Garage guttering - where do I send the water?

[weezer]

I have a large detached garage with a pitched tiled roof. It has guttering running along the side facing our house. The downpipe goes into the soil, I haven't investigated where it goes after that, but the garden doesn't waterlog so I assume it either goes to a soakaway or under our driveway and into the surface drain. The other side of the garage (facing the neighbours garden) has never been accessible due to the wild overgrowth of the neighbours garden. Now the neighbour has sold and the garden has been cleared, I see there is no guttering on that side, which explains why the wall on one side of the garage has been damp!

So I need to put guttering up, which shouldn't be too much of a problem. I can clean up and paint the fascia boards which are in reasonable condition and put some UPVC guttering on. My big problem is where do I send the rainwater? A concrete driveway runs down to the garage, so I'd have to dig through that to get to the surface drain (no thanks!) I can make the guttering fall from the front of the garage to the back, but about 1.2m beyond the back of the garage is the boundary fence and beyond that a farmers field. I read that soakaways have to be 5m from any building so that's out. I could just dig a trench leading to the edge of the field and put a drain in it which the new downpipe links into, but am I allowed to do discharge the water into the field? The only other thing I can think of doing is a french drain but will that cope with the discharge from the roof?

 

[justlead1]

Hi. Difficult to answer without seeing situation, but have you concidered drilling holes in walls and running pipe across gable end wall and into existing RWP?

 

[weezer]

I thought about connecting the new guttering to the existing around the front gable end, but it wouldn't look great and getting the fall right would be tricky. I'd rather not drill holes. I wouldn't have minded connecting it around the rear gable end but our wood"shed" (made of breeze block) is in the way.

The downpipe on the existing guttering is at the front of the garage and the fall is from back of the garage to the front - which is a bit weird since the ground slopes the opposite way from front to back but I think this is so the downpipe is near the surface water drain. Since I don't really know where the existing downpipe goes (ie soakway or drain) I'm a bit reluctant to put the flow from the new guttering into it unless I know it can take it.

 

[big-all]

any room for water butts!!!

 

[chappers]

easiest solution is to probably just run it onto the ground alongside the garage, towards the field after all thats all thats been happening up until now.

 

[weezer]

any room for water butts!!!

Yep one of those is going in on a spur off the downpipe, but I don't want to rely on that to take it all!!

 

[weezer]

easiest solution is to probably just run it onto the ground alongside the garage, towards the field after all thats all thats been happening up until now.

Well that's what I thought would be the simplest thing to do, I just didn't fancy a visit from someone from the water board telling me I shouldn't have done it.

 

[chappers]

wouldn't worry too much many downpipes used to just run onto the ground, after all where would the rain land if the building wasn't there, just divert it away from the base of the building.