A house in the country with a small garden?

Regulatory boundaries for your private sewage system.

Whether you are reactive or proactive has never been so important when buying a house, especially with the new rules and conditions for private sewage systems.

Your drainage field, soakaway, or land-drain area needed (an integral part of your private sewage system ) may have been sold off! 

It seems a popular thing to do now – selling part of your property for someone else to build on, but what happens if the seller at the time didn't consider where their drainage field for their private sewage system was!

If that is the case – the area could now be in your neighbour's garden over the fence, and no one seems to be aware of it.

Your neighbour, who moved into the house a year ago, or more, is unlikely to know; the land drains from your septic tank or treatment plant are in their actual garden, separated by a fence.

It's very costly to find out who is to blame; and everyone is busy with their own problems.

When it goes wrong, you don't own the problem unless you own the house.

Here at ASL Limited, we have experienced personnel in the office and a specialist team following a pre-purchase survey from one of our experienced surveyors in order to identify and solve these issues and problems highlighted in this case study entitled 'Case Study | Regulatory boundaries for your private sewage system'.

It will compound the problem...

If surface or roof water was entering the system before you moved in and is still entering the sewage system indirectly or directly; plus unknown or unwelcome fats, grease, even a small amount of cooking oil, the land will clog up. 

The drainage field will fail. Sewage will begin to overflow from the inspection chambers around the house and disruptive tanker emptying and jetting. 

Eventually, you realise the land drains/drainage field needs replacing.

Then you could find that the amount of land available for a new drainage field is insufficient. 

A legal nightmare.

Because of the limited space, the septic tank or treatment plant, the land drains, or drainage field are now too close to the building or the boundary fence line.

Environmental agencies and Building regulations require specific distances from these boundaries and that means the size of your garden comes into play.

This is a subject came into a recent job for our teams. You can read the case study called “Regulatory boundaries for your private sewage system” via this link.
 

If you are buying a house and would like a draiange survey please contact Our office 0800181684