Storm water and sewer

[Lawrence Zarb]

Is it allowable to drain the rainwater from my conservatory into the main sewer, as this is more conveniently located than the storm drains

[Roger Mills]

Probably not officially, but I did!

A lot depends on whether or not the conservatory is subject to building regs. If not, there's no BCO involved to tell you which gully to put the downpipe into!

[The Natural Philosopher]

Almost certainly not in about 95% of areas.

It used to be done a lot, but its being phased out..rainwater is good water. Shut infested sewage is not. Since we have very stringent requirements in how we treat sewage in every sense of the word, mixing a load of runoff water with it is deprecated.

rainwater needs to got to a soakaway, or to a proper storm drain system.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Tsk Tsk!

Orfully norty wot?

I wouldn't cos I have my own shit digester, and it would overflow it..

The pond takes most of teh gutter water..its practically overflowing right now.

Natural ponds make great soakaways. You can keep fish in them too.

[Tournifreak]

Convenience doesn't come into it. Your BCO will no way let you do this IF you have a storm drain available.

Jon.

[John]

Do I infer correctly from this that 'they' route storm drain water (gulleys they call them here) into reservoirs? Don't tell me they're doing something right?

I'm sure that on our estate (1960s) our rain drains join the sewer drains, at each house. Do they build them differently now?

John

[Phil L]

His BCO doesn't know about it.

[Phil L]

They've been building them split this way for about 25-35 yrs, depending on where you live, certainly almost all houses older than 35-40 years old have one drain that takes away everything in one pipe.

[Phil L]

If the house is older than 35-40 yrs, then yes, they all join up underground anyway, newer houses have seperate rainwater and foulwater drains.

[Jonathan Pearson]

Our house was built in 1907 and has a separate sewer system. For these sorts of systems built at the time, it was normal for the front (w.r.t. the road) guttering from your roof to go into the separate system, however I guess due to cost implications the rear guttering was still normally routed into the foul. Jon

[Andrew Gabriel]

It has almost nothing to do with the age of the house, but is related to the age and density of the area as a whole. In older dense urban areas, you are likely to have a single victorian sewer system designed for both surface and foul water. In less dense areas where there was space for separate surface and foul drainage, or areas with newer infrastructure, you'll find them separate. Two home counties residential areas I know which were layed out in 1875 and 1895 both have separate systems, whereas as area in London layed out in 1875 has a single system, and a row of 5 year old houses also have all their surface and foul combined into it. (With no space for soakaways and no other infrastrure provided, there isn't much choice.)

To the OP: you will have to ask your sewage company if they will allow rainwater drainage into the sewer system. A friend did this recently for an extension where it would have been difficult to route the guttering to a soakaway (extension was on top of old soakaway), and much to my surprise, the sewage company were fine with this. They needed to know the horizontal surface area which would drain into the sewer, in order to ensure it had adequate capacity without risk of the sewer flooding in a downpour.

[Lawrence Zarb]

Thanks for that