In message ,
(Frank Fisher) wrote:

How do I go about doing this? I'm putting a new bathroom in, and the
soil pipe is too far from the old one to redirect - I know there is a
sewer running just below the garden (it's on the council charts) and
my guttering drain already flows to this. Can I route my guttering
elsewhere, hook into that drain (with some kind of seal around it) and
forget the issue, or do I need to dig down to the sewer and install
some kind of conenction there? The house/sewers are old - early
victorian. Or, is there a fixed charge for water companies to carry
out this work for me?

We had a similar problem - a bathroom (sans loo) at the front of the
house (1930s), discharging (sink & bath) into a hopper and thence into
the same drain as the guttering. The only toilet was at the back of the
house connecting directly (about 4ft of pipe outside the house) into the
main 6" sewer running along the rears of the properties.

We moved the bathroom around to the side of the house, and added a
toilet. We therefore needed a 4" connection to the sewer. Both our
builders and two different BCOs were adamant that under no circumstances
were we to go anywhere near the main sewer; "ooh no, that's Welsh Water
property and they want to do all the work themselves - it'll cost a
fortune." (aside, it did occur to me that it was their property on our
land and as we have no record of a wayleave we might be cynically able
to counter-charge them for access ;-)

There was no existing manhole on the property and the main sewer had at
least a couple of dozen houses "up stream".

Our poor builders had to break into the 4ft of 4" from the existing
downstairs loo and insert a "mini manhole" in that extremely tight
space. Both BCOs were happy :-)

There was a *lot* of hand digging involved - filled a mini-skip with
spoil, and used an awful lot of hardcore and cement to re-do everything
afterwards. Cost us the thick end of a grand.

Hwyl!

M.

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Martin Angove: http://www.tridwr.demon.co.uk/
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