The Old Bakery's creaking old drains have made the blog on several occasions. They are antiquated and totally insufficient for the job in hand. All the sewer waste and most of the rainwater from the vast roof end up in a septic tank which is barely 1.5 cubic metres in size in my next doors garden. The 'fall' is all but non existent and the liquid then filters off into another neighbours garden where it seems to disperse into his vegetable plot. Whilst he grows the biggest Parsnips in the village you won't be able to tempt me to eat them!!
There are two exceptions to this drain system, firstly the waste from the cottage shower, sink, dishwasher and washing machine seem to disappear into a soak away meant just to handle rainwater. For a year this drain was not a problem, then one of our guest's little angels thought it would be a great game to 'post' stones from the gravel path into the holes of the grid above the drain and thus blocked the thing causing a flood of soapy water along the length of the said gravel path every time anyone had a shower. This drain, being a soak-away, had no inspection cover and appeared to go some 2 metres under the lawn.
The 2nd exception is the front yard drain which is also a soak-away but it has a massive square footage of roof rainwater gush into it along with the large yards own collection of rain water. A bilge pump sits in a containment area above the soak-away to pump the water to a water butt when it gets too full. However until today there seemed no place for the water to go to and I had fitted a small hosepipe to the tap at the base of the water butt to allow the full tank to empty in times of heavy rainfall thus preventing it from overflowing right back into the drain from which it had just been pumped from. Sadly the bilge pump had stopped working correctly (didn't switch itself off when all the water had been pumped out) and in heavy rain the garage was at a high risk of flooding.
TROUBLE BREWING
Over the last few weeks and with full bookings every night for 16 days in both the B&B and the cottage things started to go wrong. It started with blessed angel sticking the stones down the cottage soak-away, then the bilge pump not working then finally the nasty stench of sewerage backing up into my pipes and heading towards the kitchen!!!
The last straw was when at 2 o'clock in the morning, after being awoken by torrential rain, thunder & lightening, I found myself dressed only in my dressing gown, Wellington boots, a waterproof anorak and a baseball cap trying to use a farmers milk churn to catch the gushing water that was overflowing from the water butt in the front yard. I was then barely able to lift the churn to the street where I emptied it some 4-5 times in an effort to prevent the waters flooding into the garage where it would then have seeped into the guests living area of the cottage.
IT WAS CLEARLY TIME FOR ACTION.
The first issue to deal with was the backing up sewers and a quick Google search and a phone call produced a drainage specialist and a pump out truck. The guy pumped out our little septic tank and then it completely refilled again as all of the pipes leading to it poured in to the hole. Even though he had effectively emptied the tank twice he was gobsmacked at how little he had pumped out explaining to me that he had never done a 'pump out' where the quantity removed barely showed on his tanker measure. At the same time another guy was calculating how to organise our waste so our pipes could be connected to the mains sewers. I am awaiting this quote but I know it will be in the thousands of pounds not least because before any actual work is even started we have to pay £436 to the water authority for 'administration costs' then about £350 to North Norfolk Council just for the privilege of being allowed to make the connection!! We also have to pay £25 for an A4 map which shows where the sewer is even though we can see all the manhole covers as plain as day. I am sure the ground works will cost about £3k as they have to dig 3 metres down under the road surface to make the connection.We should be lucky though, I am told, because there appears to be no pavement services to breach which would stand a minimum of at least another £1,000 pounds. NO WONDER THE LAST RESIDENT DIDN'T BOTHER TO MAKE THE CONNECTION!
Then I tackled the cottage soak-away. Firstly I got my plumber to fit a flexible hose to one of the waste pipes coming out of the cottage and dropping it into a nearby manhole. This left the rain water pipe and the shower waste which was too low to be able to divert so I needed to try to alleviate the problem. My drain rod attachments would not fit into the small pipe so I tried using just the rods and I think after much shoving, bludgeoning and heaving I may have cleared the blockage.
Finally in between helping a neighbour with a serious leak from her central heating system I worked on the yard drains. After the dressing gown monsoon incident I was reviewing the whole pump, tank system when I realised that there was a second pipe at the back and this may have been an exit / overflow pipe. I followed it only to see it disappear right back under the cobbled yard. Following the angle that it entered the ground I was able to find the exit route to the street but if this was the same pipe it was blocked. Again I tried with my drain rods, no good just too wide. Then I went and got my old solid fuel chimney cleaning brushes (a small brush on the end of a 6' wire). Well... A very long story (2 hours) short I both managed to clear the blockage and fix the bilge pump and I may.... just may, have fixed the problem of the flooding yard. So now I am waiting for some heavy rain and of course after an entire summer of the stuff not a bloody sign of any!!
The plane connection? I hear you ask. Well we had just managed to win the war on our neighbours leaking central heating system and we were standing in the garden when this Spitfire flew towards us really low, circled the Windmill and flew off again, brilliant.
Thennnnnn, I had just finished fixing the yard pump when there was this low rumbling noise, I rushed to the roadside and straight down the centre of the street at no more than 6-7 hundred feet a Lancaster Bomber flew as if it was driving home along our road.... DOUBLE BRILLIANT!!!
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