Four years ago, we dug most of the drainage to the house. A part of that didn’t get finished. At the time, we were still slating the roof, and we had some scaffolding erected in front of the kitchen window. The scaffold is now gone, but there is no gutter, due to the fact that we have no-where to drain the water.
This scaffolding meant we could not dig in the final drain, and therefore, we have had rain water falling on the windowsill, which has rotted away the kitchen window. Today, it’s time to finish that drain….
The rotting window has not been a great concern, as it’s old single glazing, which needs replacing with more efficient double glazing, but we still need to stop the water falling on it.
Digging Time.
Bring out the tractor.
I’ve dug hundreds of meters of drainage with this tractor. The ground is old river bed, made up entirely of round granite stones. Very hard to dig, especially for such a lightweight digger that I have on the tractor.
Drainage is relatively easy, and yet, if you get it wrong, it causes huge problems. You can end up with standing water and possible undermining of foundations. At the end of the day, we just need to make sure it runs downhill.
We look for a fall of about 1 in 40. This pipe will be way in excess of that, simply due to the location it is running from. There is a lot of large stone next to the house, which is supporting our foundation stones. Therefore we cant move it, and the drain needs to run from a very shallow start, and meet up with an existing section of drain.
Setting The Pipe In Place.
Once the drain is in place, we back-fill under and around the pipe with sharp sand. This achieves two things. Firstly, there are no sharp stones pressing on the pipe that will deform of puncture it once it gets loaded.
Secondly, it allows us to water in the sand. This settles very solidly around the pipe, and keeps it in the exact fall that we originally set it to.
Back-Fill and Finish.
Once the sand is tightly packed, then all of the fill that was removed, can be pushed back over the top. With a bit of leveling, and the turf re-laid on top, it’s like we were never there 😁
After a morning of digging drainage, we now have somewhere to run a new down-pipe to.
