A good soakaway has a 4 inch soil pipe going into the point were there are
lots of rock/aggregate to soakaway.The soil pipe can also have holes in the
bottom with sharp sand around the soil pipe.Done this way you should never
get problems with water backing up.The soakaway area should also be quite a
big area and deep,I would say around 1m square min.

--
Thanks Keith,England,UK.
"Janet Baraclough" wrote in message
...
The message
from "Amber Ormerod" contains these words:


Is it a soak away,try rodding with drain rods.


It is. I drove a stike 2 foot into it. Its really hard going with the
mallet.

Drain rods are for clearing a blocked pipe, so that water can run away
to a sewer or wherever the pipe leads.

A soakaway is a hole in the ground filled with stones or large
gravel, that leads nowhere. It works by collecting water then letting
it slowly percolate out into the surrounding soil. Rodding a soakaway
with drain rods is pointless.

If a soakaway stops working, it usually means that there's more water
than usual running into the soakaway, or that the surrounding soil is
less able to absorb it. Causes could be, months of heavier-than-normal
rainfall saturating the ground, a change in the water table (from nearby
construction works) or a very old soakaway having filled up with fine
silt.

This has been an exceptionally wet winter in many areas.

Janet.