Overflowing Downpipe

holidayinn

Hi all, during heavy rain the external shared (my responsibility) rainwater downpipe overflows. It’s a metal/iron downpipe into a concreted gutter. I’m not sure it can be opened without breaking it apart.

I think the leaking could be due to two issues –

Blockage in the bend into underground clay pipe feeding into sewer

Or Breakage in the underground clay pipe resulting in blockage

First question – if there was a break in the underground pipe, could that result in water overflow at the top of the house? I would have thought this would lead to ground flooding instead?

Second question – what steps should I take? I was looking into a CCTV survey.

Will try to add pics in due course.

FreeBear

I have had, at various times, blockages in my guttering & drainage. In all cases, water would overflow the guttering..

Leaves & moss blocking bends at the top of the downpipe - Not that difficult to unblock, but does need a long ladder (preferably with a stand-off).

Tree roots blocking underground drainage - Required digging up and replacing the blocked pipe. Recently fitted an interceptor gully at the bottom of the downpipe to make it easier to clear any future blockages.

Bigphil1474

Worth checking if the underground pipe is the responsibility of the water board. We had one in our front garden that was seemingly leaking for a long time due to damage. Caused the bay of our house to move forward an inch and over £25k worth of subsidence repairs via insurance. The Insurance company got the water board to fix the pipe first.

Having said that, I would have thought an overflowing downpipe is more like how Freebear describes. We just cleaned one of our downpipes out that we realised was running slow, it had about a foot of thick mud and leaves blocking it at the bottom.

stuhse

First port of call is the simple / cheap one.  Feed a running  hose pipe down the pipe as far as you can, good chance it will be just moss/leaves, and that will be enough to flush it through.

Have a look at where the sewer runs, chances are there will be manhole covers you can lift to check if its running through.  As you say its old style cast down pipes sounds like your house is not new and chances are its a combined system sewer.