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The builder tells me he’s finished putting the drains in for my new build, & I should pay him. My drain plan is shown in picture 1. I went to the site today to inspect his work. I couldn’t get the first few IC covers off (near the house) because they’re held down with a Philips screw & I didn’t have tools with me. I looked in IC4 (between house & garage). I saw sand & soil in the bottom of the drain; there was water on top of this & it was flowing very slowly. There are no taps, etc connected. This must just be water from the ground (storm Daragh over the weekend). There’s a high water table at the site, so the bottom of IC4 would normally be below this in the winter, even without a recent storm. In the video you can see water coming in where the risers join. Also, it’s coming in through one of the redundant inlets (it’s supposed to be capped off). Water looked like it was coming in from up stream, into the main channel, as well. I removed the cover from the final IC, IC5. This one is > 1.5m deep (I think – I should have measured). In here things look even worse. There’s a build up of at least 20mm of sand & soil across the bottom of the main channel. There’s about another 20mm of water on top of this & it didn’t look like it was flowing, although it probably is flowing – just too slowly to see. I could see water coming in at the base, where the concrete floor meets the cylindrical wall. There’s a video that shows a buble right in the first second. It was bubbling away, then as soon as I started recording the video clip it stopped – perhaps because of my weight on the concrete base. In this video you can see water flowing quickly, but that’s because I put a hose into the upstream IC4, to see what happened. There are some pictures here showing a close up of what’s in the bottom. It looks horrible, as mucky drains always do, but it’s just sand & soil – it isn’t backwash from the sewer. I put that little, vertical stick in there, to measure the depth of the soil & sand. I think the bottom of this last chamber is probably set too high in the ground & is flat, rather than with the required fall. What should I do? I’m reluctant to give this builder another chance to fix his work. I think I need to hire a competent person to take charge & do whatever needs to be done. I’ve already told this builder off about his poor quality work. I objected to him leaving IC covers off for several days while he was working near the ICs & allowing debris to fall inside them. He told me he’d clean them out. Perhaps he did (although I doubt it). Perhaps all this sand & soil has come since the storm. Either way, it looks bad. Although I know next to nothing about building, I’m of the firm opinion that the drainage system he’s built is no good. Am I right? Also he told me they’ve been airtight tested. I’ve no idea how this test is done, but given the amount of leakage we can see, I think, if it was done, it would have showed a leak. How much work do you think might be involved in correcting these problems? Might we need to pull everything up, including down the side of the house, out & start again? Picture 1