Browse Forums Building A New House 1 Jan 27, 2015 11:55 am We have just built a new house with "Distinctive Homes", at Freeling in country South Australia and while we are quite happy with the overall build itself, not withstanding a few little points that we are sure will be rectified before handover in a week or so time,..... which of course they WILL be, (rectified), I do have a bit of an issue with the depth of the sewer pipe that comes from our en-suite at the driveway side of the house. My plan is to pave the driveway with 65mm clay paving and bearing in mind that Freeling is reactive soil, I WILL effectively need 100mm rubble sub-base,....plus 35mm sand base compacted and finally the 65mm paving on top,... a total working area of 200mm from bottom to top. The top of the sewer pipe itself is barely 70mm below ground level and ground level is only about 220mm below the damp-course,..290mm in total. The gully trap is on the same sewer line and because the underside of the gully trap collar has to be 150mm below floor level (damp course), I therefore effectively then only have a maximum working area of 140mm.........deduct a further 75mm for required sewer pipe coverage,.. will leave me a paving working area of only... 75mm beneath the underside of the gully trap. According to what I read at the local council literature on sewer depths, I am required to have a minimum 75mm of soil or rubble over the top of the sewer pipe, BEFORE anything else can go on top, which is the 200mm of total paving area required, but I will end up with only 75mm.... a shortfall of 125mm. Our site supervisor is trying to convince me that the plumber HAS installed the sewer pipe at the correct depth, even though he has conceded that it IS the minimum depth required. The pipe section is only about 8 metres in length after coming out of the en-suite area from where it takes in the gully trap at that front side of the house, then turns across the front of the house to the bottom corner of the block on the other side, with copious amounts of fall. My contention and also from 40 years paving experience, is that this pipe IS up to high in the ground and could have,.. SHOULD have been put in at least 250mm lower than it was from which there would still be AMPLE amount of fall. My own guess is that it was hard ground on the day (and it can be just that) and the plumber didn't feel like digging any deeper, even though some common-sense should have dictated that he do that, even though it may have taken another hour to dig it lower. Plain and simple.. I can NOT do my paving correctly with the pipe depth as it currently is and I'm asking the builder to get his plumber back for a half a day and to lower it. Am I being too picky or am I trying to be fair,.. I really do think the latter. In my 40 years of paving (now retired) and where I have used a bobcat to dig out 100,s of driveways down as low as 250mm in many cases, I have never ever come anywhere near to finding a sewer pipe in the way... Every sewer pipe that I have seen in the ground before the trench is filled in again has been close to 600mm below surface ground level. The one and only time ever, that I find something like this, it ends up being my own new house. Hi, only for walking. It is a narrow 1.5m paved area next to house. 2 5417 I think you are getting different numbers because they all just based them on "other jobs" even though each job is unique. Often, with builders, unless you're speaking to… 3 3232 The distance between my DEBs varies from 4.1m at the narrowest to 8.1m at the widest. 5 27307 |