Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 42 total)
  • So, today under our patio I found out that…
  • woffle
    Free Member

    ..we have a massive brick cistern/watertank.

    Having some work done on the house and chatting to the plumber about capping a drain grate on the patio (going to build a brick step over it), he mentions that it doesn’t go to the septic tank, rather to the “water-tank thingy”. Cue confused looks from me. Complete news to us – we just thought the manhole cover down from the grate was over a junction for the drainage. No, he lifts it up and it turns out that there’s a huge brick-lined, water filled hole under our patio…

    Our house dates from late 1890s and started as a small, semi-detached workers cottage built on what I think was the old kitchen garden of the large house next door. Since been extended a few times. The edge of the tank lies about 4 foot from the back wall of the latest extension. Sticking a (very long) stick into it, I reckon it’s about 3 metres deep, about 2.5-3 metres square, brick lined with a vaulted ceiling. It’s got just over 2.5 metres of rainwater in it – the builder reckons the rainwater drainpipes all run into it.

    So – questions for the STW mind-hive;

    1. How to best work out what’s really going on down there? Go-pro with a light to take video? (There’s no way I’m getting in there!). Part of me doesn’t want to see what’s down there but…

    2. Any clues as to what it might have been built for? There’s no functional reason for it to be there other than to store water. But why go to the trouble and expense? It would have 50% of the square footprint of the original house…

    3. What do with the our newly discovered resource? A quick top-of-the-head calculation says I’ve got approx 18,000 litres of water down there at the moment…

    I’ve got a small koi pond and it’d be ace to use fresh rainwater as part of cleaning / cycling the water. A pump and irrigation system for the garden? Swimming pool? 🙂 My wife reckons we leave it – come the zombie apocolypse that way we’ll be ok for water…

    mrmonkfinger
    Free Member

    You can fit an awful lot of bodies into a 3 metre cube.

    Contact your local mafia and rent out the storage space.

    woffle
    Free Member

    down in Sussex, any local bodies can be fed to the pigs or dumped in the woods. Not much call for that I’m afraid…

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    mrmonkfinger
    Free Member

    Genuine reason for building would likely be to feed the garden during drought, as in ye olden tymes a big house with servants would probably have relied on the garden produce for food.

    Oh, and livestock.

    funkmasterp
    Full Member

    Drain it and build one of those nuclear survival shelter things or batcave style bike storage

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    I believe we have one also but we live in what was once a dairy farm and the surface drains from the barns and shippon all run into the tank.

    I have absolutely no idea where it goes from there and I’ve never actually looked into it as it’s covered by railway sleepers at the back if the outbuildings.
    But we’ve only been here 17 years!

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Drain it, waterproof it, secure bike storage / man cave?

    woffle
    Free Member

    ..we’ve been in the house for about 6 years. The people before us were here for about 40 odd years and they would have built the patio over the tank at some point. I’m assuming there are overflows etc in there as it’s never flooded and looking at what construction I can see, it’s got to be contemporary to, or pre-date the original cottages. They’re just simple workers houses and aside from anecdotal evidence that the neighbouring big house had it’s kitchen gardens near our plot with two small semi-detached houses on it.

    It’s hard to work out why anyone would spend the money and effort on putting it in. There’s no agricultural reason for it and the big house has a series of ponds that fill with rainwater as a reservoir too so they’re not strapped for water…

    joshvegas
    Free Member

    Ask macruisken what he did with his hole in the ground. Ie. Nothing 😆.

    That reminds me though… What was the outcome of that mystery cover/gate to the underworld thread that i can’t find.

    woffle
    Free Member

    Leaving aside the why (I think rain/grey-water storage is a great idea), I just can’t get my head around why you’d do it and then just leave it unremarked on, or with no means of actually making any use of it. And now working out

    We had thought about digging the whole patio up. That could have been amusing! Me and the kango disappearing into the watery depths…

    If I’d have known it was there I might not have bothered digging out the bloody pond.

    bikebouy
    Free Member

    we have a massive brick cistern/watertank.

    Victorian Dungeon?

    esselgruntfuttock
    Free Member

    We had a new patio laid a few years ago & there was/is a manhole cover under a big planter. We didn’t realise there was a cover but it revealed a big round concrete lined hole with small holes around it. Even the bloke who was doing the work didn’t know what was/is but we decided it could be a ground water soak away.

    slackalice
    Free Member

    You mentioned something about a sceptic tank? So presumably you’re not connected to mains drainage? Or perhaps if you are now, the house might not have been when it was built.

    In which case, the black and grey (foul) water and waste would have drained into a brick lined tank that contained the solids and a secondary tank would have contained the overflow liquid. This second tank would then have an overflow soak away drain itself through a pipe and into the ground.

    This system works very well and efficiently so long as the soak away drain stays open, the solids break down in the first tank and may well only require taking out and emptying every 5 to 10 years depending upon size of tank, number of properties connected etc.

    It sounds like you’ve discovered one of the tanks, possibly the original solid tank as it’s nearest the house?

    woffle
    Free Member

    ^^ kind of makes sense but we share a septic tank – and actually our drainage, and that the adjoining pair of identical cottages, go into the same shared tank that’s down the back of the gardens. AFIAK this has always been the case – there’s certainly no foul smell from the tank. I guess I need to get a camera down there to work out what’s what…

    ajaj
    Free Member

    If your water bill includes rainwater drainage then claim your refund.

    peterno51
    Full Member

    Could it have been an ice store? Although I think they are usually round and more egg shaped.

    tillydog
    Free Member

    we live in what was once a dairy farm and the surface drains from the barns and shippon all run into the tank.

    I have absolutely no idea where it goes from there and I’ve never actually looked into it as it’s covered by railway sleepers at the back if the outbuildings.

    That sounds like a settling pit (to stop cow $hit washing into surface water). Beware of noxious gases if you decide to investigate.

    No idea what the OP’s pit is, but an underground water tank for the ‘Big House’ sounds like a good call.

    mariner
    Free Member

    Fit a tank with submersible pump feeding a tap in there and drain the roof gutters into it.
    I have a 3000 liter tank under my garden which stays very green through long hot summers.
    You will need an overflow.

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    Ask macruisken what he did with his hole in the ground. Ie. Nothing 😆.

    nothing…. yet.

    theres a few more cubic meters in mine though – roughly 300 more 🙂

    hamishthecat
    Full Member

    Before piped water lots of properties had cisterns for capturing rain water – particularly where there wasn’t access to a well for whatever reason. Was probably for normal use but could have been specifically for the garden as suggested earlier.

    Cistern

    Edit – some bigger ones here

    Twodogs
    Full Member

    I’ve got a small koi pond and it’d be ace to use fresh rainwater as part of cleaning / cycling the water.

    That’s exactly what my father did with the same thing in our house

    keithb
    Full Member

    We’ve got something similar, though not as deep.

    Ours is a sowkaway.

    First thing is get your water company to stop charging you for surface water charges.

    Second, establish if it’s s sowkaway or genuine storage. What’s your underlying geology?  Clay soils?  Then probably storage.

    It would probably have had a hand pump originally with the water being used for cooking and washing.  Drinking water would be from a public cistern in the street potentially, so you wouldn’t want to lug buckets of water around just to wash clothes in.

    Drop a water butt pump in it, and use it for watering the garden. Or s 12v caravan pump, feed a header tank in the loft and feed your toilet cisterns with it.

    slowoldman
    Full Member

    You mentioned something about a sceptic tank?

    I was staying in a holiday cottage last week where a note in the bathroom said they had a sceptic tank. I assumed they didn’t really believe where the sewage was going.

    hamishthecat
    Full Member

    ^^ I see what you did there 😎

    duncancallum
    Full Member

    You need a light on a stick

    Possibly ohe of the fihets threads ever

    https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=210&t=543304&p=1

    linchpin
    Free Member

    I found one recently under our courtyard. It sounds just the same as mine, it’s a water storage cistern which would have had a pump in the top, usually close to the kitchen. Ours has several vents running out and filling chambers with sedement traps in. It’s huge, 10 ft deep and 8 ft wide. I can’t think what to do with it but I’m not going to fill it in as it would have taken so much work to make. Grey water recycling tank or rainwater harvesting is the number one possibility.

    jimdubleyou
    Full Member

    We found one of these when digging the footings for  our new extension.
    Sadly it was right on the line of the footings so the builders couldn’t do much other than fill it with dry mix concrete and rubble.

    We’ve kept the capstone in the garden though 🙂

    Our house is also in the former grounds of a grand country manor, so we assume it was a well/cistern to service the garden.

    woffle
    Free Member

    cheers folks – I think first steps will be to invest in a 2nd-hand gopro and light setup and work out exactly what’s down there.

    Followed shortly by speaking to the water company about whether there are any refunds due – that might pay for a pump setup – as tempting as it would be to empty it and create an underground man-cave, it seems daft not to use it for the reason I guess it was made and start using the water for irrigation.

    spooky_b329
    Full Member

    The expense of building it has been mentioned, but back in the days when labourers and their kids had to do a full days work for a loaf of bread it would be mainly material costs I guess? Not like modern times where many builders will earn as much as their ‘professional’ clients working in the City!

    woffle
    Free Member

    Re: expense – I guess, but it’s not far of being 50% the size of the original footprint of the cottage. That’s a fair chunk of additional material cost (and work).

    I’m going to ask the neighbours if they have anything similar on their plots. If not, it might point to it being something connected to the large house next door, rather than it being specific to the cottage itself…

    mrmonkfinger
    Free Member

    Could it have been an ice store?

    They’d need foot access to the floor of the chamber, I’d think. And only super grand houses would have had them.

    globalti
    Free Member

    It’s a disused septic tank. If there’s a layer of pale sludge on the bottom that’s the contents, which thanks to sepsis (bacterial action) have gone inert. The water comes from the surrounding ground. From the size of it, it sounds as if it may have been common to all the cottages.

    woffle
    Free Member

    re: septic tank – I’ll know more when I’ve managed to get a camera down there – the builder reckons that it’s only the gutters and rainwater run-off that flows into the (old) drains and hence into the tank, with the foul water going on a different system of equally old drains (to the different, shared septic tank that sits on our neighbours land, at the bottom of their garden). It’s on heavy sussex clay, not sure if that makes a difference as to the likelihood of the water sitting in currently being down to ingress from the surrounding ground.

    Are (old) septic tanks usually that close to the house? It would have been about 3m from the old back wall. The shared tank is a considerable distance from the cottages.

    It’s all a learning experience!

    MTB-Idle
    Free Member

    I’ve got a small koi pond and it’d be ace to use fresh rainwater as part of cleaning / cycling the water

    Koi prefer hard water. Pure rain water will be too acidic for them and stress them unless you buffer it with some (lots of) pond salt.

    andrewh
    Free Member

    I was going to say what SlackAlice said, it sounds very much like the one my parents have.
    Definitely Victorian? There’s was built in the early 50s when the inside toilet was put in. They still use it and it’s fine, been emptied once in 35 years IIRC. Yours may not still be in use if you have since had a septic tank or mains drains connected.

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    I think first steps will be to invest in a 2nd-hand gopro and light setup and work out exactly what’s down there.

    Old phone taped to a cheap selfie stick – tape that to a bit of 2×1 if you need more reach. I used a small rechargeable LED work light and taped that to the 2×1 too – helps to have a bit of distance between the light and the camera

    oikeith
    Full Member

    You need a light on a stick

    Possibly ohe of the fihets threads ever

    https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=210&t=543304&p=1

    Lost an hour to skimming this today, worst thing is it didnt even end, the guy just stopped and stopped updating it!

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    the guy just stopped and stopped updating it!

    if you look the bottom of the first post theres and update with a link to a blog where he documents everything

    woffle
    Free Member

    Old phone taped to a cheap selfie stick – tape that to a bit of 2×1 if you need more reach. I used a small rechargeable LED work light and taped that to the 2×1 too – helps to have a bit of distance between the light and the camera

    Need something waterproof to work out where the incoming drains are and to see how many bodies are laying at the bottom…

    CraigW
    Free Member

    You can buy a USB endoscope camera for less than £10. So attach that to a stick, and plug the cable into your phone/tablet. Most of them have a small light built into the camera.

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