Leaks and Fans

People ask me what's it like living in Bali. Here's one answer.

I got tired of our plumber saying there's nothing we can do about having a pump that starts up if one drop of water drips somewhere. I asked some others too. They'd say that there aren't any pumps we could get that have high and low settings like the one we installed at John's place (low for when it starts and high for when it shuts off). We had a leaky toilet our plumber Mudik and his boys gave up trying to fix it. It was so small no one could see or hear any problem but shutting it off stopped the pump from starting and stopping constantly. Our plumber said we'd have to have the tank above the pump to do that. My occasional assistant, Gus, brought a plumber named Komang over from where he lives. He takes care of the snazzy guest villa where Gus works. He couldn't find the cause of the leak in the toilet either. He didn't know about the high and low settings but said he could install a much better automatis he called it, the electronic thing that starts the pump. He did and it worked. Just went off every five or ten minutes. I read the box (in Indonesian) and showed it to him. He'd never read it. It specifically said it would stop pumps from stopping and starting constantly, that it wouldn't restart till one liter of water had leaked from the system. It's a York from England. It was a miracle. It made life better. Now if there's a little leak I don't have to deal with it immediately if I don't want to be bugged by the pump. Komang went back to the mystery leak in the toilet. He found the leak by putting a little video camera in the toilet that filmed from angels he couldn't get to. So it was fixed too. And then I discovered he is a master at adjusting ceiling fans. We have nine ceiling fans and sometimes one will get a little off balance and needs to be adjusted. Our plumber is also our electrician and he and his staff have done a pretty good job adjusting fans but Komang did a perfect job. He spent two hours on one fan reinstalling a wooden mount that kept it level though the ceiling was at a slant. In defense of Mudik, he's fine for standard work and that's mainly what we need. He lives nearby and he'll come right over for something that needs immediate attention even late at night and that happens. But he's not good at out of the box thinking. Komang is.