Note on legislation: This section describes Czech legislation and Czech administrative practice. Treat it as general orientation only and always verify the current requirements with the relevant Czech building or water authority.
If you have a public sewer at hand, and it is not far, and it is not behind twenty foreign lands, a railway, and a rock, join it. You will pay sewerage, but with the exception of no electricity, you will not have to worry about anything, repair anything, export, clean, .... Attention, the sewage system must end with a wastewater treatment plant. If it only ends in a so-called free outlet, only clean water can enter it, and the construction of a domestic wastewater treatment plant (or cesspool) will not spare you.
Characteristics
Advantages
- You don't have to worry about anything (it doesn't have to apply to pressure or vacuum drainage)
- Your water will probably be cleaned better than you could at home
- The least space-consuming solution
- You do not buy or operate any equipment (tank, blower, pump, .... - unless you need to pump water into the sewer)
Cons
- Sewerage must be paid
- If it is necessary to pump your wastewater into the sewer, the care of the pump is necessary, costs also arise for electricity
When is this solution appropriate
In this case, the heading should be more like "When this solution is not suitable". These are cases where the sewer is located far from you (e.g. you live alone), or behind a terrain obstacle (e.g. a rock; a wide watercourse; the sewer runs high on a hill and you live below it, etc.). Connection is not possible even if you fail to get the landowner to agree to the location of the connection. You may not connect even if the treatment plant does not have free capacity to treat additional water (although this happens only very, very rarely) and the operator will therefore give you a disapproving opinion.
In all other cases, a connection to the sewer is appropriate, and the water authority would not even allow you to set up a wastewater treatment plant (the building authority could allow a cesspool if you could prove that it would be better than the sewer in your particular case).
Procedure
How to connect to public sewage? The universal procedure is roughly as follows: First of all, it is necessary to find out who operates the sewage system (it is the one to whom people pay sewerage). The operator will officially tell you where the sewer runs if you don't know. It will also tell you if the sewerage and treatment plant has sufficient capacity to connect another property and what the connection conditions are. Also contact the administrator of other possible networks (gas, electricity, telephone, internet, ...) and ask them for a diagram of the networks.
If the operator agrees to the connection, it is necessary to find a designer of water management structures and discuss with him the details of the connection, especially where it is best to run the channel with regard to the terrain and local networks, and whether the water will flow into the sewers by gravity, or it will have to be pumped.
Next, you need to find out who owns the land between you and the sewer. If they are yours, you win, if not, you must obtain written consent from each owner to place the connection and establish an easement to it. This can be a real pain. In addition, owners may have other requirements that must be incorporated into the project. The sewerage itself is usually conducted on the land of the city or municipality, his or her consent is also necessary. The owner's written consent stating the conditions for the construction of the connection must also be obtained if you have to cross a road, stream, etc.
What follows is obtaining an endless amount of papers to confirm that network managers such as gas, electricity, etc. agree with your solution. Written approval for the project must also be issued by the sewage operator.
To this pile of papers (design, sewer operator statement, network manager statements and landowner consents), add the application required under current Czech building law. The older term “zoning approval” may no longer match the current procedure, so verify the exact regime for the connection with the local building authority or your designer.
Once the necessary consents and permits are in place, construction can start according to the design and the conditions of the sewerage operator.
You can build the connection to the gravity sewer, unless otherwise stated in some conditions, with the help of a professional company or by yourself. However, the actual connection to the sewage system must be carried out either directly by the operator's employees or by a specialist company. If you are connecting to a pressure or vacuum sewer, it is better to leave the construction to the experts. Don't forget that the sewer operator usually requires a geodetic survey of the location of the new connection, so invite a surveyor for the connection if the sewer operator does not send one.