week 7: rainwater tank goes in

A ‘blue moon’ opportunity whilst we have the, one and only, chance to ever get a digger into this part of the site, so we invest in, well, a blue water tank. This will connect the rainwater discharge from the rear roof slope and the rear extension roof. It is a 1500 litre tank, about the size of 8 standard water butts – not huge, but as big as we can get into the space without major civil works and it will serve only to water the garden. The tank is a shallow dig unit from RainWater Harvesting. The photo shows the tank part-connected – with just the overflow connected to the underground surface water drain.

wessex water approval…

After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, we have received approval from Wessex Water this week. This is a great relief, but I am a little confused. The manholes that we proposed (because we thought Wessex Water required them) will be too close to the foundations. We have been told to make direct connections into the sewer. This is fine for us – less work, less disruption, less visual impact, less cost. But, given the problems we had with the CCTV survey due to poor access, I am surprised that Wessex Water don’t at least want one manhole to improve their access.

So now we have revised Planning Approval, Building Regulations Plans Approval, Wessex Water Approval, we just need to sort the price out and we may be back on track.

sewers: bad news continues

Found them! Unfortunately they are much, much closer than we had hoped. I have been getting rather frustrated at Wessex Water saying that they have an ‘exclusion zone’ of 2 metres, but now we have found the pipes (show in green in the drawing), it is clear that the storm water drain is located in the vicinity of the foundation. So,irrespective of Wessex Water’s view and approvals, we would not be able to build on top like this in any case. Continue reading

our first major problem…

Sewers!!! The foul and storm water drains run at the back of the house, which we knew. The original record drawing showed the sewers further out in the garden.Wessex Water have written to us to say they are within 3 metres. Not only that their records show that they are deep (approx 2 metres). Their rules prohibit construction within 2 metres horizontally of their infrastructure if below 1.5 metres. Continue reading