Plumber Hopeland

Hopeland WA 6125, Shire of Serpentine-Jarrahdale. About 45 km south-east of the Perth CBD.

Hopeland is a small rural locality in the Shire of Serpentine-Jarrahdale about forty-five kilometres south-east of the Perth CBD, established in the 1920s as one of the group settlement blocks on the Peel Estate. A few hundred people live here on rural land with no commercial centre. For a plumber that means unsewered blocks on septic, bores and tanks for supply, and flat ground where a century-old drainage network still decides where water can go.

• Flat ground with almost no fallHopeland sits on the coastal plain with very little natural slope, which is why the district was drained artificially when it was settled. Stormwater and leach drainage here have to connect into that system, because a soak well on its own often has nowhere to discharge.
• A water table that rises in winterGround that copes in February can be saturated in July, and a leach drain with no capacity left is the result. Septic systems on these blocks want sizing and servicing for the wet season rather than the dry one.
• Bores, tanks and the pumps behind themHousehold water comes from a bore or from tanks, so the pump, the pressure vessel and the filtration are the parts that fail. Hard bore water also scales hot water elements and tapware faster than scheme supply would.
• Very long private service runsOn rural blocks this size the run between the supply and the house is measured in hundreds of metres. A leak anywhere along it surfaces wherever the ground allows, so electronic location saves digging a paddock to find it.