Sewer Line Replacement near you

The Water Industry (Schemes for Adoption of Private Sewers) Regulations 2011 required the Secretary of State and the Welsh Ministers to make schemes under section 102 of the Water Industry Act 1991 for the adoption by sewerage undertakers in England and Wales of private sewers and private lateral drains. Under a main scheme, each sewerage undertaker had to perform the relevant duty in relation to any private lateral drain which, immediately before 1 July 2011, communicated with a public sewer vested in that undertaker. The declarations made under a main scheme had to specify 1 October 2011 as the date of vesting, except for any part that was a pumping station, for which the date had to be no later than 1 October 2016.

The exemptions are narrow. A private sewer or lateral drain is exempt if it is owned by a railway undertaker, and a sewer or lateral drain on or under Crown land is exempt where the undertaker received written notice before the relevant date from the appropriate authority that it should be. Everything else that met the description moved, whether or not the householders concerned ever noticed.

The practical consequence on a replacement quotation is blunt. The length running under your own garden and serving only your own building is still yours. The length beyond the curtilage that carries your flow to the public sewer is very likely a lateral drain and therefore the undertaker's, and Approved Document H states plainly that where repair or replacement of a public sewer is required it will be carried out by the sewerage undertaker. Get the CCTV survey plotted against the sewer records before you accept a figure for excavating a garden.

Open-cut replacement is still the default where the line is shallow, reachable and under soft landscaping. The trench is dug along the old line or a new one, bedding is laid, the pipe is jointed and laid to an even gradient, granular material is placed around it, and the ground is reinstated. It is disruptive and it is predictable, and on a short garden run it is often the cheapest option once you price the reinstatement of everything else.

Trenchless replacement earns its keep where the line runs under a drive, a conservatory, a mature tree or a highway. Pipe bursting pulls a new pipe through the path of the old one while a bursting head breaks the original outwards into the surrounding ground; directional drilling creates a new route entirely. Both need launch and reception pits, so they reduce excavation rather than eliminating it, and both need the position of every other buried service established first.

It is worth being clear about what is not a replacement. Cured-in-place lining, patch lining and robotic cutting are repair techniques: they restore a pipe that still has its shape and its line. They are the right answer far more often than a replacement is, and a contractor who reaches for excavation before a survey has ruled lining out is proposing the more expensive job without having shown you why.

Local authorities have their own power to force the issue. Section 59 of the Building Act 1984 provides that where it appears to a local authority that a private sewer or drain provided for a building is insufficient, or, where it communicates directly or indirectly with a public sewer, is so defective as to admit subsoil water, or that such a work is in a condition prejudicial to health or a nuisance, the authority shall by notice require the owner or occupier to do such work as may be necessary for renewing, repairing or cleansing it. The same section covers a disused cesspool, private sewer or drain that has become prejudicial to health or a nuisance, requiring it to be filled up, removed or otherwise rendered innocuous.

If the new line has to reach a public sewer, section 106 of the Water Industry Act 1991 gives the owner or occupier of a building the right to communicate with it, subject to restrictions, and Approved Document H records that 21 days' notice of the intention to make the connection must be given to the sewerage undertaker. Under section 107 the undertaker may choose to make the connection itself and recover its reasonable costs, or allow the work to be done under its supervision.

Anything that involves opening the street is a separate permission again. Section 50 of the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991 lets the street authority grant a street works licence permitting a person to place or retain apparatus in the street and thereafter to inspect, maintain, adjust, repair, alter or renew it, including breaking up or opening the street or any sewer, drain or tunnel under it, or tunnelling or boring under the street. The section makes reinstatement of the street part of the works the licence covers, which is why a quotation that stops at the kerb line is incomplete.

Approved Document H expects gravity drains and private sewers to be tested for water tightness after laying, including after any concrete or other haunching or surrounding and after backfilling, using either an air test or a water test. It gives test requirements for pipe sizes up to 300mm and refers larger sizes to BS 8000 Part 14 or BS EN 1610.

For the air test on pipes up to 300mm diameter, the guidance is to pressurise the pipe to 110mm water gauge and hold it for approximately five minutes before testing, after which the pipe should be able to hold an initial 100mm pressure with a maximum loss of head on a manometer of 25mm over a period of seven minutes. For the water test at the same sizes, the system is filled to a depth of 5m above the lowest invert in the test section and a minimum of 1m at the highest invert, left to condition for a period that is generally an hour, and then held at the test pressure for 30 minutes with topping up as needed so the level stays within 100mm of the required level. Losses per square metre of surface area should not exceed 0.15 litres for test lengths with pipelines only, 0.20 litres where the length includes pipelines and manholes, or 0.40 litres for manholes and inspection chambers alone.

Where separate foul and surface water systems exist, Approved Document H also expects connectivity to be proven, so that each appliance and gully is shown to be on the system it belongs to. Ask for the test results in writing. A drain that passed is a fact; a drain that was tested is an assertion.

Approved Document H is direct about the reason. Disused drains or sewers provide ideal nesting sites for rats, so a disused run should be disconnected from the sewer system as near as possible to the point of connection, in a way that does not damage any pipe still in use and leaves the system watertight. It gives removing the pipe from a junction and placing a stopper in the branch of the junction fitting as an example, and says the sewerage undertaker should be consulted where the connection was to a public sewer. During construction it also expects drains and sewers left open to be covered when work is not in progress, for the same reason.

Scotland's technical handbook goes further on removal. Its guidance on existing drains expects disused drains to be disconnected as near as possible to the point of connection, and says sewers less than 1.5m deep in open ground should be removed where practicable and otherwise capped at both ends and at connection points. Its mandatory standard is that a building must not be constructed over an existing drain, including a field drain, that is to remain active, with an exception only where re-routing is not reasonably practicable, and it expects re-routing to be the first option where a building is going over a private drain that will stay in use.

Scotland runs its own building standards system under the Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004, with the Scottish Government's technical handbooks as guidance and a building warrant rather than the English building notice or full plans route. The handbook deals with existing drains, wastewater drainage and surface water drainage in its own sections, and its rules on building over an active drain and on sealing or removing disused ones differ in detail from Approved Document H. Scottish Water, not a regional company, is the single sewerage authority.

Northern Ireland has the Building Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012 and the Department of Finance technical booklets, with NI Water as the sole water and sewerage undertaker. Neither jurisdiction went through the English and Welsh private sewer transfer of 2011, so the arguments about lateral drains that dominate a replacement in England do not map across. The engineering is much the same everywhere; the ownership, the notices and the document you quote are not.