Browse Forums What's New 1 Apr 30, 2010 10:35 am A word about housing designs and how roofing, gutters and storm-water drainage works (or more like, how it DOESN'T work)! I do water damage restoration as part of my work. Especially over the past 5 weeks since our big storm, I am amazed at how inadequately the average home is designed with regard to coping in severe wet weather! I have attended homes and businesses all over Perth, old, new, some well maintained, others not. But generally it seems to me that things could be a whole lot better designed. As things are, it is almost a certainty that we will have water ingress in our homes sooner or later. The costs are incredible! So to those who know a bit about building design, what do you think could be done in improve designs of roofing, gutters etc to make them more water-tight? And not just from external water.... there is also a lot of water ingress through walls and floors etc from showers and water pipes. Really, there's gotta be better standards of finish available to prevent water damage! Ash. Re: GOTTA GETTA BETTER GUTTER! 2May 06, 2010 6:00 pm Ohhh yes and I’ve seen it also! My cousin’s house is a perfect example of the boxed gutters. They have a leak and can’t find where it is from the boxed gutters. You should see the mess it has made internally! Internal and External Building and Colour Consultant Online - Worldwide http://www.denovoconcepts.com Re: GOTTA GETTA BETTER GUTTER! 3May 16, 2010 2:23 pm Box gutter should become a thing of the past....seriously. They cause so many headaches when they don't hold up, it's not funny. When building in the UK we steared away from ever using them as they were sooooo unreliable. Unfortunately, most homes I have to deal with now have them and as soon as I pull up outside and see one of these things, I just want to drive off again. I hate them!! Re: GOTTA GETTA BETTER GUTTER! 4Nov 13, 2010 5:25 pm A couple of rules need to be followed here; 1. Building to the BCA - a lot of builders gutters don't comply - the edge of the gutter must be lower than the back so any overflow will pour out from the house, instead of running back into the house. Slotted gutters are a perfect solution for this. 2. Box gutters are a pain, but with all the narrow block designs they are almost a given now. For these you need added downpipes and larger size gutters. I used to over-specify the width and depth to ensure they could cope with almost anything. 3. Open connections from downpipes to stormwater drains instead of direct connect. When people direct connect, the gutter fills with leaves and then blocks the pipe, which ends up with backflow and if the gutters aren't correct the water flows back into the house. During our last massive storm I know of one house in particular where water ran back into the house, then down the cavity wall and hit a T Bar over large bifold doors which then acted like a waterfall INSIDE the glass bifolds - LOL. (Not funny for the owners though) No, I even have sections of narrowness where the tiles won't slide up any further. When I manage some spare time, I might play around with the first DIY part of my… 7 4940 DIY, Home Maintenance & Repair This is a very challenging situation, made much harder by not being on site. Firstly, I think that I originally… 10 8993 Thank you so much. We ended going with the terrain that’s part of our brick. 2 2545 |