So we’ve just moved from a flat where I washed bikes in the yard with a proper drain to a house where I’m doing it on flagstones in the garden which promptly floods.

So:- I figure digging some kind of soakway is the right answer, but googling soakaway design leads me into a whole range of rules and regs for drainage that I really don’t want to get involved in.

If I lift a couple of slabs and dig a pit at the bottom of the garden, maybe 3′ deep; fill it up with bits of broken brick and some gravel, then stick a grill over the top, am I likely to come up against any major issues? It’ll be sited a bit over 5m from the nearest house (mine). I accept that it’ll fill up with the clart I wash off the bike over time, but anything else I need to consider?

What have you guys done in similar circumstances?

Thanks!

this was posted t’other day

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/today-i-have-built

You’ll be fine, we have something much along the same lines although it’s filled with slate and doesn’t have a grill on top.

A soakaway is to hold water until it can percolate into the soil. As such only the part above the water table has any effect. If you dig a hole, it will fill up with ground water to maybe 400-300 below the surface, depending on your geology.

Dig a hole and see how it fills up, of course this will be affected by time of year and recent rainfall, but you get the idea.

If your have a high water table a wide shallow soakaway is much more useful. The more gap you can incorporate into it, the better it will work. Professional jobs use specially made plastic frames and are mostly void.

Does that help, or am I just ranting?

APF