Soakways

kapszone

Hi All,

We have recently got our garden done, with patio and new turf however with no drainage so far. Just few weeks back we have our garden flooded with water and the water was standing, took overnight to be soaked which led us to think about having soe sort of drains so that the water doesnt hold up on the turf.

We are thinking about to get some standalone single pipe soakaways install at various places in the garden, would you advise is this is something going to help at all. We are looking to create something similar to this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rainwater-Drainage-soakaway-diameter-100-rain/dp/B015WJI8AW/ref=sr_1_8?keywords=soakaway&qid=1572955448&sr=8-8

The other thing is, if we go for the above should the top end of the pipe be covered with kept open with some sort of grating so water could go in. Has anyone got these and have been successful ? The only reason we dont want to go for crates system is due to the fact we will need to dig alot of garden for it.


Thanks
Aaron

wild edges

Step one is to find out if the lower levels of your soil drain well or not. If they don't then those pipe drains will do very little apart from fill up with water. You'd need to dig some test pits to find a nice gravelly or stoney layer and then test how fast the water percolates out of the base of the hole.

Actually step one should be to find out where the water is coming from in the first place and make sure there aren't easier steps to prevent it pooling in your garden. Check to see all your roof drains are flowing well and the same for neighbouring properites too. Do you know where the water off your roof goes at the moment?

Topbird

I think in your previous thread you mentioned being on clay soil. Soakaways are generally less efficient on clay soils and whether something like you've found would work would probably depend on a number of factors such as how bad the flooding is (depth / frequency), how much rainfall you get, how waterlogged the soil normally is, the area involved etc etc

We have soakaways which work well - and we're on heavy clay. However, we're also live in the driest part of the UK with a low water table and we have the deep set crate system.

kapszone

wild edges said:

Step one is to find out if the lower levels of your soil drain well or not. If they don't then those pipe drains will do very little apart from fill up with water. You'd need to dig some test pits to find a nice gravelly or stoney layer and then test how fast the water percolates out of the base of the hole.

Actually step one should be to find out where the water is coming from in the first place and make sure there aren't easier steps to prevent it pooling in your garden. Check to see all your roof drains are flowing well and the same for neighbouring properites too. Do you know where the water off your roof goes at the moment?

Hi, Thanks for your response. I can see the roof drains pipe is connected to the drains in the ground. I will have to see if that's connected to something big or not (not sure if I am making sense). 
We actually had a flood like situation just few weeks back where our and neighbor's garden had a stand still water of roughly 15cm. It was soaked in garden same night though, we checked with our neighbor's who suggested this never happened in past. So to avoid similar situation we thought it would be better to have this DIY soakaway.  We planned to dig roughly a meter or meter and half in the ground, I can do the test by only doing one and see if that works. 

kapszone

Topbird said:

I think in your previous thread you mentioned being on clay soil. Soakaways are generally less efficient on clay soils and whether something like you've found would work would probably depend on a number of factors such as how bad the flooding is (depth / frequency), how much rainfall you get, how waterlogged the soil normally is, the area involved etc etc

We have soakaways which work well - and we're on heavy clay. However, we're also live in the driest part of the UK with a low water table and we have the deep set crate system.

Thanks for your response @Topbird
We are based in London in harrow, we dont get that much rain except the one saw few weeks back where our garden had around 15cm water standing. We moved in this property 4 years ago and never saw that and similarly neighbor's suggested this happened once 20 year back so I take that it is rare. 

We are now too late for crate system as we just got the new turf laid down as you saw I  the other post. Our bad that we didn't do much of homework before getting contractors in, hence we thought to have these standalone soakaway laid on gravel surroundings.