storms and floods

[Nemesis]

Oh well - no doubt trying to be helpful! As they do!

Sympathy - but you have to chuckle!

 

[chuckey]

Leak + 136 Hrs, man has come around to mark the leak. Do you know I could tell where it was by the water p*****g out of the road. Interesting spray though, marked the tarmac through the water film. More bubbles in the tarmac. I suppose it will be Monday now before anything happens.
Frank

 

[Nemesis]

And soon they will tell you there is a water shortage...

Monday? That's Monday of which month?

 

[charlie-ia]

how are you now chuckey?
I hope things are much improved for everyone?
has anyone managed to find a reasonable map of the places affected? the environment agency map i could find doesnt seem much use. it says we're under water, and its barely rained here compared to most.

 

[chuckey]

The leak is fixed, two chaps came on Wednesday morning (8 days after the telephone call ) and put a large rubber lined clamp around the pipe. The hole was about 1/2" diameter in a 4" diameter pipe. Bit of a wet job tightening the clamp up.
Frank

 

[DaveBrigg]

I asked for advice about French drains on the forum a while ago. The ones at the back of the house worked brilliantly, while those at the front were still at the trench stage and filled up, but could be baled with a small bucket. The soakaways are two large plastic bins, sat in a hole with at least a foot of gravel all round, dug in sand. They filled up so quickly that it was a full time job emptying them, with a handy 20 litre tub that had once contained lime mortar. My wife started mid-afternoon, and I took over when I got home from work. In the end I disconnected and rearranged the drainpipes, which luckily reached to the roadside verge the other side of the wall.
A big thank-you to Gervase and Penners for the tips, without which the water would have probably come under the front door.

 

[Nemesis]

I assume the bins have holes in them...

 

[Penners]

Dave - two plastic bins (even with holes in) don't sound like very much soakaway capacity. Depending on the permeability of your soil, I reckon you should probably be aiming for at least 1m3, filled with very coarse shingle.

 

[DaveBrigg]

Yes, the bins have holes :lol: They hold 70 litres each, which after a quick google seems to equate to 0.07 cubic metres. Taking into account the surrounding 20 mm gravel, do I really need to increase this by a factor of 10? It would cause problems because the front garden is not large, and the house foundations are only a foot at the deepest. On the other side is a low wall and then a road. I could go deeper, but I assume this would then bring in problems with reaching the water table, and shoring up the hole. With hindsight, 70 litres is probably not enough capacity, even with good drainage in the surrounding soil; perhaps I should clear a bit more soil and pop down the garden centre for some goldfish?
The option I am considering is fitting an 'overflow' running through a weep hole in the outside wall and into the road, but this may not be as easy as it sounds because the ground levels have risen since the house was built.
The 'front garden' can be seen here, in drier conditions. http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/search/details.aspx?pid=1&id=196504

 

[Penners]

I can only say that I was told to construct a 1 m3 soakaway for the surface water from garage - total roof area a little over 30 m2.

I don't know whether you can extrapolate anything from that.

 

[DaveBrigg]

I've extrapolated that I should have paid more attention in maths lessons. Presumably if I measure the floor area of the front half of the house and find the highest likely rainfall I could then work out how many litres of the wet stuff will be pouring down my downpipe, and the volume required of the soakaway. Sounds like a project for a rainy day.

 

[Penners]

That will be a guide, but not quite right. Assuming that your roof is pitched, and that the water you're talking about all comes off the front pitch of the roof, then you'll need to apply pi, in order to work out the area of that part of the roof (assuming you can't just measure it with your tape up the pitch).

Take a horizontal measurement from the eaves edge of the roof across to a line dropped vertically down from the ridge (probably half the width of the gable wall, unless your roof is asymmetric). Square this.

Take the vertical measurement of the imaginary line that you dropped down from the ridge to your horizontal line above. Square this.

Add the above two results together and take the square root of the total. Multiply this by the width of the roof (gable to gable). The result is the area of the front pitch.

If that doesn't make sense, tell me and I'll try to post a diagram.