house& sewage pump- little brick box with alarm half size of a wheelie bin

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help required please! hopefully someone knows.

an amazing house has cropped up on rightmove and the estate agents are so busy with bookings they've asked for offers to be made by 12 noon on monday.

only snag is there is some sort of sewage pump within the property boundary. its an estate sale so owner can't answer and agents only know thats its a pump with a 440 voltage (?) to power the pump. apparently the 440 volt isnt an issue as these can be installed into domestic garages as dh wants one in the garage.

its a little brick box maybe about 1/2 to 2/3rds the size of a wheelie bin with an orange (currently unlit) light on the top. its about 6 ft away from the side of the house.

im confused what the implications are and cant find much info at all on the internet or on the water company's website.

there was a man gardening a few doors across from the house, all he said was that it was a sewerage pump and the alarm has gone off a few times when people put things down loos they should't have. he wasn't very responsive, so i left it there.

does anyone know what these are?

We've got one of these. Our house is set back from the lane and down a slope so the pump is used to get the waste up to the main drain. The alarm has only ever gone off once when the pump failed. This hopefully won't happen again because we now have it serviced once a year something we should have done before. It isn't a septic tank so you can use normal cleaners etc and it doesn't smell because the waste doesn't hang around.

oh hiya! thanks for posting.

the house is on a housing estate of about 30 houses and the little brick box is owned by the water company. the estate is about 1 miles from town centre and miles away from sewerage works (?).

there's a small green area beside the pump box owned by the house and another house about 20 ft away. the green area is about 20ft by 10ft.

will all 30 houses soil pipes be linked into this pump? Is there a vat of human waste under the green area? any risk of pump failing and pipes leaking poo on my property?

sorry if i sound very clueless, never ever seen this before!

I have no idea really but maybe it's there because the drains run uphil. Perhaps look at the Saniflo or Grundfoss websites to see if anything looks familiar. Hopefully someone with personal experience of this will come along. I think it's safe to say it's not ideal to have a component like that in your drainage because it will sometimes stop working.

X-post. Sorry - I was really slow to post that.