Top tips for maintaining your drainage system

Investing time and effort into the maintenance of your drainage system can pay dividends in the long term. Blocked drainage can cause huge problems for businesses, leading to costly repairs and even business downtime or closure.

Ponding around drains and puddles within a car park can see customers performing a U-turn and going elsewhere, a well-maintained car park provides an excellent first impression of your site and no soggy feet.

The following simple tips will help to keep your drainage system in great shape and avoid any costly pitfalls.

1. Follow a schedule of planned drainage maintenance

We all know that proper planning prevents poor performance, but an efficient maintenance plan for your onsite drainage system can really save the busy FM a lot of headaches.

Planned maintenance can be as straightforward as a simple visual inspection but is often combined with more complex internal inspection on a less frequent basis.

Ultimately, a planned maintenance drainage plan will help to reduce high-cost emergency plumbing and avoid unplanned expenditure. More importantly, it will help keep a site compliant by avoiding any health and safety issues that may arise, while avoiding loss of business revenue due to overflowing drains, blockages or faulty toilets.

2. Remove Debris from drainage grates

Over time, channel drains can become clogged up with soil, leaves and other debris which can render the drain ineffective. The good thing about these types of drains is that they are relatively simple to clean, and gratings can usually be removed without the need for specialist equipment.

Any build-up of debris can normally be done by hand before flushing the channel to clear the silt. If you have a plastic grating be careful so as not to blast the drains too much, a gentle pressure should clean the channels out enough to be functional.

While this is a year-round task, obviously there are certain seasons, such as Autumn and Winter, and periods of inclement weather, where inspections should be more frequent.

Keeping on top of tree surgery, pruning and general site landscaping can also help here, as debris from unpruned trees, plants and bushes is one of the leading causes of drain blockages.

3. Watch for signs or ponding or sink areas

Water ponding occurs when an uneven surface allows water to collect in one or multiple locations instead of being adequately drained away. In light rain, this is not too much of a hazard, however, storm water can very quickly accumulate with sustained or heavy rain, fast becoming a dangerous nuisance for your site users to navigate.

The principal cause of an undulating surface is a poorly integrated drainage system. These often come in the form of a grated pit and pipe system which are reliant on pavement gradients to drain any surface water. Typically seen in car parks, you will often see numerous grated pits spread out over its surface.

As previously mentioned, these grated drains are relatively easy to access and inspect, and should be subject to regular cleaning. However, sweeping your car park and removing any debris such as stones, leaves and mud that can cause blockages is definitely easier than subsequently removing this debris from the drain.

4. Using CCTV surveys after works

While regular visual inspections can help identify external blockages and things like leaf and debris build up around manhole covers or downpipes it is often best to conduct a specialist drain survey using CCTV camera equipment in order to inspect a site’s pipe network.

Adopting the latest CCTV technology can provide you with a clearer picture of your drainage system. This is a quick, accurate and cost-effective method of inspection that causes minimum disruption. It works by using specially designed drain inspection cameras, which trawl your drain channels beneath the ground, delivering live pictures back to our operators.

5. Use the latest technology to minimise site disruption

Once any issues have been identified it is then possible to determine the best cause of action, such as rodding or high-pressure water jetting.

CCTV drain inspections can also help identify where repairs are necessary. In such circumstances OUTCO is able to deploy the latest no-dig pipe repair and relining technology, removing the need for costly and disruptive site excavation.