now we need to call the water company so I figured if they can move it I'll ask

Sorry just re read the shared bit, there are 2 access points on my neighbours drive so we assumed one is ours and one theirs. Estate built late 80's.

Does anyone know what happens when the water company doesn’t know where your external stop cock is? Our water company can’t find ours and have kind of washed their hands of the situation. But what if we need to turn the water off at the pavement?!

@Reedplayer they should be able to find it either with a listening rod (acts like a stethoscope but picks up the sound of running water) or a metal detector.
In worst case scenario they will turn off the valves that feed the whole street.

@whoruntheworldgirls where I used to live I had one moved from a shared (with a neighbour 3 doors down 😕) one to being a separate one outside my house. I also had a separate water pipe put in at the same time to improve the pressure. It was chargeable though and depends on your water provider.

@Reedplayer Ours couldn't be found either. Yorkshire water sent out a succession of young lads who didn't have a clue what they were doing. Took months of pestering to get them to sort it (we were renovating and needed to be able to turn it off if things went wrong with the dodgy plumbing).
They eventually decided to put a new one in and we came downstairs one morning to find them digging at the side of the door. (Think it was Morrisons utilities).

Months later we had issues with water ingress, dug around and discovered when they put it in, they'd broken the main clay pipe from the kitchen to the drains so for months we'd had water from the sink and dishwasher soaking back against/under our house (which has no foundations as it's old).
There was clay pipe in the infill for the hole so there's no way they didn't know they'd broken it. They tried to say we needed to pay for the repair ourselves as it's a private drain (it's not) then they said we'd caused it ourselves. Eventually they gave in and fixed it but were very arsey about it.

Thank you all, will give them a call in the new year then and ask for it to be moved.
In the meantime might try some WD40 on the internal stopcock to set off we can fix that.