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Please help! Mystery structure in garden
Claymore1
Posts: 7
Hello everyone, first time posting but I've been coming here for tips and advice and what a great community. I'm hoping you may be able to help me with a slight mystery I have!
We moved about a year and a half ago and are just starting to get the garden sorted. It's on really heavy clay, and gets waterlogged in autumn and winter. I dug a hole about five foot deep to see if a soakaway might work, but within 24 hours it was completely filled with water.
I was emptying the water and was going to fill in the hole with hardcore to act as a sump when I came across a pipe and a drain cover right at the boundary of out property. I'd not seen either before as the drain was covered with a slab - as it is broken - and the pipe was disguised by foliage.
My question is - what type of drain could this be?! I tipped a bucket of water down the pipe and it went a very long way down. I'm wondering if it's for surface water, which would be great as I could presumably route a channel from a soakaway to it. I've googled and had no luck, other than finding out that if its for foul water I absolutely can't connect my soakaway to it.
Your suggestions would be most welcome, I'm very intrigued!!
We moved about a year and a half ago and are just starting to get the garden sorted. It's on really heavy clay, and gets waterlogged in autumn and winter. I dug a hole about five foot deep to see if a soakaway might work, but within 24 hours it was completely filled with water.
I was emptying the water and was going to fill in the hole with hardcore to act as a sump when I came across a pipe and a drain cover right at the boundary of out property. I'd not seen either before as the drain was covered with a slab - as it is broken - and the pipe was disguised by foliage.
My question is - what type of drain could this be?! I tipped a bucket of water down the pipe and it went a very long way down. I'm wondering if it's for surface water, which would be great as I could presumably route a channel from a soakaway to it. I've googled and had no luck, other than finding out that if its for foul water I absolutely can't connect my soakaway to it.
Your suggestions would be most welcome, I'm very intrigued!!
0
Posts
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
@raisingirl what's a radon sump?
@Mrs-B3-Southampton,-Hants in large parts of the country, there are high levels of radon gas in the ground. It's naturally occurring and quite radioactive. In more modern homes, you have to have a pit under the floor of the house, with a pipe and a vent to the outside, with a radon barrier under the floor slab. The idea is the gas collects in the pit (sump) and is vented away, rather than seeping in to the house. Old houses were so draughty it didn't much matter - especially if you had chimneys and open fires. But now we build better, the gas can build up indoors and there's some correlation between high radon areas and certain cancers, including leukaemia
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”