I’m having an new garage/utilityroom/WC being built at the moment. The builders are having trouble finding our waste pipe, which I told them was around the back of the house somewhere, as all the neighbours are the same (why we cant have downstairs toilet easily in our front porch area).
We have no manhole cover in the garden. Only one near front road which builder thinks is a storm cover.
Southern Water only have plans for main sewers in the front road. Building Control only have SW plans, contractor who do work for SW only have SW plans also. SW want to charge me £50 for a bit of A3 with possibly useless plans of main sewer+ I dont want to pay £50 for a print out!!
The contractor said I would need a £300 survey done. Is this the case? At the moment, the builder is trying to work it out from neighbours manhole *snigger*.

any ideas STW’ers?

Unless you live in a pretty newly built house there is probably no records of ANY of the private drainage.

You can trace it, using dye, from the neighbours MH or from your yard gully where your sink discharges into. Your foul pipes might just branch on to the main run along the back of the houses or could enter into a MH in the neighbours land.

I’m assuming you want to divert the pipes around the new build? If this is the case DO NOT contact the water company as from last October new regulations came in that mean any private sewer taking more than one property becomes a water authority asset, this is good for private owner in terms of anything going wrong, but if you want to divert any thing they could charge you for doing anything to it.

Thanks ads. The building is already up and not far off completion, so not diverting the sewer pipes, just tapping into them. It looks like the builder will have to trace from the neighbours MH. We have got an easily accessible sink discharge, but the builder knows about that and I assume has tried this route.