It's time for a tutorial on outdoor drainage systems. This weekend past I went to my sister’s to help my Dad with this outdoor drainage system he’s been installing. There’s been a lot of water entering her basement and he’s been trying to stop that from happening. When I got there I saw that he had dug out a very long trench along the side of the house and well into into her front yard. Saturday morning when we got started Dad gave me his explanation of how things were working.
Essentially he wanted to install a new drainage system for the two water spouts on the right side of the house, and a French drainage system for water that flowed down a nearby hill and might collect by the side of the house, as well as the water that just naturally falls there. At the moment he had the trench wide enough for one tube’s worth of drainage. He needed the trench wide enough for two tubes. The way the French drainage system works is that you lay a piece of fabric in the trench, then you take a PVC type pipe that has finger thick holes drilled into it like a woofle ball, and place it in the trench with the holes facing down. On top of that you put gravel, and on top of that you grow grass. When it rains the water soaks into the ground like it normally would, but as it collects it starts to rise up into the holes and when enough is collected it travels down the PVC pipe and away from the house. The spout drainage system originally went into large copper pipes that went very deep into the ground and went somewhere. We don’t know where the copper pipes lead because they go down so deep. The problem is that over the years the copper can crack and when that happens the water can leak out and start causing problems. Dad thought maybe the copper pipes had cracked somewhere along the basement wall and was causing water to leak into the house.
So when I got there he had an initial one tube wide trench dug. That in itself was quite a feat. It was a long trench and had to be back breaking work. Right away I, who always try to avoid demanding labor, convinced him that we didn’t need to double the size of the entire trench. Rather once we got past the side of the house and into the front yard where leakage wasn’t a problem, we could take the two tubes and feed them into one. That way we would only have to double the part of the trench that went along the side of the house. He liked that idea, and for the rest of the weekend we worked on just the drainage for the spouts. That was quite the project. For two days we cut, glued, and laid PVC pipe. This was a massive geometry problem. I learned early on that Dad should have bought the pipe first, put it together without the glue, got it the way he wanted on the yard, made markings on the grass, and then dug his trench. But since the trench was already dug, we were trying to fit the PVC tubes into Dad’s trench which wasn’t always straight or cut at nice angles like 22.5, 45, or 90 degrees which are the three angles PVC connectors come in. This became a huge challenge for us. But in the end, we managed to get the drainage system for the spouts completely put together and we doubled the size of the trench along the house for the French drainage system.
Saturday and Sunday it was sunny. But on Monday, when we had just a little bit more to finish up, it started drizzling. And just, like to the minute, as we got the last piece in place, essentially connecting the first half of the drainage with the last half, it began to pour. The contraption was a success and the water gushed out of our new drainage system. Next weekend Dad has to install the French drainage system to account for the water that falls into the yard and nearby hill side, but it should be much easier for him, because of this weekend’s experience and that tubing despite also being PVC based, is much more flexible. And now you know all about outdoor drainage.
Essentially he wanted to install a new drainage system for the two water spouts on the right side of the house, and a French drainage system for water that flowed down a nearby hill and might collect by the side of the house, as well as the water that just naturally falls there. At the moment he had the trench wide enough for one tube’s worth of drainage. He needed the trench wide enough for two tubes. The way the French drainage system works is that you lay a piece of fabric in the trench, then you take a PVC type pipe that has finger thick holes drilled into it like a woofle ball, and place it in the trench with the holes facing down. On top of that you put gravel, and on top of that you grow grass. When it rains the water soaks into the ground like it normally would, but as it collects it starts to rise up into the holes and when enough is collected it travels down the PVC pipe and away from the house. The spout drainage system originally went into large copper pipes that went very deep into the ground and went somewhere. We don’t know where the copper pipes lead because they go down so deep. The problem is that over the years the copper can crack and when that happens the water can leak out and start causing problems. Dad thought maybe the copper pipes had cracked somewhere along the basement wall and was causing water to leak into the house.
So when I got there he had an initial one tube wide trench dug. That in itself was quite a feat. It was a long trench and had to be back breaking work. Right away I, who always try to avoid demanding labor, convinced him that we didn’t need to double the size of the entire trench. Rather once we got past the side of the house and into the front yard where leakage wasn’t a problem, we could take the two tubes and feed them into one. That way we would only have to double the part of the trench that went along the side of the house. He liked that idea, and for the rest of the weekend we worked on just the drainage for the spouts. That was quite the project. For two days we cut, glued, and laid PVC pipe. This was a massive geometry problem. I learned early on that Dad should have bought the pipe first, put it together without the glue, got it the way he wanted on the yard, made markings on the grass, and then dug his trench. But since the trench was already dug, we were trying to fit the PVC tubes into Dad’s trench which wasn’t always straight or cut at nice angles like 22.5, 45, or 90 degrees which are the three angles PVC connectors come in. This became a huge challenge for us. But in the end, we managed to get the drainage system for the spouts completely put together and we doubled the size of the trench along the house for the French drainage system.
Saturday and Sunday it was sunny. But on Monday, when we had just a little bit more to finish up, it started drizzling. And just, like to the minute, as we got the last piece in place, essentially connecting the first half of the drainage with the last half, it began to pour. The contraption was a success and the water gushed out of our new drainage system. Next weekend Dad has to install the French drainage system to account for the water that falls into the yard and nearby hill side, but it should be much easier for him, because of this weekend’s experience and that tubing despite also being PVC based, is much more flexible. And now you know all about outdoor drainage.
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