EP #56 – How A UK Plumbing Apprentice Brought Clean Water To A Nepal Village w/ Daisy Turner
📑 Table of Contents
TOC
📑 Table of Contents
Overview
Daisy Turner went halfway around the world with a handful of tools, a language barrier, and the same plumbing principles she uses every day, and left a village in Nepal with clean running water for the first time.
This episode covers the project in full, what it did for the community, and why Daisy thinks every engineer should be thinking beyond their day job.
Highlights
The Plumbing Professional Development Scheme
- (01:26) – What the Plumbing Professional Development Scheme is — an initiative to support young engineers
- (02:04) – Filling the gaps college leaves. Real-life heat loss scenarios to practise, plus homework to work through and compare answers.
- (03:24) – Insights from members from other industries, for the business side of the trade that college never teaches.
How the Nepal trip came about
- (03:54) – The Dolma Foundation and a call for UK plumbers to share their knowledge for a clean water project in a remote Nepalese village.
The village and the job
- (06:19) – The before: a leaking hose pipe running two kilometres down from a waterfall, sucking in debris through the holes so the water arrived dirty and unreliable.
- (08:25) – What they built instead — a new intake tank, a break tank to manage the pressure dropping down the mountain, and pipework dug into the ground where the terrain allowed.
- (11:33) – Nine stop taps for a village of ten homes — almost one per house — thanks to how well the team and villagers worked together.
How the work differs from a UK job
- (12:38) – Different materials and methods on site — HDPE pipe, and no fires allowed for butt jointing because it was a national park.
- (14:01) – Turning up to find tools were far more limited than anyone had briefed.
What clean water actually changed
- (14:28) – Why clean water is life-changing, not just useful
- (15:47) – How the experience changed Daisy’s view of work and infrastructure in the UK.
Getting involved yourself
- (18:52) – What the trip did for Daisy personally, and why you don’t have to fly across the world.
- (20:39) – The takeaway: Saying yes to one opportunity two years ago put her on stage at the World Plumbing Conference.