What is a drainage field?
Question:According to UK Building reg's you do not need a soak away if the land you are building on has been a drainage field in the past. On diiging into the land we have found oold drainage pipes from when the land as a farm, we are hoping this is what the defination is? Many thanks.
Answers:
A septic tank holds solid sewage during decomposition and allows the liquid waste to drain away into the ground by a network of perforated pipes surrounded with gravel, then covered in dirt.
The land that it drains into is called a drainage field. Obviously, you would not want to build on top of it or dig through it for a long time after the septic system has been removed.
edit: By a "long time" i mean a couple of years, not decades.
A drainage field is where the sewer water overflow from the septic tank runs. It is usually piped into long rows with perforated piping and the pipe is surrounded by a lot of gravel to allow proper drainage. The amount of gravel will depend upon how porous the soil is .. more porous requires less gravel.The style and implementation are differnt in differnt regions so it sounds like you have one if the pipes are perforated but a local inspector of a person who pumps out the tanks cwould be the better person to really see it and verify.
a drainage field is a field that has been prepared for the drainage of rain water so the area does not get swamped or water logged. It has nothing whatsoever to do with grey or sewage water as stated in the previous replies. Any sewage or grey water will have to be either
a) biologically broken down, by reed bed (the old type 2 chamber brick septic tank is now only classed as a holding tank, by building regs)
b)stored and later removed by sewage collection company or c) drained away through mains pipe to the local sewage treatment works
I was one time called in to try and solve a problem of water standing below the wooden ground floor in this house. I decided to dig a big soakaway and lay pipes from the house to it. Down about six feet I came across a strange clay pipe shaped like an inverted U. So I broke into it and piped the water there, problem solved, no more water in my clients house, the pipe remains a mystery but there are a lot of Roman workings in my area, Maybe Claudius helped me out??
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