House purchase, sewer under house

[Rorschach]

Seller probably wouldn't budge on the price anyway, they are in too deep.

We offered on a house with problems (fixable, but expensive), the seller wouldn't budge with their silly asking price. We walked away, they are still trying to sell 2 years on.

 

[kevinlightfoot]

Don't trust anyone when buying your house,vendors ,solicitors,surveyors,estate agents are all out to part you from your money.I moved house 2 years ago and in the first week I found major faults that all the above had assured me did not exist we had a nightmare,I would walk away and consider myself lucky to have avoided a disaster.As for surveyors they charge the earth to give you a report that says we advise you to get this and that checked ,what the heck do we pay them for!Soliciters leave most of the work to unqualified secretaries who will get you in a right mess unless you double check everything yourself,vendors and estate agent will just blatantly lie,believe me I know from bitter experience don't trust any of them!

 

[Steliz]

Don't trust anyone when buying your house,vendors ,solicitors,surveyors,estate agents are all out to part you from your money.
Soliciters leave most of the work to unqualified secretaries who will get you in a right mess unless you double check everything yourself,vendors and estate agent will just blatantly lie,believe me I know from bitter experience don't trust any of them!

In my experience, I can't disagree with any of this and it also applies to selling a house.

 

[Noel]

Bear in mind that map may well surface again in a future search. As suggested earlier, barge pole.

 

[RogerS]

Don't trust anyone when buying your house,vendors ,solicitors,surveyors,estate agents are all out to part you from your money.I moved house 2 years ago and in the first week I found major faults that all the above had assured me did not exist we had a nightmare,I would walk away and consider myself lucky to have avoided a disaster.As for surveyors they charge the earth to give you a report that says we advise you to get this and that checked ,what the heck do we pay them for!Soliciters leave most of the work to unqualified secretaries who will get you in a right mess unless you double check everything yourself,vendors and estate agent will just blatantly lie,believe me I know from bitter experience don't trust any of them!

Mmmm...bit of a broad brush condemnation TBH. In my experience, estate agents are very variable, true. We sold two houses via Knight Frank and they did us proud. Another estate agent we contacted for one house seriously undervalued it just to get a quick sale.

Surveyors...you need to do your research. Again, variable, but we've always got pretty good ones TBH (even though their estimates as to the cost of remedial work can be awry sometimes).

Solicitors .. we've always had very good ones...always done the work themselves and with proper due diligence. I've also had some bad experiences with others commercially ending up, in one instance, taking a leading London Chancery Lane firm to the Taxing Master for over-charging. I won.

Vendor..the vendor of our current house has turned out to be pretty straight and open and honest to all the questions I posed him. Luck of the draw, I guess.

 

[SammyQ]

Hello. Fully understand your predicament; we, like you, saw a house we REALLY wanted but were apprehensive about for a few reasons akin to Bob's (Lons) comments.
My direct experience - as opposed to conjecture and guessing- is to advise you to make it a condition of sale/purchase that a drain camera is put in and a data record is made so that you can ACCURATELY plot the sewer course. I solved a similar mystery AND had three separate lines cleared in two hours, cost £150, three weeks ago on Friday.
The more sophisticated the 'mole' they have, the more chance you have of built-in GPS and the more accurate map you will have. We used one in my previous job, and it had over 100m capability in the cable and could turn up 'Wye' junctions.
Peace of mind and the satisfaction of being able to say 'it's this way' is going to cost very little in the scale of the overall cost of your house. Personally, I would be tempted to put such a survey in as a vendor-provided and funded clause in your contract AND stipulate that you are present for the execution of the survey. Mine is safe on a USB pen, backed up on my PC. The stick is in the 'emergency bag': papers we would grab-and-run-with in case of fire or flood.

Sam, paranoid to a fault....

 

[Jacob]

Had to do that here for a blocked drain. Plastic pipe plus mini camera fitting into the end and watching it on a TV monitor. Like a trip down a tunnel. At first it was floating bits of baked beans and sweetcorn but after 20ft there was just cr@p on the telly as usual.
Turned out the drain went into a soakaway and wasn't connected.
Then had to dig it out and connect. Wasn't as bad as you'd expect - only a thin layer of fresh stuff the rest well reduced to compost by masses of worms - which suggest composting lavs could be a good idea in these green environmental times.

 

[SammyQ]

Yup. Detail is good. You can see spiders webs, rootlets, cracks in piping, can even read manufacturing codes if they are still contrasty enough. We discovered circum £5k of lining work that was totally undocumented.
Sam

 

[AES]

Lons wrote, QUOTE: He may well be right even though it would be a lucky guess but a remark like that is flippant and irresponsible. UNQUOTE:

Yup personally agree 110%, but as you surely know by now, that's Jacob for you. IMO he should stay on that (IMO) silly BBC/EU rant thread thing.

 

[Jacob]

Lons wrote, QUOTE: He may well be right even though it would be a lucky guess but a remark like that is flippant and irresponsible. UNQUOTE:

Yup personally agree 110%, but as you surely know by now, that's Jacob for you. IMO he should stay on that (IMO) silly BBC/EU rant thread thing.

erewego more stupid remarks and feeble insults.
I chipped in on this post because I do know a bit about drains (not a lot) having dug and connected a few and have experience of plans being wrong, as the OP's may be. So I had something slightly useful to say, based on experience, but you obviously did not.
It does get tedious. If you haven't anything interesting, useful or even vaguely intelligent to post, why bother?

 

[AES]

QUOTE: .... slightly useful to say, based on experience, but you obviously did not. UNQUOTE:

Which is why I didn't post on the subject Jacob.

QUOTE: If you haven't anything interesting, useful or even vaguely intelligent to post, why bother?
It does get tedious. If you haven't anything interesting, useful or even vaguely intelligent to post, why bother? UNQUOTE:

As so often Jacob, you gast my flabber! "Ket, pottle, black" mate! "As SO often with you"!

 

[Jacob]

.... slightly useful to say, based on experience, but you obviously did not. U

Which is why I didn't post on the subject Jacob.
......

The subject of the thread is "House purchase, sewer under house".

Sorry about this folks but I get a lot of it but just from the same few.

 

[Noel]

AES, please, use the quote facility. DIY quotes (and unattributed) are not needed when we have the quote button.
Also, please stay on topic.

 

[Tasky]

I don't see the problem, myself...

We have tens of thousands of private properties built over public sewers, with rarely a problem and almost never beneath the actual property. Half of London is built like this.
It's more often the manholes surcharging due to blockages caused by customers dumping fat, nappies and a whole host of things you wouldn't believe. If you're worried about pipes under your house, look to your own private drainage and consider who built those.

You would like to think there would be a record of a main drain though #-o

Only if the developer bothered to file them (properly, if at all), and didn't do anything dodgy to get the build finished... which they often do, hence not filing them, hence water companies not knowing where certain pipes are.

This being a small local public sewer, I doubt there'd be much in the way of problems. It's also more likely that the map is accurate, as something that size would have been public for some time, if not always.

The water authority were often responsible before that if other people's sewers ran into yours. Section 28, iirc.

Section 24, but only from the point where the sewers of two distinct curtailages joined, and only if they were built after 1937.
More recently, Sections 102-105 have meant water companies adopted a great many more sewers, from the point at which the connection becomes shared, irrespective of land or curtailage.

I have no expertise in this subject but I would like to believe that a house would not be allowed to be built over an existing main sewer

Why not?
Many of the roads, railways, schools, churches and so on have already been built over them. Most cities would not exist if we didn't build like that.

From a sewer maintenance point of view it would be a nightmare for the water authority.

Why?
There are easily accessible manholes upstream and downstream, which would work fine even with large plant. *I* could probably park a tanker at either end. If anyone is having problems dealing with this, they don't belong in the industry... and would have a heart-attack if they worked on the railways!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Section 24, but only from the point where the sewers of two distinct curtailages joined, and only if they were built after 1937.

They were only responsible up to where ours joined the others in our garden. From when there was first a problem they told me they were responsible up to that point and from then on they jetted the main up to there every six months or so. The houses were built in 1899. This would have been 17 or 18 years ago.

 

[Tasky]

They were only responsible up to where ours joined the others in our garden.

Yup, still Section 24.
Basically from the point where the connection is shared by more than one 'defined property' (one house, one block of flats, etc). There are many other little oddities in terms of classification too, and we have a whole handbook dedicated to navigating our way around those definitions.

The houses were built in 1899. This would have been 17 or 18 years ago.

Section 24 is the basic rule. There are others though, such as Section 105 covering sewers for adoption, under which a water company can claim, accept, or be forced to accept responsibility for various other private sewers... depending on a variety of circumstances, and while we have another separate handbook for that one, we also have more than one legal department to figure it all out.

 

[whiskywill]

[There's English on one side and some sort of gobbledegook on the other "

Explain please.

 

[RogerS]

[There's English on one side and some sort of gobbledegook on the other "

Explain please.

Welsh !

 

[Akwoody2402]

Thanks for all the responses.

We did some digging which unfortunately did not elay our concerns.

Our surveyer explained he had never seen a house build slap bang on top of a public sewer. He didn’t say walk away but he recommended the camera search, especially as already a crack in the face of the house.

Solicitors had nothing to say about it

Passed this way and that by welsh water who at first wouldn’t divulge anything but then my wife got one chap on the phone who was quite the open book

The map is accurate and it is the main combined sewer for our village. It is a pressurised 10inch clay pipe put in the 60s. He also let slip that “something happened” in 2010...but then seemed to recall he shouldn’t be telling my wife anything and said no more. He was an engineer so one of the chaps we assume would be inv9lved with planning and such. He said we would not be able to extend to one side of the house, and very unlikely the front. He said the back would be possible but would depend on the depth of the pipe and soil conditions.

The above cemented our thinking and we have walked away, pretty gutting nd I now have a long long list of jobs to freshen up our house for the new baby.

Got a ton of abuse from the vendors (had my number and I let them know before we told our sols) I spoke to the husband and from that and a text from the wife they gave away the game, they definitely knew about this and had looked into development themselves. They had put on the paperwork “drains in the rear garden” and don’t seem able to accept that was misleading and everyone would have saved a lot of money if that had been up front. The fact the searches are backed up with welsh water just exacerbated the situation

So there you go...one more but of advise if possible

Solicitors fees, I am absolutely going to be paying those as they have done work for us BUT I paid them the money for searches in early November which they. Sat on till 18/12 at which point they requested the searches. I can’t think of any reason as to why they would have delayed, especially as they knew welsh water were taking some time. Is it unreasonable to suggest they “review” their costs given the delay in searches resulted in an. Delayed decision and hence the conveyancing progressing to a point it wouldn’t have normally. Or am I being unreasonable?

 

[RogerS]

....
Solicitors fees, I am absolutely going to be paying those as they have done work for us BUT I paid them the money for searches in early November which they. Sat on till 18/12 at which point they requested the searches. I can’t think of any reason as to why they would have delayed, especially as they knew welsh water were taking some time. Is it unreasonable to suggest they “review” their costs given the delay in searches resulted in an. Delayed decision and hence the conveyancing progressing to a point it wouldn’t have normally. Or am I being unreasonable?

I don't quite follow you here ..

Sat on till 18/12 at which point they requested the searches. I can’t think of any reason as to why they would have delayed, especially as they knew welsh water were taking some time.

I thought that contacting the water company was one of the searches and so what you're saying re the WW delay doesn't make sense to me.

But...if they ploughed on doing a whole raft of other stuff such as local council searches etc then you could argue that that work was wasted and therefore why should you pay. No harm in challenging their fees.

I think you made the right decision though regarding the house.