Water water

I moved into my new (old) house last weekend. It's a fairly substantial Victorian with a coach house, the two structures being connected by a passage at first floor height and a covered sideway at ground floor level.

It was clear from the start that there has been a bit of settlement around the sideway, which has so far been put down to some drain leakage and I am in the process of getting that done. However, I was talking to someone who told me that when it rains heavily and the ground becomes saturated, water collects at the back of the house (there's a slight rise to the rear garden - maybe 4 feet over 150 feet) until it floods into the sideway and flows to the front of the house. Been happening for years, he says.

I have a suspicion that this might be a more significant cause of problems than any small leaks from the drains. Even if it isn't, it would make sense to deal with it asap, along with the drain repairs.

I'm presuming that it should be possible to do something in the garden to divert water flows into the main drain but I'm wondering what scale this should be on (ie one channel close to the house or a more elaborate land drain system).

Does anyone here have experience of draining land in this context? I suspect that talking to drainage people would be a bit of a waste of time, since they mostly just re-line pipes etc in urban areas and this is more of an agricultural issue.

It'll certainly require more than an angle grinder and some WD40!

Reply to
GMM
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We had a similar issue at school (I'm a caretaker) which was eventually solved by digging a trench about 10 yards from the school, down about

6' (2m) or so, about 18" wide and filling the bottom 2' with pea gravel and larger round stones, the trench leading to a large soakaway with a 'proper' drainage pipe to main drains.

Can't remember all the details, the above is the gist of it.

We're actually built on a flood plain but one side of the school field is about 6' higher about 100 yards away than the playground and school side. When it rained heavily, water collected and moved slowly downhill and the original school drainage system couldn't cope any more, hence the need for more groundworks.

Reply to
Paul - xxx

It will depend upon where the water is coming from. Is it only your garden, or is there higher land that is feeding water into it? In the second case, it may be better to put a ditch at the top of the garden to intercept the incoming water and stop your garden becoming saturated. Of course, if, like one of my neighbours, the problem is a spring in the garden when the water table gets high enough, that is an entirely different problem. As you have hinted, the people to speak to are probably drainage engineers who specialise in agricultural land.

Colin Bignell

Reply to
Nightjar

What do you mean by "main drain"? If you mean sewer, then I understand that the regs do no longer allow surface water to be drained into a sewer. It has to go into a soakaway or land drain. At least that seems to be the case in my Local Authority.

Lawrence

Reply to
Lawrence

Thanks Paul, that was what I was sort of anticipating might be needed. At a guess, I should think the details (depth etc) might depend on assessing the local situation, which will be interesting! I'm sort of hoping that this will be a milder case, but then you never can tell with water tables as they don't necessarily seem to behave in ways you might expect!

Reply to
GMM

The land slopes back down again at the end of the garden, so I might hope that the area I'm dealing with is limited, but who can tell without an expert evaluation? I haven't seen any evidence of it yet, so it's hard to visualise what's happening. The person who told me has been working as a part-time gardener here for quite a few years, so I think he knows what he's talking about. Unfortunately, he, like many people, seems to underestimate the potential of large amounts of water to damage a building so has dismissed it as something 'worth seeing' but not a problem. The previous owner was a nice old chap, but not the most practical of people, so wouldn't have felt it necessary to do anything about it. Oddly, the cellar of the house is perfectly dry, and I might have expected such an issue to show up there.

Reply to
GMM

If the cellar is properly tanked, there probably wouldn't be anything to see.

You may find this page of interest:

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Bignell

Reply to
Nightjar

You need the agreement from the owner of the sewer. In some areas (particularly older dense urban areas), surface and foul often use the same drainage system. In other areas, it will depend on the policy of the sewage company, and if the local drains have spare capacity without risk of flooding them.

Also, they can now charge for removal of rainwater from your premises, weather into the sewer or onto public land across the surface (such as a driveway draining into the road).

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

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