The Brew Cabin

Posted: **Tue Jul 26, 2005 3:18 pm**

I have a 3 bed semi D house average size 1934, and nearly all of the roof drains to a 3" gutter pipe at the front of the house, it also picks up a small piece of rooofing above the front door then down by my front door into a drain.I have exposed the concreate area around the door as the step has been removed as part of a new block pave project.It slants away from the door at roughly 45* and dissapears into the sub grade.
The sewage system is at the back of my house (man hole there).
I assume it's a soakaway and if so how do I locate it ? and is it possible to break into it with an extra 22.5 square mtrs of possible surface rain water in addition to the roofs rain water. when the paving is complete.

Posted: **Tue Aug 23, 2005 11:18 am**

The simplest way to track a drain and thereby locate the soakaway would be to use a transmitter and detector system. You can hire 'Drain Locating Kit' from some of the better hire shops. The transmitter element can be attached to a length of drain rods and inserted into the pipeline as far as possible. The radio signal is then detected above ground, and you dig down to find the end of the line, as it were.

Whether the soakaway is in good enough condition to cope with the extra hard paving is best determined by sending down a few buckets of additional water during a heavy storm to see if there is any surcharge or 'back-up'. However, 22mÂ² is such a relatively small area, it's pretty likely that, if the soakaway is functioning well at the moment, this additional input won't bother it too much.

Just how you connect to the soakaway depends on the linking pipework and the actual structure itself. It's usually easier to link in to existing pipework than to make a new connection to the soakaway itself, but, as I said, this does very much depend on the structure of the soakaway.

The Brew Cabin

Do i need another soakaway - Use existing or new