Soakaway Nightmare, Clay Soil

Glad to hear you have it sorted. Tell me - has he given the impression that had you been less rural, would he have given up and instructed you to plumb it in in to the public sewer?

As a country boy - I know what I'd do in this case. Feed your surface water outlet to the high end of a new land drain pipe which feeds into the dyke at the edge of your property.
So yo have to run in (mole plough?) 150yds of land drain pipe.

Clay soil, constantly wet from a soakaway will become a quagmire and make the feild close to unusable for much of the year. #4 goes a long way to confirming my thoughts.
I think with the soakaway as specified you will end up having to land drain the field anyway and there will always be a soft spot over and around the soakaway hole.

Unfortunately I doubt the PTB understand that and will stop you from doing it.

Hi

If I had been less rural, it would have been a public sewer option (unfortunately the nearest is literally miles away)


wgt52, I hear what you are saying, the nearest watercourse if 150m away over my land and the farmers land, not so easy to do, but certainly doable.

The sand layer I found is very well draining. It drained 1500litres of water in fairly quick order, dropped an inch every 5 minutes until it was gone.

The soakaway design the engineer has come up with is 24m long, 0.6m wide, 1.5m deep with its top being 1m down.
I've estimated 36 tonnes of 40mm gravel and some geotextile membrane - circa 800-1000 of materials and I should have a working soakaway.

If you are doing a gravel soakaway you'll only get about 20%-30% void space. Have you considered using soakaway crates?
It would cost about the same but you'd have less to shift.

Those aqua cells (apparently) hold 95% water.

Ian H said:

Those aqua cells (apparently) hold 95% water.

Click to expand...

Yes, they are a lot of money for some milk crates. (£20 each+vat)