Kitchen sink waste

[ARW]

If the kitchen sink waste is just discharging into the back garden (ie no drains) what laws are been broken?

[Bob Minchin]

Problem is it would be classed as foul waste (kitchen grease food fragments etc) and so come under building regs which are enshrined in law. It will stink after a while. If it does not cause a nuisance to others then you will possibly get away with it. For years I have a washing machine in my garage discharging into a 50 gallon drum with a seep hose discharging on the gravel between my house and neighbours. I just raked over the gravel now and then when it started turning white with the detergent residues.

[Brian Gaff]

I'd imagine that depends on what you put down the sink! Brian

[Brian Gaff]

I just had a thought. Recycle plastic cartons like butter etc, OK? No matter how diligent you are, when you have finished there is a residue, so you wash them oin the sink and all that fat goes down and creates fat burgs which soome poor drain worker has to clear out somehow using energy and chemicals.

Brian

[tabbypurr]

If it's an old house with shallow foundations, the law of gravity might get broken

NT

[Andy Burns]

In V1 of our council's scheme they wouldn't take butter/yoghurt containers, in V2 they will take them, along with plenty of other things they previously wouldn't.

I don't dick about washing anything that's going into recycling ...

[Roger Mills]

Possibly none - as long as none of it finds its way into a water course.

[ARW]

I now wish I had not spotted this problem. The nearest river is very close. In fact so close that a 3m length of waste pipe could easily discharge the kitchen sink waste into the river.

A small house with a few little quirks.

I cannot find a stop tap or indeed the entry point of a water pipe into the building and I have no idea where the saniflow from one of the two toilets pumps to.

Now I would say that I know buildings better than most people but this one has me baffled. A 3 hour search today looking for the mains water entry point revealed nothing.

[harry]

Look outside for stop tap under metal cover. Look in neighbour's house. In old buildings, one stop tap sometimes covered several houses.

[Jeff Layman]

I assume you are on an unmetered supply, or a stopcock would have been fitted next to the meter. Mind you, if you have considered having a meter fitted, your water supplier would have to find a suitable place for it and put a stopcock next to it; might save you a bit of bother searching for it. Anyway, if you have a stopcock, it might be outside somewhere which has been covered by soil.

In our last house (fairly new - built in 1978) I looked under the kitchen sink for a stopcock as I wanted to replace the taps. There wasn't one, and I couldn't see where the mains water pipe went after it disappeared into the floor. A few weeks later, by sheer chance, I was clearing out a kitchen cupboard on an internal wall which backed onto the cloakroom and found a chipboard "false" wall and shelf over it, going back a few inches to the real wall. After removing the shelf, I found the stopcock. So it appeared that the mains supply entered the house under the front door, hall, and cloakroom, and then went into a kitchen cupboard. Needless to say, it then took an hour to loosen the stopcock so I could actually make use of it...

[Jim.GM4DHJ ...]

it's waste water not foul so who cares ..........

[Huge]

Which is one of the (several) things that piss me off about so-called "recycling" schemes. There should be a single country-wide scheme. Preferably like the one here, where all recyclable waste goes into a single bin.

And as for idiotic schemes where stuff marked as recyclable isn't accepted, words fail me.

Good man, me neither. Use my expensively heated metered water to wash garbage? Forget it.

I'm reasonably sure that if you did a Total Cost analysis of domestic recycling schemes, they'd be shown to be pointless. The only reason they "work" is the artificially inflated cost of land-fill and because they push a lot of the cost onto the householder, where it's hidden.

[Huge]

[20 lines snipped]

Tee-hee. My meter is 300 yards away down the lane ...

(But we do have a stop-c*ck under the kitchen sink.)

[Robin]

Where does the legislation for Scotland mean water from a kitchen sink is not "foul"? AFAICS the position seems to be as in England.

[Andrew]

Rubbish, it is grey water, not waste water. Needs to be connected to mains sewage or a private treatment system.

With a river 3 metres away, there are some potentially big fines for contaminating water courses.

[ARW]

A metered supply with a the meter outside not far away. Of course it's full if shit so I don't know if its a copper or MDPE pipe I am looking for. Just inside the building from the meter is an old capped off stop tap with a lead pipe.

Solid floors and no sign of a pipe (other than the capped off one) coming up out of the floor. I had all the kick boards off and hammered away the dot and dab plasterboard behind them to see if there was a buried pipe.

That just leaves the stud wall between the kitchen and toilet with the saniflow (the saniflow disappears into the stud wall) and I do not have permission to damage that wall.

Now the other toilet waste just disappears straight down and there is no soil stack at all on or in the building.

[newshound]

I'm inclined to agree. But suitable incinerators do potentially supply some useful energy, and there is an externality cost to land-fill, even if it is normally likely to be rather lower than the "tax".

Round here it is the greenies who are most likely to oppose the incinerator, which I find somewhat ironic.

[spuorgelgoog]

Chuck some dye down it, at least that will tell you if it's coming out near the river.

Owain

[James Wilkinson Sword]

I just feed mine into the downpipe from the garage.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

I rinse (but not bother washing) in free cold water things that will rinse easily. Butter, get lost. If I had a water meter, they wouldn't get rinsed.