hi team,
my house is below street level and that means im underneath the storm water run off for my street

what options do i have for getting rid of rain from all my down pipes?

pretty much water tanks is it right?

im wondering if its worth talking to the council to see what other options i have

What happens when the tanks are full, you need to build a trench and eventually a sewer - would be great if the council could sort that out, eh.

find a neighbours yard that's lower than yours
problem solved

also +1 for top of a hill house

You will need to plumb the water tanks into the house if you have any hope in emptying them out before the next rain. ie: dunny's and washing machine at a minimum.

We have a 4,500 tank that takes about 60% of our roof and it is constantly full, so when it rains it just over flows onto the ground (we have storm water drain issues). This tank isn't conected to anything but a hose though.

I'd speak to a plumber... Surely there are things you can do - a lot of new houses are built below street level.

Is there no existing storm water drain at your house?

wait what?

your house should already be connected into some form of roofwater drainage.. i'm guessing you're thinking about where you're going to drain the new roof you're building over your deck?

as your block slopes away from the road, there should be a pit or a house connection in the back corner of your yard, hopefully it's a pit so you should be able to find the manhole lid.

if you want davey i could jump on e-bimap (has all sewer, drainage and water info for bcc limits) and take a look for you, i'd need your address though

thermite is wrong, you do not drain your roofwater into sewerage that is illegal

legend pave;

pm away!

I didn't suggest anything of the sort. I'm saying he'd have to use pipes to take the water somewhere else. It's a practical idea that goes back to roman times, you should look it up.

last edited by thermite at 09:23:09 22/Jul/09

You can still do it.. just means you're going to have water all the time in your stormwater pipes. (be charged all the time)

Depends on a couple of things..

Your kerb, is it going to be higher or lower than your lowest point? (ie water tank over flow) Gravity can push the water as it fills up, because your downpipes are higher than your kerb, your water tank overflow hopefully is higher aswell.. let me find a diagram..

http://www.stormwater.net.au/images/Basix.4.gif

similiar setup on the right hand side with the downpipe and the tank. but yours will be watertank overflow and kerb.

see how you go, now back to doing this drain :P

We have the same problem Spook (zomg, we could be twins)

Have yet to find a solution, so we just get a flooded back yard every time it rains :(

We have only just got the rest of the downpipes out of the sewerage. The owners before us were dodgy f***ers. Now we will have more water flooding our yard. Yay!

Yeah, our house is on top of the local hill too Mr Hardware.

It's amazing how much you don't understand about your house when buying. There's a lot of luck involved.

I would be speaking to the council.

have thermite carry the water up to the street in buckets
I don't think I need to list the positives for this one

Council have no records for storm water. So unless your plumber can trace them back to current ones you are out of luck I have been told.

I have been referred to our certifier.

i have an idiot neighbour that thought that taking off the top 6" of his soil of his entire yard & replace it with an inch of crusher-dust would be an excellent idea. i don't know why he thought it would be a good idea but he definitely told me that it was a good idea. i said i couldn't see the advantage. then it rained (heaps) n all his crusher-dust got washed away in the storm water drain & all the excess run off from my yard took the easy path & went into his yard.

he then approached me saying that i needed to take the top 6" off my yard because our yards weren't level & water from my yard was running off into his. i don't talk to him anymore.

yeah it's pretty dodgey kat, but they do have some roofwater drainage on there mainly newer areas though.

e-bimap is pretty hit and miss as far as roofwater drainage is concerned, just depends if it's been entered into the system which relies of them still having the plans from yonks ago

unfortunately i can't find much on there davey, apart from your block really sucking hard if it hasn't got proper roofwater drainage

if i were you i'd be asking your nextdoor neighbours if you can have a look at what theirs does and where it goes

the only other thing i can suggest is going to BCC and asking for as constructed plans for the whole development your block is in, you'll need to pay for them and they won't make much sense to you but a plumber should be able to see what the go is, if you even have any drainage at all.

last edited by paveway at 09:56:21 22/Jul/09

as constructed plans will only show for sewerage..

ok ta dude, will try that then;

nah there should be as con plans for roofwater drainage aswell, if it's built.

i know we do them these days, but it's really looking like he hasn't got anything built

all council will tell you is to discharge it towards the neighbours place... unfortunately council don't give a s*** about anything unless it's a problem on their land ie. anything in the footpaths/road reserve area

so i'd almost just be connecting all your downpipes up like a normal house, just under the ground and bring it to daylight down towards the back corner of your block and simply discharging it towards the poor pricks block behind you and let him deal with it. if you want to be nice put some rocks and stuff around the outlet so it slows down the discharge

last edited by paveway at 10:16:43 22/Jul/09

do your roof downpipes go into stormwater at the moment?

or bury a 25,000L tank and fill that bad boy up + wash your car every weekend

do your roof downpipes go into stormwater at the moment?

nope:

none of my downpipes have ever gone into storm water

as mentioned above, it wasnt something we realy checked when we bought the place;

no one has really mentioned anything, im just in the process of doing up the place and the yard, and dont really want soggy patches at all 4 corners of the house

yeah no one mentioned it because it's f***ing dodgey

but your place looks like it was built 'back in the day' so they could get away with that kind of s***

also loving the big double garage jealous+

thermite is wrong, you do not drain your roofwater into sewerage that is illegal

My father worked in the Council.
Its a secret council-workers deal that a lot of them do it.
Forget the FreeMasons.
Brisbane City Council workers are the true Secret Society.

oh yeah no doubt people do it, but you get owned if you get found out

Yeah I don't believe you faceman
where my parents live, across the road is a park where the sewer runs. every 4 years or so for my life the sewerage guys would come and go through the sewer because too much water had been getting into the sewer, which apparently was a bad thing, and they monitored it and proclaimed that it was cracks in the pipe. they know how much water vs s*** ratio there should be, and know when it's out of whack.
ps i've never seen so many cockroaches in my life.

also loving the big double garage jealous+

yeah big double garage ftw (i can even make mine a triple if i do two in series)

last edited by Mr Hardware at 13:33:04 22/Jul/09

ok, council says our street doesnt have any stormwater access

so i guess we'll just have to tank it and manage the tanks which is a bit of a bummer

sewers are designed to take a certain flow ie. they predict how many houses in total will eventually be connecting into a line and it's designed accordingly so it's never flowing above 70% capacity in peak period which includes ground water infiltration etc

so then you get wankers connecting roofwater into it and during a storm it's running at max capacity or more and s*** goes pear shaped

so i guess we'll just have to tank it and manage the tanks which is a bit of a bummer

That sucks, but you're saving the environment so you can pat yourself on the back and drive around in a big old cloud of smug.

If you connect up your washing machine and s***ters you should manage it ok.

We need to do that at home but the prospect of future renovations would mean what we do now would just get pulled out, so a bit of a waste of money.

discharge it next door imo

that's your motto for life isn't it paveway

depends what i am discharging

;)

If you end up trying to tank it I'd keep in the back of my mind that Storm weather and rain can be very violent in this corner of the world and that no matter how much you try and plan for a massive amount of water your shiz could potentially overflow if you get unexpected amounts. We just had a pretty wild year with respect to rainfall, after all.

Don't put anything you want to keep in the way of the water if your system for dealing with it potentially overflowed, is what I'm getting at.

roger that

altering water-courses is a sure fire way to incur the wrath of neighbourly folk.. especially if some of their s*** gets washed away/damaged

only in queensland

the water is going to go to the lowest point anyway, so there isn't that bigger deal if you simply help it on it's way so the rest of your yard doesn't have to get soggy in the process of it getting that point

as long as you put some rocks in front and make sure it's grassed so that the water doesn't just shoot straight into their yard and returns to a sheet flow they probably won't be any the wiser.

hi team, my house is below street level and that means I'm underneath the storm water run off for my street

I'm in the same boat

You can dig a big hole in the back yard and fill it with drainage stone. This will only do so much. I think it still need some sort of overflow as well but I'm not sure how this is implemented.

I have what they call an "ease" in the property behind me which basically catches all the stormwater in the area and f***s it off. I should be somehow able to use this I'd reckon. If I got friendly with the neighbours behind me I'd put a 1000L tank in the ground for a pit and run a high-flow submersible pump with piping along the back neighbours fence to dump water in the ease from a high point because teh ease fills up to ground level real easy.

After the first rains when I moved into my house I went on a search for my stormwater access. I thought the only downpipe that was in the ground was the key to ending my stormwater issues. I engaged in digging around the pipe only to find the end of the downpipe was buried 100mm under the ground. So when it rained the downpipe filled up and water overflowed from the gutters. Any dumpage of water around your house is bad for your movement in your footings especially if your house is on stumps!

Your best bet is water tanks with the overflow to you gardens and or to a drainage pit down the back.

How do your toilets work if you are below the pipes in the street? Do you need some special pump system or are the sewerage lines much deeper in the ground?

Syco, toilets go to sewerage. Downpipes go to storm water.

This thread is about storm water, not sewerage

Kat, read my post again.

Edit:

Assuming your rooftop is below street level so you can't have the storm water feeding to the guttering on the road that would make the floor of your house atleast 3M below street level, council regulations require sewerage to be further below the soil level of your house. I didn't think the sewerage in the street was buried many meters below the road.

last edited by Syco at 12:10:06 23/Jul/09

No drainage pipes connected from my roof gutters either.
Houses built back in the ~70's didn't legally require it be routed to stormwater drainage.
That's what B.C.C. has told me, I'm not sure if you get your roof re-tiled etc. it means you have to then connect it up however.
Really, I'd just trench it yourself till ~1m to the gutter and then have someone drill through the concrete to have it then routed.
Or just re-surface it and dump it on your property such that it flows straight into the gutter anyway.

I engaged in digging around the pipe only to find the end of the downpipe was buried 100mm under the ground. So when it rained the downpipe filled up and water overflowed from the gutters.

haha that is really bad luck

How do your toilets work if you are below the pipes in the street? Do you need some special pump system or are the sewerage lines much deeper in the ground?

his lot is sewered perfectly fine from the low point in the back corner runs into the lot next door which runs down through the lots behind him

Syco, I don't actually get what you are saying (I will just put that out there). In most cases if you are below the street level you are on a sloping block. Therefore your sewerage would run toward the back of your yard and join up with the council sewerage usually on the boundaries of the houses or under one of the neighbours houses (even yours).

Storm water usually runs to the street. Sewerage runs to the backyard, between the streets.

At least that is my knowledge of most plans I have seen

edut: paveway said it better. my post is way too confusing

last edited by Kat at 12:16:14 23/Jul/09

Kat's plan holds for our house. Sewage at back fence running between properties. I have no idea where storm water goes though. My yard slopes front to back and the downpipes just go straight into the ground. I always assumed some sort of Magic Faraway Tree solution to storm water. I'm willing to put it out there that I could be wrong.

you would be connected into a roofwater drainage line running through the back of your lot pinky, possibly drains out ot the kerb in a street downhill or out to a stormwater/gully pit in the road.

this is what spook *should* have, but it sounds like it was all too much trouble back in the 70's or whenever his house was built

there is no rule regarding where your lot sewers to, just work works

in bcc you can't build a sewerage line across the front of a lot, has to be in the footpath but lines can run down the side and along the back

last edited by paveway at 12:26:06 23/Jul/09

Syco, I don't actually get what you are saying

Wow, really? Looks like even Paveway did heh.

sewered perfectly fine from the low point in the back corner runs into the lot next door which runs down through the lots behind him

Thanks, didn't think of that.

Don't put anything you want to keep in the way of the water if your system for dealing with it potentially overflowed, is what I'm getting at.

This is great advice, my dad put in a 27,000L water tank in and that last weekend of rain we copped filled it.... Fortunatly he has a lot of land so the run off wasnt a huge issue.

This is great advice, my dad put in a 27,000L water tank

what's the diameter of that sucker?