Greetings everyone,
Found this site to exceptionally good, but am helping with my daughters newly bought victorian terrace, and have a few questions which I hope some experts out there will be able to answer.
The property seems to have been designed with a low damp proof course - and/or high gullies , and a high foul water drain as shown {whichever way you look at it }
The foul water pipe top is only 203mm below the DPC
There is insufficent depth to bury the pipe properly under "selected fill" , sub base , sand , paving without breaching the DPC level.
Even the Gully tops are only 120 below the DPC - {Dont modern standards specify 150 mm ?}
Seems to me that to do the job properly involves re laying the drains lower - if this is even possible {I have been unable to find any inspection chamber yet}
I have seen a few ideas on this site which look appealing -like the one below- but Ive still got to work round that foul water pipe.
Also - IF I did dig them up and relay them lower {maintaining minimum fall} - Is there any danger of weakening the adjacent foundations as the trench woul be close to , and parallel with the side of the house.
Thanks for reading:)
Unless the mortage surveyor says it needs doing i personally would not do anything to the pipes as they have been there for years,without problem, the chances of lowering then is slim as would have been built with the house MSH
I agree unless its requirement for the mortgage lender then leave well alone, the square top you can see is either a separate item to the P trap what is below the ground or its the type whats combined, either way your looking at £ 30 - £ 50 just to end up virtually the same because your limited to dropping the height of the pipe deeper into the ground due to the invert level of the existing drain
the invert level is the bottom of the pipe
some older properties don't have inspection chambers
when you relay the paving if this drainage pipe is too high to fit any new paving on top of it the only way round it is to cut a notch carefully to the underside of the paving and to bed it on a semi dry mixture of sand and cement
Crystalclear
Driveway and Patio Installer
Call us today
01942 840109
7 days a week 8am till 8pm
bear in mind that some DPCs on older houses are below finished floor level
often they were installed on the underside of the floor joists
in which case they are 125mm below your door cill????
as mark and mick have bother correctly mentioned leave well alone
its a can of worms trying to gain extra fall on old pipes
just be very careful round the pipe itself
cheers LLL
i personally would dig it all up reset at the right height with the correctly positioned and quantity of inspection chambers. BEFORE the drive gets resurfaced, so it hasn't got to come back up IF there later transpires to be a problem with the drains. were the drains well exercised before your daughter brought the place or was it a holiday home or just one old lady living there for eg? we moved into our place and although the drains had been tested and everything appeared to work, as soon as the drains came under a bit of hard work 6 adults two children they couldn't cope.
also if she is thinking of selling in the future your average mortgage surveyor seems think that spotting the lack of gap between dpc and ground entitles them to there fee.
saying all this, it took me two and half years to my front drive, including £300 worth of drains work and replaced every service except the electric which i just buried deeper because they wouldn't replace it? so you might just want to leave it alone like the pros are saying??
We come up against these problems on older type of property very often, when we have dug off to replace the existing flags with block paving you can't start replacing all the gullies and rest bends just because its old and especially on a fixed price for doing the job
we test them for leaks and if they are of sound condition surround them in concrete and continue with what we are getting paid for, if the pipes are cracked then thats a different ball game and they are replaced but as you can see from the photo the height of the existing 90 degree bend is high so to get the height down you will have to go down the length of the pipe by a good 3 metres if not further as a 1:40 fall will only give you a few inches extra height
Crystalclear
Driveway and Patio Installer
Call us today
01942 840109
7 days a week 8am till 8pm
cheers lads for your info and help.
Ive not decided how to tackle it yet .
I think I should maybe have given a more full a picture though :-
The area shown is at the rear of the property - adjacent to the rear outrigger.
The previous path {that we had just taken up} had been laid breaching the DPC in places - and a ""concrete fillet" had been added all around the path/outrigger and path/lounge wall junctions - which has just acted like a wick to take water above the dpc in places.
There are two large areas of salt efforvescence on the outrigger and lounge walls as a result - indicating rising damp.
The soil stack you can see in the photo is coming away from the wall to some extent higher up the property and as a new toilet is being fitted , I was wondering about replacing the stack anyway with a modern plastic one.
Coming back to the path again :-
The intention of the previous path designers seems to have been to drain it into the 2 gullies {only one shown above}
But large quantities of water have just ended up missing the gullies, and going under the foundations , and up across the dpc and consequently some of the joist ends have rotted inside the property.
{The rear yard is higher up and drains onto this path too}
In other words the previous arrangement has not been entirely problem free and im anxious to resolve it fully
