What a soakwell actually is
A buried chamber — concrete or plastic — that sits under your yard, driveway or paving and holds stormwater until it soaks away into the sand beneath it.
That is the whole idea, and it works here because of what Perth is built on. Sand drains. A hole in sandy ground will take water away steadily, which is why the soakwell became the standard answer across the metro area rather than piping everything to the street.
Your downpipes feed into underground pipe runs. Those runs feed the soakwells. The soakwells let the water go into the ground. When all three parts are working and sized correctly, you never think about any of it. When one part fails, water turns up somewhere you do not want it.
The rule that sits behind all of it
The City of South Perth requires all stormwater falling on a site to be collected, contained and disposed of on that site, regardless of how heavy or how long the storm is. Runoff is not allowed to be pushed onto the road, the verge or the block next door.
So a drainage problem in Como is not only an inconvenience. Water leaving your property is a compliance problem as well as a wet-feet problem.
The council attaches a number to it too. For minor additions on a property with no existing private drainage connection, the required soakwell volume is at least 0.02 cubic metres per square metre of impervious area drained. A 100 square metre roof addition needs two cubic metres or more of soakwell.
That figure is useful even outside the situations it formally covers, because it gives you something concrete to hold an existing system against. A great many older Como systems do not come close to it.
What we do
New soakwell installation
Sizing the system to the roof and paving area it has to handle, choosing between concrete and plastic based on the site rather than habit, working out where the wells can physically go, and connecting the pipe runs so water actually reaches them.
Soakwell replacement
When the existing well is cracked, collapsed or simply too small to be worth keeping, it comes out and a correctly sized one goes in. More on soakwell replacement
Soakwell and stormwater repairs
Cracked chambers, broken lids, failed joints, and the pipe runs between the downpipe and the well. Not every problem needs a whole new system, and we would rather do the smaller job. Collapsed soakwell repair · Stormwater drain repairs
Blocked stormwater drains
Grates that back up, downpipes overflowing at the top, runs that have silted closed. Blocked stormwater drains · Blocked drains
Drainage for yards that flood
Working out whether the problem is capacity, a blockage, a break, or roof area that was never connected to anything in the first place. Backyard flooding and drainage
Concrete or plastic?
Both are used across Perth and both are fine. The question is which suits your block.
Concrete is heavy, strong and takes load well. If the well is going under a driveway, a parking bay or anywhere a vehicle will sit, concrete is usually the answer. The trade-offs are weight — it needs machine access to place — and the fact that concrete does eventually crack, particularly the lids.
Plastic is light, goes in faster, will not corrode and comes in shapes that suit narrow side passages and tight rear access. It does not take load the way concrete does without protection above it, so placement matters more.
On a Como block, access often decides it before anything else does. A rear yard reachable only through a 900 millimetre side passage rules out a lot of options that would be straightforward on an open block. We look at that on the quote visit rather than discovering it on the day.
How the job runs
1. You call or send the form
Tell us what is happening — where the water sits, when it started, whether anything has changed on the block recently. A subdivision, a patio, an extension or new paving is often the whole explanation.
2. A licensed plumber comes out at no charge
He looks at the downpipes, the runs, where the water is ending up and what the block allows.
3. You get a written price
On site, before any work starts. Transparent pricing, no hidden costs. If you would rather not go ahead, you owe nothing.
4. We do the work
Old well out where it is being replaced, new chamber in at the right depth, pipe runs connected and the surface reinstated.
Why the Como housing mix matters here
At the last census, only about a third of Como's occupied dwellings were separate houses — more than half were semi-detached homes, townhouses or villas, and the suburb held 7,645 private dwellings across 6.7 square kilometres.
That density is the reason so much Como drainage work is a capacity problem rather than a breakage problem.
Every time a block is split or a rear dwelling goes up, roof and paving area increases. The drainage underneath frequently does not. A system that coped perfectly with a single 1950s house can be badly undersized for what now sits on the same ground, and nothing about it looks wrong until the first solid winter downpour.
It also means a lot of this work involves more than one owner — villa groups, duplex pairs and strata blocks where the drainage runs across boundaries. We handle those too. Commercial and strata plumbing
What we need from you
Nothing technical. Tell us where the water goes, when you first noticed it, and whether anything has been built, paved or subdivided on the block. That is enough for us to know what to bring.
Everything else — what has failed, what size it should be, what the fix is — is our job to work out on site.