Bore hole tool for testing clay depth? - Looking for tools to find depth of clay

[mikeb54]

Looking at soakaway solutions and am certain soil under topsoil is clay. Will want to design a rain and grey water soakaway for a 2 bed house with one shower and two sinks.Clay suggests permeability will not be good but wondered if there is a simple bore tool I could use to 'drill' down through ground to determine depth and thickness of clay. My thinking is that if clay only goes down to say 1m, then could dig below for soak pit?

[GB_Groundworks]

you can get lots of tools or hire a geotechnical company in to drill we had one the other day costs about £900 a day + well casings and then engineers time to analyse results



or you could dig a hole and follow the instructions from the main page about a porosity test

http://www.pavingexpert.com/drain08.html

labelled site investigation



Edited By GB_Groundworks on 1398717186

[Tony McC]

There's an much simpler soil sampler which you can buy/hire for a few quid if you are only going down, say 2-3m, but it's the sort of thing anyone with a bit of steel pipe and half a brain could knock up in the shed.

There are various types out there, some of which use an augur bit of 40-50mm dia to bore the hole and then send in the sampler to retrieve a spit of sub-soil or clay.

Giles does love his big kit, but sometimes, no matter how much we'd love to bring a full rig onto site, we have to keep it simple and manual.