Soak aways

[Mimi]

Any one have any advice on soakaways?  When I dug my pond i have laid a pipe at one side ready for draining away excess water(I live in Wales remember) Land of song and p**sing down rain for most of the year.  So back to the question:-  how big does it have to be.  Initial thoughts are about 1 square metre but I am not too sure.  Cand anyone help?

[Mimi]

[Doris_Pinks]

A square meter sounds enormous to me Mimi! You building a lake??!!  :o  The pond I built my parents, has a 1-2inch overflow pipe, which seems to cope well, but then I am not in watery Wales! ;)  I am sure someone out there will be able to give you better advice ;D DP

[Mimi]

 ;D ;D Not quite Doris but if you look on the gallery page 4 'Here goes nothing ' that will give you an idea of the size of the pond.  The drain pipe is to the right of the bog garden at the top of the picture.

[Hugh_Jones]

But why do you want to drain away the surplus water from  the pond to a soakaway? Surely that`s the purpose of the bog garden.

[Mimi]

Hugh, it is because we  have so much rain here that in the winter the pond and bog garden would overflow into the garden.We also plan to have the drain water from the roof of the garage, drain into the pond.  So a lot of water to get rid of.

[Hugh_Jones]

Yes, I see your point Mimi, but think of it this way. If you get an inch of rain on your pond in a few hours, and you rely on a pond overflow, that`s a lot of water to lose in a short time.  However, if the pond overflows into the bog a lot of the water will be temporarily absorbed in the bog, and will be released much more slowly over a much longer period, so you would only need a smaller soakaway for the bog to cope with it.

After all, that is precisely what happens to the rainfall in the Scottish Western Highlands, which often have greater rainfall even than Wales.  There are no flash floods there, but the bogs absorb the rainfall and then release it slowly into the streams so that they run even in dry weather (probably happens the same in the welsh mountains too).