Toronto Downspout Disconnection: The Rules, How to Do It, and Where the Water Can Go

Every property owner in Toronto is required to have their downspouts disconnected from the City's sewer. A lot of older houses in the city still have them running straight into a pipe in the ground, and plenty of owners have no idea theirs are connected until they apply for the basement flooding subsidy and get turned down for it.

Here's why the rule exists, how to tell if yours are connected, how the job is done, and the part people get wrong: where the water ends up afterwards.

Why the City wants them off the sewer

In a heavy storm, every roof in the neighbourhood dumps into the same sewer at the same moment. The pipes fill, and the water has to go somewhere. Too often that somewhere is up through basement floor drains. Taking roof water off the sewer is one of the cheapest ways to take pressure off the whole system, which is why the City made it mandatory and why it's a condition of the basement flooding subsidy.

Is yours connected?

Walk around the house and look at the bottom of each downspout. If it ends in an elbow that spills onto the ground or a splash pad, it's disconnected. If it disappears into a pipe sticking out of the ground, usually clay or black plastic, it's connected. Check every one. It's common to find three done and one at the back still plugged in.

How it's done

The City's own instructions are simple, and a handy owner can do it in an afternoon:

1. Measure about 23 cm up from where the downspout meets the sewer pipe and mark it.
2. Cut the downspout at the mark with a hacksaw and file the rough edge.
3. Cap the sewer pipe that's left sticking out of the ground, so nothing, including critters, gets in.
4. Fit an elbow onto the bottom of the downspout.
5. Add an extension to carry the water away, screw it on, and put a splash pad at the end.

That's the easy part. The part that decides whether you just made your basement drier or wetter is the next one.

Where the water is allowed to go

The rule is that the water has to flow away from your foundation and can't cause trouble for anyone else. In practice that means:

• Not onto your neighbour's property.
• Not across a sidewalk or a driveway where it'll freeze into a sheet of ice in January.
• Not back toward your own house.

This is where people get caught. They disconnect, drop a two-foot extension on the ground, and the water pools right against the wall. A roof sheds a surprising amount of water. On an average Toronto house a one-inch rain sends well over a thousand litres off the roof, and every downspout is concentrating its share of that into one spot. Put it beside the foundation and you've built a leak.

What works:

• Extensions long enough to reach ground that slopes away from the house. Two metres is a good target.
• Regrading the soil so it falls away from the wall for the first couple of metres.
• Moving a downspout to a different corner of the house where there's lawn instead of a walkway. This usually means changing how the eavestrough is sloped so the water runs the other way.
• For a tight lot with nowhere to go, a buried pipe out to a dry well or a rain garden.

Narrow lots and semis

Toronto has a lot of houses with a metre of side yard, a neighbour's wall on one side, and a walkway on the other. Disconnecting here takes some thinking. Sometimes the answer is re-pitching the eavestrough so a side downspout moves to the back yard. Sometimes two downspouts can be combined into one that lands somewhere safe.

If there's truly no safe place for the water, the City has an exemption process. You fill in the exemption application and include a sketch of the property, and the City looks at whether a downspout could be moved, whether grading could be fixed, and whether disconnecting would create a hazard. They expect you to have tried moving and re-sloping first, so show your work.

Help with the cost

For most houses this is a small job. For eligible low-income seniors and people with disabilities, the City has a financial assistance program that reimburses up to $500. Details are on the City's mandatory downspout disconnection page.

When the downspout isn't the only problem

Disconnecting is a good moment to look at the eavestroughs themselves. If they sag, drip at the seams, or overflow in a hard rain, the water is coming down the wall instead of down the downspout, and no extension will help. Moving a downspout also often means re-sloping a run, which is easiest while the trough is being worked on anyway.

We've been doing eavestroughs and downspouts around Toronto since 1979. If you'd like a price on re-routing or replacing yours, the eavestrough estimate takes a couple of minutes, or you can measure your roof from satellite with Find my Gutters.