I'm aware that soakaways are supposed to be 5m from a building or road, but in my case that's impossible.
I live in a small terrace property that fronts the road, and would like to deal with the rainwater, which currently just deposits onto the surface, by means of a soakaway. I can achieve about 2.5m from the house and the highway at best.
The reason I want to do this is to replace the ugly and deteriorating tarmac in front of my house with a flower bed and grass.
The ground here is exceptionally well drained - porous, fractured rock at the top of a hill. I'm 100% confident the soakaway will easily cope with any storm, and affect neither the house nor the highway. I just hate breaking the rules!
I'm assuming we're talking Victorian terrace here. I've seen many such houses near me where the drain pipe does down to the ground, then horizontally along the property boundary and empties onto the pavement. What do other properties near you do? Do they have drains, empty onto the garden or to the street?
Presumably this means you've no foundations and from how you've described it, anything you do will be at least as good as it is now. I suppose the one issue is that if you create a soakaway, you will tend to concentrate the water in one relatively small space and there's the chance that over time silt etc will clog that lovely porous rock and then water might sit and eventually it might find it's way under the house or somewhere equally unhelpful.
I suppose a long-and-wide soakway, as far from the houise as possible, would be as close to what you have now, whilst allowing you to still garden. I wondered about somehow distributing around the garden but a water-butt-and-soaker-hose approach still needs to deal with downpours or times where the rain exceeds your using it.
I suppose you could ask the Council, but then they're liable to get al officious and just tell you the things you CAN'T do.
of 3 cottages, the other 2 (which have lower roofs) drain into the foul sewer, which you are not supposed to do round here.
You can ask the sewage company for permission to do so, which they might grant. Make sure you keep any such grant letter safe as you may need it when you sell the house (it's the sort of thing that would have been held with the deeds, when deeds meant anything).
o deal with the rainwater, which currently just deposits onto the surface, = by means of a soakaway.=20
Look into SUDS. Basically a posh soakaway.
You dig a hole, and you fill it with beercrates. These support the sides an= d roof of the hole, but allow the maximum volume for water. Literal plastic= beercrates, wrapped in a bundle with geotextile to stop them filling with = soil, are fine although you can buy posh SUDS beercrates at an unearthly pr= ice.
The idea that this volume is big enough to catch all the rainwater your roo= f can intercept over a day or so's heaviest rain, and the lower surface are= a of your SUDS tank is permeable enough to let it drain away before the nex= t deluge.
Don't follow the "traditional" soakaway design of digging a hole and fillin= g it with big rocks. This might allow some area for soakaway, but it reduce= s the volume available for temporary interception storage.
If you're on sand, you're laughing. If you're on clay, it's difficult.=20
If you're on rock, and you dig a SUDS system the size of an aircraft hangar= but don't shell out for the soil survey beforehand, you can find that you'= ve hit impermeable rock. Then you get to over-rule the very specific clause= in the planning application that says "No fecking groundwater runoff, we'r= e already a swamp" and you can just pump the excess into your neighbour's w= orkshop and through the 4" Victorian surface drain pipe. Bastards.
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