The suburbs we cover
- South PerthWA
- ManningWA
- KarawaraWA
- Salter PointWA
- WaterfordWA
- KensingtonWA
- Victoria ParkWA
- BentleyWA
- WilsonWA
- ApplecrossWA
Why the suburb changes the answer
Drainage is not the same job everywhere, which is why we ask where you are before saying anything useful about what is likely wrong.
The old riverside suburbs
— Como, South Perth, Applecross, Kensington — were built long before the outer estates, and a lot of them sit on ground that slopes toward the Swan or the Canning. Drainage here is old, it has usually been altered more than once, and on the lower ground near either foreshore the water table sits higher and sand takes water away more slowly. A soakwell that would drain freely on high ground can be sluggish two streets closer to the river.
The post-war and mid-century suburbs
— Manning, Bentley, Karawara, Wilson — went up largely from the late 1940s through the 1970s, often as planned estates with modest houses on generous blocks. That original drainage was sized for a small roof. Most of those blocks now carry considerably more than they did, and that gap between roof area and soakwell capacity is the single most common fault across this whole area.
The heavily subdivided suburbs
— Como itself, Victoria Park, Kensington, South Perth — are where it bites hardest. When a block is split or a rear villa goes up, roof and paving increase immediately. The wells underneath very often do not. Como is the clearest example of it: only about a third of its occupied dwellings are separate houses, and more than half are semi-detached homes, townhouses or villas.
The university and institutional pockets
— Bentley, Karawara, Waterford — carry a lot of grouped dwellings and larger sites, which means shared drainage runs, shared soakwells and jobs with more than one owner attached. Commercial and strata work
One rule across all of it
Most of this area falls under the City of South Perth, which requires all stormwater falling on a site to be collected, contained and disposed of on that site — whatever the storm. Water is not allowed to be pushed onto the road, the verge or the neighbours.
The City also splits its area into eight drainage precincts, and the requirements are not identical across them. Where your property sits genuinely changes what applies. Parts of this ring fall under neighbouring councils with their own rules again, so it is worth telling us the address rather than just the suburb.
Just outside the ring?
Ring anyway. A few minutes either way rarely makes a difference to us, and it costs nothing to ask.
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