Drainage Work in Banbury, priced in writing before anything starts.
Drainage around Banbury raises a question that does not arise in a town: a good number of properties in these villages are not on a public sewer at all.
Where a house drains to a septic tank or a package treatment plant, the rules are different and they have tightened. A septic tank discharging directly to a watercourse is no longer acceptable, and where that arrangement exists it has to be replaced with a treatment plant or the discharge redirected to a drainage field. If you are extending, adding bathrooms or increasing occupancy, the capacity of what you already have becomes a live question rather than a background one.
That matters at the design stage, because an extension that adds two bedrooms to a house on a tank that is already at its limit is not just a building project. We raise it at survey rather than at completion.
Surface water on the ironstone is its own question. A soakaway only works if the ground accepts water at a useful rate, and on stone and clay ground that is a site by site answer rather than an assumption. A percolation test costs very little next to a soakaway that fills in autumn and stays full.
In town, where properties are on the public sewer, building over or close to a run that belongs to the water company needs consent granted before the concrete goes in. Our drainage work page covers surveys, repairs and new connections.
Four things we commit to on every job, rather than four things we say about ourselves.
Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations. We arrange the Cherwell District Council inspections, meet the inspector on site at each stage and see the work through to sign off. We do not make the application itself, and we will tell you what is needed and when.
Free, and you get it before you commit to us. Party walls and skip licences are raised at quotation stage, not three weeks into the dig.
The same people do the groundworks, the brickwork and the fit out. Nobody hands your job to a subcontractor you have never met.
You get a straight answer rather than a padded price. It costs us a job occasionally and saves you a great deal more.
Process, specification and what moves the price are set out on our drainage work page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Banbury street to the next.
Every connection is tested before it is covered and recorded on a drawing you keep. On a village property with a private system that record is genuinely valuable, because the location of a drainage field is exactly the thing nobody can remember when it matters.
Excavating for drainage in ironstone ground is harder work than in clay and produces more spoil that will not compact back. We price the ground we expect and tell you what would change it.
Where a run crosses a neighbour’s land, which on village plots is common, the permissions are agreed before the spade goes in.
Where a property runs on a private treatment system we will tell you plainly if the extension you want takes it past its rated capacity, because that is far cheaper to hear at the survey than at sign off.
Part of our wider building work in Banbury.
Send photographs and a rough brief, or call and talk it through. We will tell you if a job is not right for us.
Southfield Construction (Rugby) Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company 14209138.
