Drain tracing and locating in Great Sankey

Drain tracing and locating — how it works here

On the newer parts of WA5 the drainage often does not run where the plot layout suggests, because estates were laid out around service corridors rather than around individual gardens. Shared runs cross boundaries, surface water goes somewhere quite different from foul, and soakaways sit under lawns that have been turfed over twice since. Older Sankey Bridges and Burtonwood have the opposite problem: runs that were extended and re-routed so many times that no drawing survives at all. We trace the pipe with a camera-mounted sonde and a surface locator and mark the line and depth on the ground in paint or pegs, so it is visible rather than described. People book this before an extension, before a driveway comes out, when a soakaway has to be found, or when a neighbour's run turns out to cross their garden and nobody can prove where it goes.

• Line and depth marked physically on the surface, not just on a plan
• Accurate to a few centimetres horizontally, around ten on depth
• Finds soakaways, attenuation and chambers that have been built over
• Sketch plan supplied for builders and Building Control
• Separates foul from surface water, which on new estates is not obvious