Yard holding water in Manning?
Ring us and a licensed plumber comes out at no charge. He finds what has actually failed, then leaves you with a written price before any work starts. Transparent pricing, no hidden costs, and nothing owing if you decide against it.
Small houses, generous blocks — and what happened next
Manning went up largely as a planned residential estate in the years after the Second World War. Modest single-storey houses, laid out together, on blocks that were generous by any modern standard.
Whatever drainage went in with those houses was sized for that original modest roof. A small house on a big block is the easiest drainage job there is — not much water to deal with, and plenty of open sandy ground for it to soak into.
Almost none of those blocks look like that now.
Over the decades the houses have been extended, re-roofed, given patios and carports and alfrescos. Many blocks have been subdivided outright, with a second dwelling on the rear half. Driveways have been widened and lawns replaced with paving.
Every one of those changes adds impervious area. Water that used to soak into open ground now runs off a hard surface and has to be collected. And in a great many cases the soakwells underneath are still the ones that went in with the original house.
That is the Manning pattern, and it is a capacity problem rather than a breakage. Nothing is broken. The system is simply being asked to swallow two or three times what it was built for. More on yards that flood
How to tell a capacity problem from a fault
You cannot, from the surface — and that is the point.
A silted well, a collapsed well, a broken pipe and a well that is merely too small all produce the same thing: water sitting where it should not be. They look identical standing in the yard looking at a puddle.
They are completely different jobs. One is a clean-out, one is a replacement, one is a pipe repair, and one is a design question about how much volume the block actually needs. Getting that wrong means paying for the wrong work and having the same problem next winter.
Finding out which one you have is the first visit, and it costs nothing.
The number worth knowing
Manning is in 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.
The council's figure for minor additions with no existing private drainage connection is at least 0.02 cubic metres of soakwell for every square metre of impervious area drained.
That is a useful benchmark for exactly the kind of work Manning is full of. If a patio, a carport or a rear extension added 60 square metres of roof, that alone calls for more than a cubic metre of additional soakwell — and if nothing went in at the time, the original system is now carrying it.
The City also splits its area into eight drainage precincts with different requirements, so the specific address matters, not just the suburb.
What we do in Manning
New and replacement soakwells
Sized against what is actually on the block today rather than what was there in 1950. Soakwell replacement
Drainage for additions and paving
Connecting new roof and hardstand into a system that can genuinely take it.
Blocked stormwater drains
Grates backing up, downpipes overflowing, runs silted closed. Blocked drains
Collapsed soakwells
Sinking paving or a soft patch over an old chamber that has given way. Collapsed soakwell repair
Pipe runs and buried faults
Located and repaired without trenching the whole yard. Leak detection
Why Manning calls us
Licensed plumber, licence 8396
The person who quotes the job is the person who does it.
$0 call-out, free written quote
No charge to come and look, and the price is in writing before anything starts.
Transparent pricing
Nothing appears at the end of the job that was not on the quote at the start.
We would rather do the smaller job
If a clean-out and one length of pipe fixes it, that is what we will quote.
Free quote in Manning
Tell us where the water goes and whether anything has been built or paved on the block recently — that is often the whole explanation. We will call you back to arrange a time.