If you recall from the previous post about when we purchased the property we were required to put $3K down for use in disconnecting the gutters from the sewer. For whatever reason the quotes we got to do this were astronomical ($2K was the cheapest), so definitely something that was easier to do ourselves.

Some places it may be possible to simply cap the sewer pipe off where the gutter connects to it above ground and call it a day. In this borough; however, they run a camera up the line you and you need to disconnect it where it connects to your sewer main! I am guessing because they have problems with people simply reconnecting them after the inspection when doing the cap method. This means we had to figure out where it connected. The borough workers were able to give us a general idea but it still took some work to figure out where. The first thing we did was go in the basement and identify where the sewer line exited the house and then found the same spot outside. We dug down to make sure we found the pipe and which direction it headed. Once we did that we used a soil probing tool (https://www.homedepot.com/p/Bully-Tools-48-in-Soil-Probe-with-Steel-T-Style-Handle-and-Sharpened-Tip-99203/205348127) to kind of follow the line hoping to see where it connected.

Unfortunately we found it ran right into a giant concrete retaining wall and ran through that all the way to the main at the road. Then we started from the gutter pipe and found this seemed to head straight into the same concrete wall. So we started digging, we dug starting from where the downspout connected all the way to the concrete wall, by hand since it was only about 10 ft. Once we got that all dug up we found a hole in the concrete and a T connecting the pipe to the main.

It was old clay pipe on both pipes so we smashed it away and pulled out the pipe leaving some of the pipe sticking out of the main so we had something to attach too. Next we took one of those Fernco rubber couplings (https://www.homedepot.com/p/Fernco-4-in-x-4-in-PVC-DWV-Mechanical-Flexible-Coupling-P1056-44/100372298) and a PVC cap to cap off the end of the T. Before filling it in we called the borough worker over to make sure this was acceptable and to get him to sign off so we could get our $3K back! He was all good with it, so next we just needed to run the downspout somewhere else.

This property was right in town and had city water, but since it was so old there was still a well on site and it just so happened to be an open well right next to the trench we had just dug! So i figured the simple solution was just to dig a few extra feet and run the downspout right into this well! Had we not been able to do this we would have had to just knock some concrete out in the retaining wall above where we had disconnected the original pipe and stuck the pipe through to drain to the street. This concrete was about 2 ft thick though, so we didn’t want to go that route.

The final thing to do was to get some corrugated black pipe and lay it in our trench to route the downspout water right into the well and then cover it up with dirt! All in all it was maybe half a day’s work for me and a buddy to dig up all the piping and rebury it. Well worth the $3K in savings!!!