Drainage Services in Braintree

Braintree grew as a market and manufacturing town on the Rivers Brain and Pant, sitting on the boulder clay typical of north Essex, which is prone to significant seasonal shrink-swell movement that regularly disturbs older drainage joints. The historic core and Bocking retain Victorian clay pipe drainage, some of it combined, laid to serve terraces and larger villas whose gardens now contain mature, deep-rooted trees that add to the risk of pipe blockage.

Great Notley and other recent developments on the town's edge have modern plastic drainage systems with clearly separated foul and surface water, designed to cope better with the clay subsoil, though attenuation ponds and soakaways still need the ground to drain adequately, which boulder clay does slowly. Villages such as Rayne and Cressing include properties on septic tanks or small package treatment plants, where percolation testing is particularly relevant given the heavy local clay.

For Braintree properties we start with CCTV drain surveys to identify pipe material and the ground-movement damage common in boulder clay areas. High-pressure jetting deals effectively with root ingress and silt build-up in the town's older clay pipework, and no-dig relining suits many properties in the historic centre where digging up period frontages isn't desirable. For rural and semi-rural properties around Rayne and Cressing, we also carry out percolation testing to check septic drainage fields are performing adequately in the clay ground.