Building a Soakaway
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- Опубликовано: 26 мар 2017
- Building a soakaway to take waste water from a reverse osmosis plant for my window cleaning business. Because the waste isn't going into the public drains I can claim an abatement on sewerage charges from the water company (U.K.). Unfortunately I had to edit out a bit in the middle but still enough to see what is involved.
hey Mate lol... you need one feet of gravel under the tank and around the perimeter beside wrapping it all around with geotextile non woven fabric.
One piece of advice for who does it properly with a foot under the tank and around it ( you can cut the bottom side off beside drilling the side holes.)
I found this video looking for the traditional method of digging a hole and filling it with rubble, by a strange coincidence I happened to have a blue barrel and a roll of membrane at hand so I am going to try this as an alternative thank you for this video!
Well, thanks for that! I'm busy putting in a soakhole to take grey water and relieve the load on our ageing septic tank system. I've dug the hole, busy channeling for the waste water pipe and was considering how to maintain an adequate underground void, I was going to stack tyres in the hole.......but it just so happens we have a spare blue barrel, which will very neatly do the job.
Old tyres is a great idea too, as long as you still use some sort of membrane to stop soil build up and something over the top to prevent cave-ins.
I was looking at going with tyres, but as you noted would also have had to come up with something durable for a lid. Our very old septic tank has ground treated bridge deck timbers over the top. But that's pretty expensive stuff, even in small quantities, and usually has to be ordered in.
Good man for using membrane to prevent in-fill of mud and stones
Great job!
GOOD VIDEO
Maybe overlapping the fabric so much will not interfere with flow but it probably will. Perhaps line the hole itself next time, not the barrel and an extra 6” of diameter around the barrel.
Thanks for the video. I was going to buy the supposedly special membrane for french drains but i kept on saying that the weed membrane is stronger and will last longer.
Great video very helpfull
Builder actually going for rubble method and hole is pretty big. I was looking online and found crates but too pricey and may need up to 4. Totally agree with you method and water disposal and 200 litres barrel may fill up quickly.
In time the earth may slowly crush the plastic drum i Installed a heavy plastic pit underground after a year or so the earth compression split one side wide open although I am in heavy clay that’s why all the drainage pit in the street are made out of concrete this just a comment and not a criticism i wish you well thanks for sharing 👍
Or maybe there was an earthquake and I slept through it ⚡️⚡️⚡️
Back filling plastic barrel with large rock (rip rap) will prevent the caving in of the barrel.
I have the same issue in my garden it well boggy. Does it work well and can I ask how long is pipe that runs to the barrel. Trying to work how much pea gravel to use .how much did you use thanks paul
The pipe from my reverse osmosis unit in the garage is about 25 feet. It is a couple of years since I did it but I think I used one bag of pea shingle under the barrel and two round the sides as I had made the hole quite wide
Very interesting . Could this system be uses to drain away excess water from a lawn , by piping in a few 4 inch drainage pipes to blue barrel . Thanks for upload . Well explained .
I think it could but if you are using 4 inch pipes you might need more than one barrel to cope with the volume. I am guessing you will put some holes in the pipes to let the water in throughout the length and breath of the lawn (you might want to wrap the pipes in weed proof membrane and bed in gravel (like the barrel) to keep debris out. You will also need to add some sort of strainer/ filter at the entry point to the barrel, that can be accessed for cleaning, to prevent it filling up with silt. This could be as simple as a fish pond filter with an inlet at the top and an outlet part way up the side, just a couple of inches up from the bottom. Fill the bottom with a layer of chopped up pieces of hose pipe, maybe regular 1/2 or 3/4 inch garden hose would do and then a layer of upholstery foam on top of that.
Thanks for reply , I was going to use french type drains . The barrel would be used to collect water as I do not have anywhere to run it off . If the barrel could be sunk deep enough I would hope that it would let water soak away gradually. Thanks for advice on filtering the inlets . Appreciate it .@@mrwindowsandyconroytrading5542
I like your method but is it for reverse osmosis plant? Or soakaway. I don’t really want to use crates as not cheap but again use of blue barrel is to dispose of water into the ground or use it for reverse osmosis plant. Let me know as I want to take the same approach.
The barrel is instead of crates - it just creates a hollow space to hold the waste water from the Reverse Osmosis plant whilst it soaks down into the soil. The old fashioned way of building a soakaway was to fill the hole with stones and gravel but you then need a much bigger hole as 2/3 of it is full of stone and therefore totally wasted. The membrane is to stop soil getting in to the barrel through the weep holes and gradually filling it up with silt over time.
So British call dry well a soak-away???
I've decided to just do a rock-lined open ditch.
So you call a soakaway a dry well? We use the Ronseal principle of naming - "it does what it says on the tin". we call it a soak away because the water soaks away. When a well is dry (has no water in it) we call it a dry well. It is a wonderful concept.
you will need to fill the blue barrel at some point (10mm shingle) as it will collapse in on itself if empty, the purpose of soakaway is that it does it extremely slowly and the stones or shingle used are porous and soak up some of the water and let it dissipate at a slower rate, good job though you may inspire people to use their old barrels and tanks as crates are creeping up in price.
Stone is totaly not porous (apart from chalk or pumice) so If I were to fill the barrel with shingle, as you suggest, that would just reduce its holding capacity by at least 60%. Using larger stones would at least create bigger voids but the point of using the barrel empty, just like suds crates, is that it is possible to use a smaller emty structure than one that has been filled with material such as stones. Neither do I believe that it will collapse in on itself buried vertically, as it is, although that might possibly happen if it was laid horizontally and considerably deeper than it is, or where it might be subjected to other loading such as vehicular traffic over the top. As it is located in a flower bed in a garden it is not even subject to human traffic passing over it. When filled these barrels can be stacked several units high, the bottom ones supporting perhaps close to a ton without distortion. Mine has just a foot of earth on top of it. From a lateral compression perspective the weakest point would be at the top, because the top end has been cut off, here it is possible to deflect the shape slightly in a free space; but it is not in free space. With soil and gravel packed tightly all around it will work in the same way that an arch does in supporting a wall or bridge, transferring the compressive load around the circumference - for one point to move inwards another would have to move outwards but the surrounding soil prevents that occuring (look at compressive strength of an egg). It has been there 4 years now and continues to work perfectly, dissipating a steady trickle of around 300 litres per day.
So I use your method instead of crates and no hardcore and forget about Reverse Osmosis plant. As water will be coming from drain from the main house. And l appreciate information about refund from water company 😉
My video was made primarily for people in the window cleaning industry who use Reverse Osmosis systems to purify water for their business and wish to gain relief from sewerage charges on the waste water. These systems work quite slowly so the water going into the barrle is only a steady trickle. There is no reason why this method cannot be used to build a soakaway to deal with other waste water, such as rainwater from a house roof but, depending on the size of the roof to be drained and the porosity of your soil, a single 200 litre barrel might not be large enough. to cope with the volume of water. that would accumulate very quickly during a heavy rain storm. You might need to use several barrels joined together to create sufficient capacity. When I built a garage a few years ago I was told that I needed a 1 cubic metre soakaway - but that was filled with rubble so, in practice, it was really only about 300 litres capacity. This article may help you work out how big a soakaway you need. www.drainagepipe.co.uk/soakaways-and-membranes/how-do-i-know-what-size-my-soakaway-should-be/
why so blurry?
filmed on cheap phone
Your drains are metered? 😧
No our drains are not metered as such. However we are charged for sewerage/drainage as a percentage of metered water supplied. By having a second meter ("sub meter") to measure water that does not go into the drains, whether that be for filling a swimming pool, fish pond or, in my case for my window cleaning business, we are allowed a rebate on the sewerage charge
Mr Windows (Andy Conroy trading as) thanks for the explanation. Peace.
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