The secret life of drainage and chambers
Hello monthly blog readers.
Todays special is all about inspection chambers, sewerage and toilets. Let’s start with the inspection chambers. These are the unusual squares that normally are in your garden or driveway. These concrete lidded chambers are used for just that, to inspect the chambers. Inside the chambers at the bottom are drain runs which carry your waste away from your house. In days of old they used clay pipes to run the waste through, but now on new extensions it’s plastic pipes that are used. They’re 6 inch across and 6 metres in length, which is great because they have less joints in which stuff could get trapped on them (Im looking at you baby wipes!) speaking of baby wipes, if these little pipe menaces get caught on a joint, usually in old clay systems, they can mix with fat and oil and form what is delightfully called a “fatburg” These bad boys and other blockages cost the uk 100 million a year! Remarkable eh?
New inspection chambers these days are made from plastic and come in separate rings which stack on top of each other till they reach the ground level, they are so much easier to install and longer lasting over the old school brick built ones, but the brick ones are nostalgic and each one differs so much. They can be as shallow as 1 foot or as Deep as 10 feet or more and all the drainage pipes that we install and ones that are already there all lead to massive sewers most of the time that are hidden much further underground than we can see. and to think all of these was dug out by hand and built as far back as the 1800s. Up until that point in London the toilet waste Simply ran into the Thames. Speaking of toilets, they wasn’t even a commodity in houses until 1919 when the Housing and Town Planning Act made toilets a minimum requirement for all new houses.
Thanks for reading till next time
