I came across an interesting idea recently concerning the pipe that takes water collected from your roof underground & out to the road side gutter.
If you need to install a new pipe, choose a PVC pipe. Before you install it, drill decent sized holes along the sides & bottom of the pipe. Doing so will allow some of the rainwater to travel out of the pipe into the ground & water nearby street trees. You can make the pipe more effective by laying the pipe in a bed of blue metal rocks & partially bury it with more blue metal rocks. This will make it easier for the stormwater to move out from the pipe & into the surrounding soil.
This is such an easy idea to use water that is usually wasted to water street trees. They will thank you for it.
January 2011 – I have since see this done an even better way. Everything was done as above, but with one exception. The end of the pipe was blocked off so that no water entered the gutter. All the stormwater from the roof was kept in the verge. In this case the verge had been planted out & there was no grass. I think in this case the stormwater found easy entry into the ground because the soil had been dug & aerated. If it was an ordinary grass verge that has been untouched for years, I would imagine that it would be hard for all the stormwater to enter the ground because the soil would be compacted.
If I had a vegetables growing in the verge I would try blocking the pipe. If I was doing this to water a street tree & the surrounding verge was concrete or grass & the ground was likely to be compacted, I’d leave the end of the pipe open.
4 comments
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January 31, 2012 at 12:50 pm
TimH
Tree roots will seek out the pipe and block it over time. It may seem like a good idea, but not sustainable in the long term.
An alternative would be a downpipe diverter.
January 31, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Jacqueline
Thanks for your comment Tim. Maybe so, but it would be worth the trouble for the time that it lasts.
May 22, 2015 at 1:57 pm
Paul
The answer is to use imaginative drain design to channel the water to trees. This has been done for many decades in Western Australia. See the “Water sensitive urban design” page on the WA Dept of Water. They have brochures to download showing real-life examples of how they not only save water, but use it to water plants.
http://www.water.wa.gov.au/Managing+water/Urban+water/Water+Sensitive+Urban+Design+brochures/default.aspx
May 27, 2015 at 5:09 pm
Saving Our Trees
Thank you Paul. This is a great resource. 🙂