Ongoing water issues a case of 'wash, rinse, repeat' for salon
Aislinn Celisse owns Salon Celisse at 18 Park’s Rd, Lismore, Waterford, and her business is affected by low water pressure and water outages. Picture Larry Cummins
Aislinn Celisse was not feeling the love when she woke up on St Valentine’s Day, facing empty taps and a full client list for the day ahead at her home salon.
She picked up her phone and cancelled everyone — a day of income lost.
Aislinn has been running Salon Celisse at her home in the West Waterford town of Lismore for the past 15 years. The last three years have been very challenging due to issues relating to the water supply in the town.
“The pressure is so low that it is just a trickle, more so in the evenings," she said.
She had a busy St Valentine’s Day planned until the water supply cut out completely — without any notice.
"I had my first appointments due in for 9.30am, and I had to cancel them. I had no water at 8am and we had got no notification."
She logged the fault with Uisce Éireann and cancelled all seven clients booked for the day, losing around €460 of income.
Aislinn had a pump installed on the boiler in her home which pumped the water to her salon.
“When there is no water going through, it burns the motor so it blows the pump. It blew the pump that day, so what a Valentine’s weekend for me!”
When the water is restored, it takes nearly six hours for her tank to fill and heat up.
Just hours after speaking to the on Tuesday evening, a new “water off notice” was issued.
The notice advised of an outage from 6pm on Wednesday to 1am on Thursday morning for “essential maintenance works".
Aislinn said the ongoing situation “seems to be a rinse, wash, repeat”.
At least plans can be made on days when outages have been announced in advance, she says.
Aislinn believes she has lost clients because of the water issues, and is fearful of the impact on local businesses in the seasons of Confirmations and First Holy Communions.
While welcoming works being done now by Uisce Éireann in the area, Aislinn said addressing the issues with the water supply “will not be an overnight job because the infrastructure for the town is huge".
She added that the town previously had two reservoirs — but now only has one.
“The secondary school has over 1,000 students and is one of the biggest schools in Co Waterford.”
Aislinn now has a daily routine to ensure that things run as smoothly as possible.
“I get up at 7am, and the first thing is to go downstairs to check the taps. I turn off the immersion at night time, in case I blow the immersion in case there is no water in it. It is in my head all the time.
She added: “I am going to be doing a renovation of my salon shortly, and will have to get my plumber in to put a new pump in because the other one is gone — so I am running off a trickle of water.
"I have enough water to wash hair, but a real nice power wash at the basin is what I want. I have had it, but it is just when the pressure has been dropping for the last three years, there is not enough to feed into a motor to push that water out. So that is how low it is.”
She has had to regularly replace her immersion because of a build up of lime.
“You are always planning around water, which should be a normal necessity for living. It is a nightmare.”
