The Brew Cabin

Posted: **Thu Jun 30, 2005 11:13 pm**

Just moved into an old house with a slab formed croncrete hard standing covering the whole area in front of the house. The path between the hard standing and road at the front of the house is about a foot or so higher than the lowest point of the hard standing . The hard standing is made up of several formed slabs, and over the years these have dropped so that there is a nice V formed between the front slab and the rear slab. When it rains water pools into this V gully and stands for hours. Someone has tried to alleviate this by installing these plastic key terrain drainage ports through the slabs. These were blocked so I cleaned them out but I'm not sure how they are supposed to work i.e are they soak aways or are they piped to a drain under the slab. Anyway they don't appear to be anymore effective.

What I need is an effective way of draining the standing water. I might be able to access a main drain buried in the path. Currently the plan is to remove the hard standing and put down block paving but as the slope is towards the house I don't want to end up with water at my brickwork.

Any ideas How I can drain this standing water away

Posted: **Fri Jul 01, 2005 4:46 pm**

I suspect the 'drains' you meantion are a linear channel system (see this page) and they need to be outfalled, either to a SW system or to a soakaway. Simply installing a few length of these drains and imagining they somehow spirit away any surface water is a nonsense, but a nonsense I see or hear about at least a couple of times each month. You wouldn't believe people could be so gormless! It's usually the same people who dig a 'soakaway' in there waterlogged gardens and then wonder why it doesn't work! The previous occupiers didn't do that as well, did they?

Anyway, if you want to get rid of the standing water, you need an outfall. If there is a 'main drain' buried beneath the path, then the linear channels are relatively easy to connect-up - there's a bit of advice given on one of the Aco-sponsored pages - Installing Aco Drive Drain which can be applied to almost any 'brand' of linear channel.

Once connected up, the linear channels will function as intended, collecting the surface water and delivering it to the outfall, so if you then wanted to construct a block paved driveway, there should be no problem.

The Brew Cabin

Pooling water on hard standing - Drainage