Top 5 Outdoor Drainage Jobs to Do Before Winter Rain

From gutters to gullies and soggy lawns, here are five outdoor drainage jobs worth ticking off this autumn - before the winter rain arrives.

There is a short window every autumn when the weather is still kind enough to get things done outside, and the wet months are close enough to make it worth bothering. Mid-October, with the leaves coming down in earnest, sits more or less in the middle of it.

Everything on this list happens outdoors, and every one of these jobs is far easier now than it will be in January with water already pooling where it shouldn’t. None of it is glamorous. But the difference between a house that shrugs off a wet winter and one that develops a damp patch, a stained wall or a flooded patio usually comes down to a handful of small jobs that either got done in the autumn or didn’t. Here are the five worth putting on the list.

1. Clear the Gutters Once the Leaves Are Down

If you do only one thing, do this one - and time it properly. Clearing the gutters in early October, while half the leaves are still on the trees, means doing the job twice. Wait until most of them are down and you get one clean pass.

It matters more than people assume, because a blocked gutter doesn’t overflow tidily onto the lawn. Water backs up, spills over the edge and runs down the face of the wall instead of away from it. Three things follow: damp patches appear on the inside of external walls, render and paintwork get stained and eventually spoiled, and the ground hard against the foundations stays saturated all winter - which is the last place you want standing water sitting for months.

How much you can do yourself depends on the house. A bungalow or a single-storey extension is usually manageable from the ground with a telescopic gutter tool and some patience. A two-storey wall, a roof edge, or anything that has you reaching sideways off a ladder is where most people should stop - working at height is the point at which clearing gutters stops being a chore and becomes a genuine risk. That is when it is worth having professional gutter clearance done instead: it is typically carried out with a powerful vacuum system worked from the ground, with a camera on the pole so the operator can see what they are doing at roof level. No ladder, no climbing, and a good deal quicker than doing it by hand.

2. Lift the Drain Covers and Clear the Gullies

This is the job almost nobody does, and it is the one that makes the first job actually work.

At the bottom of most downpipes sits a gully - a small open drain, usually with a grid over it, where rainwater enters the drainage system. There will normally be another cover or two around the house. Over a year they silt up with leaves, moss, grit and whatever else has washed off the roof, and a gully half full of silt cannot take a winter’s worth of rain.

Checking one takes a minute. Lift the grid or cover - gloves on, and lift from the edge rather than levering it towards you. A healthy gully is clear, and water drains away freely when you pour a bucket down it. A blocked one shows standing water above its normal level, a tidemark up the sides, or a smell. Scoop out the leaves and silt with a trowel, bag it rather than washing it back in, and rinse the gully through.

The order is worth stressing: clearing the gutters but leaving the gully blocked simply moves the problem to the bottom of the pipe. Gutters first, gullies second, and the whole path from roof to drain is clear.

3. Work Out Where Your Rainwater Actually Goes

Most people genuinely don’t know, and finding out costs nothing more than a walk round the house.

Follow each downpipe down to the ground and see where it ends. Some discharge into a gully and from there into the drainage system. Others feed a soakaway - a buried pit or plastic crate system in the garden that lets rainwater disperse slowly into the surrounding soil. It is worth knowing which you have, because the failure modes are different. A blocked gully is an afternoon’s work. A soakaway that has silted up, was undersized from the start, or sits in heavy clay that won’t take the water is a different problem altogether, and it announces itself as a patch of lawn that stays soft and squelchy long after the rest of the garden has dried out.

The best diagnostic is free and takes ten minutes: go outside during or just after properly heavy rain and watch. Where does the water go, where does it slow down, and where does it stop and sit? Ten minutes in the wet will tell you more about your drainage than an hour of guessing from the kitchen window.

4. Sort the Soggy Patch Before It Becomes a Soggy Garden

Not everything that goes wrong with rainwater happens inside a pipe. A good deal of it happens on the surface, and autumn is the time to deal with it.

There are four usual culprits, and they are easy to spot once you know what you are looking at. Lawns compact over a summer of use and stop absorbing water, so rain sits on top instead of soaking in. Channel drains along the edge of a patio clog with grit and leaves until they are decorative rather than functional. Gravel channels and French drains run along a wall silt up until they no longer take anything. And occasionally a patio or path turns out to have been laid falling towards the house rather than away from it, which sends every downpour straight at the wall.

The first three you can deal with this month. Aerate a compacted lawn - a garden fork and some persistence, or a hollow-tine aerator if it is a large one. Clear out channel drains and gratings properly, not just the visible top layer. And rake out a gravel channel or French drain so that water can get into it again.

The fourth is more honest news than good news: a patio laid to the wrong fall is a proper job involving lifting and relaying. But it is far better to know that in October, while you can plan it and get quotes, than to work it out in February with a mop in your hand.

5. Get a Survey If the Same Problem Keeps Coming Back

The last one is a judgement call rather than a task, and it may be the most useful thing on the list.

One blockage is a blockage. The same blockage every autumn is a symptom. If you are clearing the same gully every few months, if an outside drain is persistently slow, or if water keeps rising in the same spot however often you clear it, then whatever is causing it hasn’t been dealt with - only its effects have.

It is usually one of three things. Tree roots find a way into a pipe joint and grow into the flow, catching everything that passes. A pipe cracks or partially collapses - common in older clay drainage - and the broken section traps debris. Or a joint displaces and lets silt wash in from the ground around it.

None of those can be diagnosed from the surface, which is why a camera survey earns its money when a problem is clearly recurring. An engineer puts a camera through the system, finds the actual defect and tells you where it is and how deep it sits. You then fix the cause once, rather than clearing the symptom indefinitely.

Ready for the Wet Months

Taken together, this is an afternoon’s work and a bit of attention - and that is rather the point. Gutters cleared, gullies clear, rainwater accounted for, surface water dealt with, and anything recurring properly investigated. That is a house that takes a wet British winter in its stride.

For the jobs that need equipment, or that go beyond what is safe to do from the ground, it is worth having a drainage firm you can call rather than searching in a hurry while water is already somewhere it shouldn’t be. BN Drainage, for instance, cover Bromley, London, Kent and the south-east with DBS-checked engineers, fixed prices and no call-out fee, and clear gutters using vacuum equipment on buildings up to four storeys - with round-the-clock cover for the occasions when something gives way at the worst possible moment.

Either way, the jobs are the same, and now is the time to do them. January is a miserable month in which to discover your gutters are full.