Amber Ormerod wrote:
"keith ;-)" wrote in message
...
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.



I would say this is what we have atm but I am not sure they did 1m
square - probs a couple of foot? Not sure how deep.

i have an idea on how to possibly resolve this without excavating
the
entire greenhouse base - i'm not overly keen on this except as a
last
resort, as it looks very similar to what you describe, and i'm
concerned that this may become an annual job, and also that
exavating
under the greenhouse base could cause instability etc.

the base at the end of the greenhouse where the drain is, is built
up
with breezeblock to around 8 inches, so my idea was to drill
diagonally from the outside up into the soil pipe currently used
for
the drain, using say 4 19mm holes, and then join these up with a
chisel to make a reasonable sized hole, put a pipe in this hole and
channel the water from the original drain outside of the greenhouse
to an external soakaway that we can then monitor and change as
required.

Not as neat a solution, but anyone see any real problems with this
approach?

obviously first port of call would be to the guys who did the job,
but after 10 months, i don't think they will want to know....

Ah, right. A two-foot diameter soakaway isn't a soakaway at all
unless you're on the kind of broken rock that doesn't need it anyhow.
Tell all your friends who did the job.

What actually happens at present? Do you get puddles, or squidgy bits
of ground where you don't want them? Where I'm heading is, does it
actually matter? Most people don't have separate drainage for their
greenhouses, and never notice any inconvenience. A minor patch of wet
ground could be cured simply by laying a deepish gravel path. How
often do you have so much water coming _out_ of the greenhouse?

--
Mike.