Category Archives: Rainwater Management

Outbuildings: Week 38, Day 3

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Outbuildings: Week 38, Day 3

Another frosty night followed by a bright and sunny day, so still some frost visible on the Utility Room roof at noon (despite finding the loft insulation is mostly missing in there and needs to be topped-up).

Good progress on the rainwater attenuation pond:

  • Levelling out the bottom so that – if anything – water will pool at the outlet end, whereas it has been tending to pool at the inlet end
  • Installing the ‘swale inlet’ to calm the flow of water entering the pond, reducing the risk of erosion of the soil at the bottom of the pond in high-flow conditions
  • Installing the silt trap that will help prevent silt entering the pond – containing a ‘bucket’ that will need emptying periodically
  • Connecting to the upstream drainage pipework

The commissioning of the air-to-air heat pump is now mostly complete and all but one of the CCTV cameras are now operational. (The last camera will go up after the handrail for the external staircase gets installed, hopefully within the next week.)

Outbuildings: Week 38, Day 2

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Outbuildings: Week 38, Day 2

The long-awaited concrete headwall was finally delivered and quickly installed and connected up to the flow-control chamber ‘downstream’.

Concrete headwall installed at the West end of the stormwater attenuation pond

With the outfall from the pond taken care of, work can proceed to level off the base of the pond before moving on to install the inlet – though there will need to be a bit of tidying-up of the pond walls around the headwall at some point.

The small load of ready-mixed concrete that had been ordered to reinforce the foul drainage pipe under the access road to the block-paved parking area arrived as scheduled. Once that has set the stone foundation for that access road can be installed, making the parking area and the garages accessible.

Foul drainage pipe between the House and the Biorock sewage treatment plant encased in concrete

I also completed a bit more preparation of the rainwater harvesting system by installing the submersible pump in the underground tank and routing its electrical cables and delivery hose to the pump controller in the adjacent building. A quick test of the pump, to flush through the delivery hose before connecting that to the inlet on the controller, showed it is working well. At their next visit, the plumbers should be able to get the rainwater supply working within the Outbuildings – since they’ve already fitted the meter, the expansion vessel and most of the other components required to enable that.