I wish to construct a soakaway.
Aquacell and Polypipe/Polystorm are cell systems for constructing soakaways - though they are not cheap!
Can anyone suggest any other brands or offer any practical experience. The alternative is a brick structure with gaps between the bricks, on a concrete base, and some sort of lid. all to be buried under a lawn..
You only need the specalised bolocks when space is exteremely limited, otherwise a soakaway is just a pit full of rubble, covered in a plastic sheet to keep the soil on top out..
..better still find a local ditch and dump it in that..
As already commented soakaways are extremely simple to build. I built one for a house extension a few years ago. For the size of roof I was draining I excavated a pit 1.3 metres deep x 1 metre square. Filled the bottom one metre with broken brick, polythene sheet on the top followed by a couple of inches of concrete capping. It was positioned
7 metres (iirc) from the nearest foundation.-- Nige Danton
It was my local building inspector suggested that I either build a brick structure, which he said is what a local builder would do, or use the plastic cells. The area of roof to drain is 35m**2 and he said that I needed a volume of 2.1m**3
Well its up to you to determine the best solution costwise.
If you have the area, a shallow pit is easy, and just dump stiff in it. Its when the area is restricted, and you still need the volume, that you need to go deep: Going deep means steep sides, and steep sides means structure to hold it all in place. Gets more expensive.
I built a deep pond myself. Got fish and water lilies in it too.
experience. The
Well >>DON'T
I imagine you thought you'd fractured a pipe initially? Must've been a grim moment....
proper
Well I have several high pressure water mains in 6" cast iron across the property as we are next to the pumping station so there was a momentry heart stopping! I knew that there was a soakway somewhere there, and that it wasn't working - that's why I was trenching for new drains - fortunately I was in the cab well out of the mire Laying the new drain wasn't nice though - even with 6" of pea shingle in the bottom.
AWEM
But that is exactly how a good soakaway works: traps the peak flow until the limited capacity the soil has to absorb it , does.
Now if there was *ever* a typo it's in that last para !! LOL!
The polypipe and polystorm systems are only copies of what builders have used for decades, namely plastic milk crates tied firmly together and then covered with weed membrane...they can be made any size, provided it's a multiple of milk crate size, then covered with stone, then soil etc and forgotten about.
proper
Dry spell - hadn't rained for days and it was full - good stuff clay !
AWEM
Phil L coughed up some electrons that declared:
Sounds like an excellent approach.
A long time ago, I helped my father make a soakaway for a single drainpipe. It was about 5-6 courses of brick, cemented so as to leave gaps, sitting on solid chalk (this was Surrey), and a couple of patio slabs on top. Whole thing was about 18" x 18". Turfed over.
Couple of retrospective comments: for a single drain pipe, it proved adequate. Having a hollow chamber meant in theory any silting up could be cleaned out - though it was never necessary. Hollow chambers run the rick of collapse if someone stuck a car on top. Ours was in the lawn. IIRC (and it was a long time ago) we did backfill around the outside of the bricks with some rocks and gravel.
Still pondering what to do at the bungalow. Currently is discharging to the main sewer but I plan to replace with soakaways. We're on mentally thick clay, so I think that job will wait until I get a mini digger on site - see if I can get right through the clay to whatever's underneath.
Cheers
Tim
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