Hello,
Saw your useful website popup and thought I'd come here for some further advice.
Recently bought a house and we've discovered a bit of damp inside the living room that we suspect is being caused by the neighbour’s driveway being up to our external render level and therefore the DPC.
We need to speak to the neighbours to get this fixed, but I wanted to come to them with some ideas.
In this picture, the wall with the internet box is ours and the one at the back with the drain is the neighbours.
The driveway seems relatively level but there is a drain at the front of the neighbour’s house, where instead it has been built up to the top of our render with no drain.
Looking at this other picture, is the front of our house where you can see the end of the render and further along is an airbrick and where the DPC must be. So if you put both pictures together you can kind of see how much higher the driveway is.
I’ve seen it suggested to dig out a drain, say about 200mm wide and 300mm deep but doing so would still mean it would be above the DPC but if it was lower then it wouldn’t be able to link up with the already existing drain. So a bit lost of what to do?!
What you are calling the 'drain' is not actually the existing drain. It's the top of the grate level of the aco. If you're lucky the outlet to this acc may be nearby with an actual drain invert level that is much lower. Have a look at the aco, find out where the outlet is then report back and we can advise further.
Yes: you need to find where that linear channel drain is outfalling, which would then lead to the underground drainage and, once you know the location and depth, you can plan the best way to deal with the worryingly high driveway levels.
