Creating a man hole

[JasonF]

Hello all

I have no man hole to the drains, I have a water logged garden and water under the suspended wooden floor, which I pump out with a sump pump. I want to put in a French drain across the back garden and have it draining into a manhole. So any advice about digging down to the drainage pipe, cutting through them, creating a brick man hole or is there a plastic one on the market. Both my neighbours have man holes and they said your house has never had one. Thanks for any advice.

 

[stuart45]

Are you talking about connecting a French drain to the soil drainage pipe?

 

[freddiemercurystwin]

Make sure you keep it quiet as the Water Company as what you are planning is illegal without Building control approval and if any problems arise because of it the Water company will endeavour to pin it on you.

 

[theprinceofdarkness]

If there is water under your floating(literally) floor, it means that the water table is very high. To put all this water into the drains will mean that the local sewer works might have to deal with thousands of gallons of water when there is a down pour - this is why water companies are sniffy about this sort of thing.
It would be best to put in a ditch/land drain and drain the surface water into a proper stream/ditch.
Are there any silted up soakaways associated with the roof's drain pipes?
If you are sitting on clay soils, at the bottom of a dip, then there is not a lot you can do, other then make your sump pump automatic. French drains are meant to work by evaporation as well as the water flowing to some known point.
Frank

 

[JasonF]

Thanks for all your reply's, I was thinking about creating a man hole on the water drainage pipe not soil pipe, but having read your reply's, I think I will stick with the sump I have dug and the float pump which does keep the water down, but the ground is still damp under the floor. what I am going to do, is get the floor boards up, put a dpc under the floor joists creating a barrier and pushing polystyrene between the joists, hopefully this will help with problems I'm having with condensation.