Storm Water and Soakwells in Waterford

Drainage not coping in Waterford?

Ring us and a licensed plumber comes out at no charge. He works out what has failed on site, and you get a written price before any work starts. Transparent pricing, no hidden costs, and nothing owing if you decide against it.

Two halves of one suburb

Waterford is not uniform, and the drainage answer changes depending on which part of it you are in.

Down toward the Canning foreshore, the ground is low and the water table sits closer to the surface. Sand there is often already holding moisture, so a soakwell empties slowly through a wet stretch. Capacity carries you through more than depth does, and a system that behaves perfectly in summer can be overwhelmed in a wet week in July.

Back from the river, on the higher ground, the sand drains the way Perth sand is supposed to and a correctly sized well simply works. Faults there are ordinary age-and-wear faults rather than ground-condition problems.

The practical upshot is that advice which is sound for one end of Waterford can be wrong for the other. We ask where the block sits before saying anything useful about what is likely going on.

Houses and unit blocks in the same street

The other thing about Waterford is the housing mix. Alongside standalone homes there is a substantial amount of grouped and higher-density housing — unit blocks, townhouse groups and villa developments, helped along by the suburb's proximity to the university and the river.

Those two housing types fail differently.

Standalone homes built from the 1970s onward generally have drainage that was adequate when it went in. The failures are wear failures — silted chambers, joints that have settled, cracked lids, roots. Or they are addition failures, where a patio, carport or extension added roof area and nothing was added underground to carry it.

Unit blocks and grouped dwellings were built with a lot of roof and hardstand and very little permeable ground left over. Capacity was tight from the start because there was nowhere spare to put more. Add fifty years of sand and settlement and there is no headroom left. The symptom usually shows at whichever grate happens to be lowest, which is rarely where the actual fault is. Strata and commercial drainage

What has to happen with the water

Waterford is in the City of South Perth, and the council requires all stormwater falling on a site to be collected, contained and disposed of on that site, whatever the storm.

For minor additions with no existing private drainage connection, the required soakwell volume is at least 0.02 cubic metres for every square metre of impervious area drained — so an addition of 80 square metres of roof calls for more than one and a half cubic metres of soakwell on its own.

The City also works in eight drainage precincts whose requirements are not identical. In a suburb that changes character between the foreshore and the higher ground, that is not a technicality. Give us the address and we will work out what applies.

What we do in Waterford

Why Waterford calls us

Free quote in Waterford

Tell us where the water ends up, how close to the river you are, and whether it only happens in the wet months. We will call you back to arrange a time.

Nearby areas we serve

Como · Salter Point · Karawara · Bentley · View all service areas