Every property requires access to the water, electricity, telecoms and (in most cases) gas networks. You’ll also need a connection for foul and surface water drainage to be taken off the premises. If your plot has not had a building on it previously, it’s unlikely that these connections will be there, so you need to go about setting them up. If you’re demolishing an existing house, you might think that you can retain and reuse all the existing utilities, but chances are they’ll need upgrading, temporarily terminating or possibly relocating. Unfortunately it’s not possible to deal with just one company for all six of these service categories, so you’re probably going to need to do four or five separate applications to various utility providers, which in most cases requires plenty of patience. Here I’m taking a look at each service type and how to go about getting these set up.
Foul drainage
This is the most likely service you can reuse when demolishing an existing house, especially if there’s already an established connection to a main sewer. In this situation, you would retain or construct a manhole close to the site boundary, leaving the main sewer connection in place, so that your new wrap-around drainage adjacent to your dwelling could lead to this existing infrastructure. For virgin sites, or plots where the existing drainage connection cannot be reused, you’ll need to submit an application to the water utility company responsible for sewage waste in your area. But first you’ll have to establish where the main sewer is and plan your route to it. The starting point for this will be in the results from your drainage search, which is usually carried out as part of your initial site investigations before buying the land. In urban situations the location is normally quite obvious, but utility records are often poor and you may not be able to get full clarity until the supplier has actually been to site, and this means a formal application. So, plan to contact their Developer Services team with a predevelopment enquiry. This will involve a fee, but it will confirm the main sewer capacity and intended location. This will be subject to a second formal connection application, when you are ready to start the build. If there is no main sewer option then you will be left with an off-mains drainage solution. The options are a septic tank (not so common these days), a treatment tank (much more likely) or a cess pool as a last resort due to their cost of emptying.
Surface water drainage