188

Gutters on stone v. wood.

because they fit close against the wall, especially if they are in a corner. Lead ones are sure to get kicked or damaged in time and droop from their own weight. It is sometimes necessary to cut through deep string courses in order to avoid quick turns in the spouts, which get choked up. I have known all the spouts round a church have to be altered and the strings cut through for this. I need hardly say that all the drains ought to be planned beforehand, and not left to take their chance afterwards.

Gutters of roofs within a parapet are generally laid on boards supported by cross pieces of wood, and many a building, including the choir roof of Canterbury lately, has been burnt down from that cause, when plumbers were mending the roof and set their firegrate on the gutters. Besides that, the wood rots and the gutters sink; so that this ingenious contrivance has the double chance of destroying the building by fire and water. At Doncaster church accordingly I had all the gutters laid upon stone, which costs no more, and is perfectly solid. But even then all gutters within parapets involve more risk of water getting in than spouts outside, and require constant attention to keep the outlets free. So indeed do all spouts: their great enemies are birds and vegetation. I have seen a tree growing out of a spout between two roofs of a church in a place not visible from below. Indeed I hardly know what I have not seen in the way of neglect and decay in the upper parts of churches notwithstanding all the fuss that is made about their restoration and decoration. Archdeacons and rural deans should be men of capacity for ascending bad staircases and ladders, and should cultivate an eye for defects,' in which too many architects as well as archdeacons are sadly deficient.

Tanks and Cisterns.-There are very few places, out

Water-gathering.

189

side of public waterworks supply, where it is not necessary to provide large tanks for rain water. Even where there is well water not too hard to drink, softer water is almost sure to be wanted for all other domestic purposes, and there are few places which are lucky enough to have it. And though moderately hard water is generally nicer to drink than filtered rain water, very hard water is injurious to many people. If rain water drops through a good height from the filter it gets sufficiently aerated again to be pleasant to drink. The idea that it is dangerously soft, for want of lime, is refuted by abundant experience. In some places where all the water is quite free from lime, the natives are anything but deficient in the size of their bones. They get as much lime as is wanted into the system from other foods. The provisions for storing water are generally shamefully deficient. I know a great house where the architect employed to put it in order deliberately turned all the spouts into an adjacent river which is too dirty to use, and built a huge water tower and machinery to pump up water which is too hard to use.

It is a generally accepted rule that nearly every country house (which are more spread out and catch much more water than town ones) catches as much water as its inmates want, if it is all stored and not wasted. Allowing for evaporation and the loss of showers too small to produce any run of water, 18 in. of rainfall is the most that can be reckoned upon in the districts of average English rainfall-less in the east and more in the west. And as consumption goes on concurrently with rainfall, tanks which will hold as many cubic feet as the square feet covered by the house must be enough to avoid any waste, or to keep store enough for the dry part of the year. It is true that much more

190

Tanks and cisterns.

water is used now than formerly, and I doubt if the above rule will hold for houses which contain a good many people for their area all the year round. But a friend of mine has proved it to be true for his cottages, for which he has built tanks in a place where there is no other water, and I have heard of it being found true in moderately large ones, though of course it will depend on whether there is any check on waste. Where there is, 2 cubic feet a day per head is quite enough for mere domestic use.

There is one way in which a great deal of waste may be prevented, and that is by having the watercloset cisterns supplied by clean (i.e. not soapy) bath water, instead of treating it as 'slops.' Those on the ground floor can easily be so managed by having a special sink from the bedroom floor to their cisterns; and for the others (or for all of them) that water may as well be pumped as any others, from a cistern in the ground made for that purpose. It may be expedient to have a subsidiary supply from elsewhere in case that is insufficient; but the baths of the bedrooms will be generally sufficient for the W.C.'s on the ground floor.

It is also very desirable in planning a house to have one or more cast iron tanks just below the roof, so as to gain at any rate a large quantity of rain water without any pumping. The amount of it must depend on circumstances, and on the space that can be afforded. Sometimes a tank can be put over a passage, as described at p. 129, or some back room where height is of no consequence, without sacrificing a whole room or enlarging the ground floor of the house, especially where there are three stories in the back and two in front. In other cases it is well worth while to build one outside on walls strong enough to carry it: the space under

Their Width and Depth.

191

neath can always be utilized for something, such as coals. It is now well known that cast iron is better in every respect for cisterns than wrought iron, and you can have no other material on a large scale beyond the size of slates. Cast iron joints too never leak after they are once caulked with iron cement rusted. The only place for very large tanks is underground; and most architects seem to delight in showing their superiority to the laws of nature and mathematics by building them rectangular, so that the earth, which is practically a kind of fluid twice as heavy as water and nearly 2000 times as heavy as air (which occupies the empty part of the tank) is always trying to break them inwards; whereas if they are round the pressure of the earth only tends to squeeze the walls together and keep them tight. Another common mistake is to make them too deep, forgetting that an increase of depth by one third, as from 6 to 8 ft. only increases the capacity a third, but an increase of diameter of one third increases the capacity in the proportion of 9 to 16, or not far from double, and also requires no more lift in pumping, which increased depth does. The greatest capacity for a given quantity of walling, including the top and bottom, is where the diameter and depth are equal. It is expedient to make the bottom slightly concave or domed downwards to counteract the bursting pressure of the earth upwards, or what is the same thing, the desire of the walls to sink in loose soils.

In hard chalk no walls are necessary. My friend whom I spoke of just now makes his tanks by merely cementing the chalk and doming over the top, no walls being requisite for carrying the dome, and he says they are found sufficient; and that it is better not to have pumps for cottages, but to give them the trouble of

192

Tanks in the ground,

getting out the water with a bucket, as it makes the people less wasteful.

Generally however walls must be built for tanks. It seems that a common 9 inch wall cemented inside is enough, unless the cement cracks, of which there is always some risk. It must be safer to build the walls with cement than lime, or at any rate with hydraulic or lias lime, which does not perish with damp; and better still to back them up with about a foot of concrete. In that case a 4′′ wall is enough, being only wanted to form a case or centre for the concrete. I have known a tank cracked by roots of trees pressing a bit of wall inwards, and the concrete would probably resist that. For the same reason trees must unfortunately be kept away from artificial ponds, or the roots will perforate the 'puddle' and let the water out, though trees are useful in preventing evaporation from natural ponds and so repay much more than their roots steal from the water. All tanks for domestic, and not merely for garden use, should have a preliminary filtering chamber divided by a slate or plate nearly down to the bottom, which is covered with about a foot of fine gravel, not sand, through which the water has to descend and ascend under the flag. This saves having to clean 'out the whole tank frequently, the filtering gravel, or perhaps only the top of it, requiring to be taken out and washed clean again. The filtering chamber need not be so deep as the whole tank, and so that water can remain in the tank while the filter is being cleaned. This is more important for underground tanks than for high ones which can be let off by taking up the waste pipe.

Pipes freezing.-Pipes exposed to frost, either outside a house or in very cold places inside, are certain to