Drainage & Stormwater

A Khandallah owner once brought me photos of her back lawn under ten centimetres of water every time it rained hard, taken over three winters, timestamped, with a rough sketch of where the water was coming from. That file was one of the easier ones I dealt with, not because the fix was simple, but […]

I washed a moss-covered roof in Halswell a few years back, and the client rang a week later asking why the hydrangeas under the downpipe outlet had gone yellow. The answer was in the wash water, not the weather. Roof washing gets treated as a purely cosmetic job, get the moss and lichen off, make

A lot of the villas and bungalows around Gonville still have their original corrugated roofs, or a re-cover from decades back, and when the spouting finally gives up it is tempting to treat it as a simple swap: old gutter off, new one on, done in an afternoon. I have pulled enough failed replacement spouting

The call that stuck with me came in at six in the morning from a place in Mount Albert, the day after a southerly had come through with gusts over 100 km/h. A section of corrugated iron had peeled back near the ridge like the lid of a tin, and water was already tracking down

An Island Bay section I inspected sat at close to 30 degrees, with the house perched on a bench cut into the slope decades ago. The stormwater line ran downhill from the house in a dead straight trench, then simply stopped at a rusted grate half-buried in blackberry, thirty metres short of the street. Nobody

A 1920s villa in Newtown I inspected last year had a downpipe that ran, with real confidence, straight into a garden bed halfway up a 25-degree bank. Someone had clearly disconnected it from whatever it used to join years ago and never reconnected it to anything. The bank below was slumping in a shallow arc

The house I inspected in Rototuna last month had spouting that looked fine from the ground — straight, clean, freshly painted fascia behind it. It was only once I got the ladder up that the problem showed: a single downpipe serving nearly eleven metres of roof edge, with a valley feeding into it from a

I was under a house in Chartwell two winters ago, doing a pre-purchase crawl-space check, when I found a soakpit dug straight into peat. Whoever built it had backfilled the hole with the same black, greasy soil that came out of it — no scoria, no geotextile wrap — and the downpipe feeding it had