Would I be better off providing my own building services ?

[Gone West]

2 minutes ago, PeterW said:

There's now a vertical borehole soak away for really tight spaces but not sure how it works ...

 

We were going to have a deep bore soakaway which would have discharged into the chalk 47m down. Unfortunately the chalk was water bearing and we now have a well and borehole.

[Stones]

35 minutes ago, Crofter said:

Sewage treatment 101:

- mains drainage. A pipe connects you to the public sewer.

- cess pit. Your pipe goes into a big tank that fills up and gets emptied by a tanker. Big running costs, may not get approval (banned in Scotland).

- septic tank + soakaway. The tank does a basic 'primary' breakdown and the watery outflow is discharged to ground where it should be broken down by bacteria in the soil. Standard option for off-mains drainage for many years but these days significasntly better performance achieved by...

- treatment plant + soakaway. This is still a tank and a discharge field, but the tank has some active systems to introduce oxygen into the contents, achieving a much higher degree of breakdown. The soakaway field is allowed to be only 75% of the size of a septic tank one. A useful reduction, but probably not enough to make the difference to whether or not you can fit a soakaway on your plot.

 

Oh and also:

- a filter mound soakaway can replace a conventional one, in areas of high water table

- a Puraflo peat-fibre system can also do the job of a soakaway in a much smaller area, again suitable for high water table areas

- reed beds can also be incorporated but I can't claim any knowledge of these systems myself.

 

Superbly summarised!  

 

 

[Gimp]

5 minutes ago, PeterW said:

There's now a vertical borehole soak away for really tight spaces but not sure how it works ...

Sounds interesting, possibly might work in a compact location as mine, think it might be a bit more than I would want to deal with during the build though. Perhaps see if there is any space I can keep free just in case and look into it I think.

[Gimp]

39 minutes ago, mafaldina said:

Recycled roof water makes sense if one is on mains sewage (Steamy its 2/3 of your bill), less so if one has private sewage. I have a metered house with 3 of us living in it, at least one shower/bath a day each, sometimes more if my son is milking (cows are mucky, plastic parlour clothes are sweaty). Washing machine on at least once a day, dishwasher every one and a half. My bill is around £200 a year, in Cornwall. I do use roof water for the cows though.

So your saying you use rainwater harvesting to cut down a lot on your bill? As otherwise I would assume all that water use would cost you a lot more.

[mafaldina]

I only use roof water for the farm and watering, tens of thousands of litres a year, not for the house. If I didn't have private drainage then the water bill would be more like £6-700. Maybe my meter is reading under, I'm certainly not going to query it with SWW. I obviously get the £50 government rebate, which, as I don't pay for sewerage pays for a fair bit.

 

[Crofter]

I would also add that private drainage and a water borehole on the same site sounds lilke a pretty nasty combination- almost certainly would be refused approval as you cannot discharge sewage effluent within a certian distance (in Scotland, 50m) of a water source.

[ProDave]

4 minutes ago, Crofter said:

I would also add that private drainage and a water borehole on the same site sounds lilke a pretty nasty combination- almost certainly would be refused approval as you cannot discharge sewage effluent within a certian distance (in Scotland, 50m) of a water source.

The 50M refers to a water course used as a drinking water supply. Otherwise a soakaway has to only be 10 metres from a watercourse. It is a lot harder to get permission in Scotland from SEPA to discharge to a watercourse than it is to get the same permission from the EA in England.

 

 

[Crofter]

Yes, that's why I said water source, not course

[mafaldina]

18 minutes ago, Crofter said:

I would also add that private drainage and a water borehole on the same site sounds lilke a pretty nasty combination- almost certainly would be refused approval as you cannot discharge sewage effluent within a certian distance (in Scotland, 50m) of a water source.

Private drainage (sewage treatment plant) into a stream offsite would be ok, think Jeremy Harris @ Mill Orchard. He managed it and his site is quite small.

[Crofter]

52 minutes ago, mafaldina said:

Private drainage (sewage treatment plant) into a stream offsite would be ok, think Jeremy Harris @ Mill Orchard. He managed it and his site is quite small.

This appears to be easier in England than Scotland. Prodave and I had similar repsonses from SEPA when asking about discharge to a burn.

You will still need to keep clear of water sources, for obvious reasons.

[ProDave]

To summarise (quick version) SEPA in Scotland start from a presumption against discharge to a watercourse. They initially refused me. I thought  filter mound would work for me, but building regs changed and it would no longer fit the plot. After a couple of alternatives were rejected SEPA finally granted permission to discharge to the burn on the basis all other alternatives had been ruled out and it was the only option available.

 

Now the silly thing in all this is they still demanded a "partial soakaway" i.e allocate that small area that building regs allow to a soakaway and anything that is is not dealt with by the small soakaway will go to the burn.  But building regs demand the soakaway must remain 10 metres from the burn. But anything that comes out the other end will go into the burn.  Would it not have made more sense therefore to say the soakaway could encompass the land right up to the edge of the burn and therefore more of it might go to soakaway and less to the burn?