where does the water from gutters go?
From roof gutters it goes down downspouts and then usually into the ground, but I assume you are asking about gutters at the sides of the road.
That water goes down drains and into sewers. Some places have combined storm sewers and sanitary sewers, so the water goes to processing plants. If a city has separate storm and sanitary sewers, the former usually empty into a lake, river, or other natural waterway.
NM
It goes down a pipe, and then is spread out onto the ground, or taken underground to a drywell or an outlet somewhere else. The concentration of rain water from a whole roof onto the ground below the eaves rapidly erodes unprotected ground, causes splashing on the walls if the eaves are short, and creates standing water or mud if it’s not carried off somewhere else. A layer of gravel on the ground under the eaves will work fine instead of gutters if the ground can carry the water away without further problems.
Here in San Diego, many gutters divert to canyons and gulleys, thus to the river, and thus to the sea. There is a large drainage outfall at the La Jolla Shores beach. It looks much like a concrete waterfall. Kids don’t always know that it’s run-off – full of lawn pesticides and dog poop – and splash around in it. Ick.
The Jackson Street extension also has a little canyon with a “creek” – and it has grown huge nasty algae pots and terraces, and it stinks. It isn’t sewage; it’s just run-off from the streets and lawns. Again, ick.
Down.
At Launceston, Tasmania the main CBD ‘gutter’ is normally fed to the sewerage system. But when its raining too heavy, they let it flow to the river/bay.
This is because the water is normally quite foul, since its filled with manure (poo of all sorts… birds, dogs, fertiliser off gardens… ), oil and stuff off roads and footpaths.
But when its raining heavy the water is much cleaner, and they don’t want to overload the sewerage system.
But just try draining your swimming pool into the curb gutter, and see if the sanitation authorities hang you up to dry.
You need to ask the itsy bitsy spider.
My house is a 2 story house in the suburbs, in the usa. Does the gutters from my roof drain into the ground or into the sewer?
Really? How do you imagine that a bunch of anonymous strangers on the internet would know that?
They should drain into the ground, usually near the downspout(s) from the gutters. Sometimes they may be submerged, and drain into a layer of crushed stone, or even sometimes they can be piped out to the street, but most municipalities take a dim view on a connection to the storm sewers.*
And they should really not be hooked up to the sanitary sewer. That would usually be a hefty fine.
Follow the downspout and see where it goes. It may be open at bottom and just spill water out into a bed of rock or something, or it may go into the ground. There may be short pipes sticking out of your yard that kind of look like the holes on a golf course. The water may go down into the ground and come up out of those pipes to disperse on the lawn.
Gutters are man-made structures, and the fluid that passes through them goes where the maker intends for it to go. Or not, depending on the efficiency of the design. Theoretically, the gutter is a device to enable water to naturally follow its original course, as though it had not been impeded by a man-made structure, such as a house or a parking lot or a roadway.
It depends. I’ve seen some houses where it just runs off on to the lawn. Mine are connected to the storm sewer, which in my part of the city is the same as the sanitary sewer.
they connect to PVC pipe that dissapears into the ground, where does it go? into the sewer?
Can you see into the storm drains on the street in front of your house? If so, wait for a dry day and then run the hose into the downspouts and look to see if you suddenly see water running into the storm drains. But if your gutters drain into a dry well, it may not be so obvious and you may need to start digging to find out for sure.
Most likely they carry the water away from the house so that the water doesn’t just return to the ground near the foundation of your house which may have caused leaking into your basement or overburden your sump pump.
I have a few of my downspouts tied into pvc pipes that carries the water to a pop up sprinkler in the lawn about 15 feet away from the house.
YMMV
The PVC could also be connected to a drywell, which is just a big buried tank with holes in it that lets the rainwater slowly seep into the ground.
Browse the web for “Footer drain.” If the downspout from the gutter disappears into the ground, it almost certainly is attached to a footer drain. The footer drain is a porous or water-permeable pipe* that runs around the perimeter of the house, typically buried under a layer of gravel or crushed stone to allow water from the surrounding soil to filter into it. At (usually) one side of the house, a T connection pipe leads the water away from the house. The pipe may empty into a dry well, or onto the slope of a hill, or it may empty into either the city storm drain system or (more rarely) the city sewer system. The many options to direct the effluent pipe explains why you are not getting consistent answers. Without digging up your yard and following the pipe, none of us can tell where your particular run-off is heading.
- In the old days, the “pipe” was made of field tile, short sections of clay or concrete tubes, (about one foot long, each), that were simply butted up against each other allowing water from the surrounding earth to trickle in through the unsealed “connections.” The layer of gravel or crushed stone was intended to let water pass while keeping the soil out of the system, Once the water had trickled into the pipe, it followed the smooth bore of the pipe to the effluent pipe (that was often made of solid pipe rather than field tile. Field tile has, by and large, been replaced by plastic pipe that has tiny slots cut into it and comes in rolls that allows it to be laid down rather quickly and to bend around footer corners without more expensive T and elbow joints.
The footer drain is, thus, responsible for preventing rain from the roof and rain falling on the yard near the house, from entering the basement. Various conditions–heavy clay soil, marshy soil, building a house in a swale that gathers water–can cause the ground water to overwhelm the footer drain, resulting in the need for a sump pump. A house that already needs a sump pump should probably have gutters that do not feed into the (overwhelmed) footer drain, but are led away from the house to keep the rain water from contributing to the problem.