I am having some drainage issues at home with my waste water, Washing machine / sink / upstairs bath and rainwater from the front of the house all run into a waste water sewer which is separate to my foul waste sewer (which is fine).

The upshot of my problem is that I think the waste water pipe or sewer may have collapsed or is damaged badly about 20-30 feet from my inspection chamber.

Before you all jump up and say its my local water authorities problem, I think this time they may be right and its my problem as having checked my sewerage search results that were done prior to me buying the house it says I have a ‘private’ drain and a ‘private’ sewer before we enter the main sewer.

It may be cheaper for me to block this waste water outlet off and try to route the sink waste etc into my main foul sewer which is running fine, as I feel that a blockage/breakage under the road on my ‘private’ drain or sewer would mount up to a fair few quid to have the road closed off and dug up then the pipe repaired and the road re-laid.

Only thing is that it is not possible to route pipes from the waste water sources to my foul sewer using gravity to move the water due to the layout of the house.

Would it be possible for me to have an underground ‘holding’ tank big enough to hold say a bath full of water, waste water from the washing machine ,a sink full of water and have space for a few gallons of rain water to boot. With an internal submersible pump that will run when it gets to a certain level and will pump the contents of the holding tank into my foul waste sewer?

Any advice or info greatly received!

Probably worth getting the pipe inspected/jetted first.

I get stuff that sounds like this with some of the properties I manage. It is usually roots and or build up of sludge etc. and it needs doing every 2 or 3 years.

HTH

Cheers

Mark

It has been jetted (by 3 seperate companies!), rodded and it seeps away very slowly. It cant be inspected by camera untill its empty and i suspect that it will take a long time for it to become empty!

Its the inconvenience of it thats pi$$ing me off now as i cant have a bath or use the upstairs sink or put the wahing machine on at all.

Put a barrel outside so that the bath emptys into it. The barrel has a small diameter tube at the base to slowly pour into the drain at a rate it can handle.

I think my options will be fix it or avoid it!

It seeps away at about 2 litres a night!

2 ltrs a night

pity you don't have a digger

at that rate you can have a bath once a month!!!

Wasn’t it queen Victoria who said she had a bath one a month whether she needed it or not



[Edited on 12/4/07 by Mr Whippy]

I've no experience in this but 2l a night sounds very much like sepage into the earth if its been jetted etc.

Couldn't you pump it out into the other sewer to allow the camera to go down as a one off?

you may have separate foul and rain (storm)water systems, however if you do bath, washing machine ect should not go to storm drainage anyway thay should go to foul system. as its only the storm thats a problem does it go to main pipe system or to local soakaway, if its a local soakaway could be due to a high water table thats not letting it drain away or blocked finger drains. what happens with the down pipe water whan it rains, does that just overflow from the gutters?

If you route all your bath, sink etc wastes into a Saniflo unit this will pump all the waste away into your foul water sewer (where I would have thought it should be going anyway). They are about £500 new but you could probably pick one up much more cheaply on ebay. If the problem is then just storm water that could be delayed using the water butt method mentioned above or ignored!