Ironbridge · TF8

Soakaway Installation & Repair in Ironbridge

Percolation testing, drainage field design, and installation or repair of soakaways for septic tanks and treatment plants. Serving Ironbridge and the surrounding villages, including Coalbrookdale, Coalport, Madeley, Buildwas.

Call 01743 562954 Describe your problem

Photo: Colin · CC BY-SA 4.0

The soakaway, properly called a drainage field when it serves a septic tank or treatment plant, is where your system finally hands the water back to the ground. It is also the component that fails most expensively, because a clogged or collapsed drainage field usually means excavation and fresh land.

Soakaways in the Ironbridge Gorge deserve a blunter warning than percolation figures alone would give. Concentrating surface or treated water into a slope is one of the recognised triggers for movement on ground like this, and these are slopes with a documented, in places active, history of landslip. The Coal Measures clays percolate poorly to begin with, made ground and old mine workings make results unrepresentative from one hole to the next, and the council expects development in the mapped instability zones to be backed by a stability report. On many gorge plots the honest answer is that a soakaway is the wrong solution and a discharge arrangement is the right one.

Mains sewerage reaches the main gorge settlements, but the properties strung along the valley sides and the farms on the plateau above frequently do not have it. Cottages built for ironworkers and tile makers, converted works buildings and isolated houses up the side valleys run on private systems, many of them old, undocumented and inherited with the house.

How soakaway installation and repair works, in full →

Ground conditions around Ironbridge

The gorge cuts through Coal Measures: an interleaved sequence of clays, mudstones, siltstones, sandstones, limestones and coal, much of it disturbed by three centuries of mining and tipping. Made ground and old workings are common, so what a trial hole finds a few metres away may say very little about the ground under the tank.

Watercourses and the rules around Ironbridge

The Severn runs the length of the gorge, and the steep tributary valleys feed it directly and quickly. There is very little distance and even less time between a failing system on these slopes and the river, in a valley whose water quality is watched closely on both environmental and heritage grounds.

What the service includes

Percolation tests to BS 6297 with written results
Drainage field design sized to occupancy and measured soil performance
Full installation with distribution pipework and correct aggregate
Investigation of failed soakaways, including whether the fault is the field or the tank upstream
Repairs, extensions and full replacements
Advice on alternatives where the ground genuinely will not percolate

Around Ironbridge

As well as Ironbridge itself, the surrounding villages and farms are covered, including Coalbrookdale, Coalport, Madeley, Buildwas, Leighton, Sutton Maddock, Beckbury, Ryton, Barrow, Kemberton. If you are somewhere smaller or somewhere between, get in touch anyway.