East Auckland
Blocked Drains Saint Heliers
Saint Heliers houses get renovated often. The drain under them usually does not.
East Auckland
Saint Heliers houses get renovated often. The drain under them usually does not.
Saint Heliers is established bayside housing — bungalows from the 1920s onward on well-treed sections, with a good proportion still running original jointed drainage. The recurring theme here is renovation: properties where the interior plumbing has been replaced two or three times while the lateral from the gully trap to the boundary remains exactly as laid, because it is underground, expensive to reach and easy to leave alone.
This is the Saint Heliers pattern more than any other. The bays have seen substantial redevelopment — extensions, new bathrooms, reconfigured kitchens, whole rebuilds — and in the great majority of cases the work stopped at the gully trap. Everything visible got replaced; the twenty-five metres of earthenware running to the boundary did not.
So we regularly camera a lateral under an immaculately renovated house and find pipe from the 1920s with fine roots at three joints. Nobody was cutting corners — replacing a functioning underground lateral during a kitchen renovation is a hard thing to justify. But it means the age of the house tells you very little here, and the age of the drain has to be established separately.
The bays bring sandier ground in places than the clay further inland, and pipe bedded in sand settles differently over decades — generally more evenly, but with its own failure characteristics where material has migrated. It is one of the reasons we prefer to camera rather than assume in this part of the city.
Saint Heliers has significant mature planting, including pōhutukawa and other established specimens. As everywhere, the roots only enter through a defect that already exists — and sealing the pipe keeps the tree, which for a mature bays specimen is generally the outcome everybody wants.
Local conditions
The interior has been redone twice; the pipe to the boundary is still the one laid in the 1920s.
Where renovations replaced part of a run, the joins between old and new are often where the trouble concentrates.
Mature specimens including pōhutukawa finding whatever joint has opened first.
We cover Saint Heliers and the neighbouring bays — Saint Heliers itself, Glendowie, Kohimarama, Mission Bay and the streets running up towards Glen Innes and Ōrākei.
If your property has been renovated or extended, it is worth telling us roughly when and what was done. On a bays property that history often explains what we are about to find under it.
A Saint Heliers blockage affecting only your property sits on the private lateral, which is the owner's. If wastewater is surfacing in the street as well, ring Watercare on (09) 442 2222, option 1 — that one is theirs, not yours. Full guide to who pays for what.
Frequently not. Renovations commonly replace the plumbing inside the house while leaving the original lateral from the gully trap to the boundary untouched — that section is underground, expensive to access and easy to defer. A camera survey is the only way to know what you actually have out there, and on a bays property the answer is often considerably older than the kitchen.
They can, like any established tree, though they are less notorious than liquidambar, plane or willow. The rule is the same regardless of species: roots enter through a defect that already exists. Sealing the entry point resolves it and keeps the tree — which for a mature bays pōhutukawa is generally what everyone wants, and in some cases what protection rules require.
It can be, and it is one of the things we look at specifically here. Joins between materials of different ages and diameters are where steps, misalignment and deformation tend to concentrate. On a property that has been renovated in stages, the junctions are often more informative than the runs between them.
On an older bays property, yes — and ideally before rather than after the new terrace goes down. Building over a drain makes every future repair dramatically more expensive, and a failing lateral discovered afterwards is an expensive sequence of events. Tracing the line and assessing condition first costs a fraction of that.
However recently the house was done up, the drain underneath may be a century old. A camera pass settles it in an hour.