Hand excavated french drain installation protects your homes value
The value of your personal residence is likely your largest cash investment. You are well advised to protect that investment by doing the groundwater drainage work that is required prior to damage being created from the lack of properly engineered and installed hand excavated french drains.
If your home is under construction, or you are adding an addition, and your plans mandate that you install a foundation footing drain, make sure that you do your diligence in finding a professional home drainage contractor that understands the engineering of a true foundation footing drain. A properly installed foundation footing drain not only needs a perforated pipe with a sock on it, and river rock rock, it needs to have an engineered grade, not laid on the outside of the foundation footing flat with no grade. Do not just put a perforated pipe flat on the outside of the foundation footing without a proper grade of approximately 2″ per 10 lineal feet that vents to a drywell or daylighted vent. In addition the drywell, installed must be sized to the amount of collection area that will be vented. Drywells can take a few weeks to break in the perking cycle into the ground and you do not want the system to overflow and prevent your system from working.
A major point to be considered with respect to this issue of footing drains, is that it is actually more important to install hand excavated french drain groundwater removal systems approximately 2 feet from the foundation wall after compacting a grade away from the foundation with dirt or clay of at least 6 inches per 10 lineal feet or greater from the exterior foundation wall, and collect the groundwater prior to it saturating to that depth. This is common state of the art home drainage and something that needs to be done. If the hand excavated french drains are installed and a compacted splash block is created against the foundation you will not get rainwater that turns into groundwater into below grade areas.
If the surrounding conditions of the foundation is loose rock that the rainwater can run right through, you are looking at installing a footing drain in most cases.
In order to raise the grade while creating a splash block by adding clay and dirt to the foundation area, the foundation wall must be tall enough, and the foundation vents must be poured high enough in the foundation wall to allow backfill for the compacted grade. I prefer as much of a grade sloping from the foundation as can be practically accomplished to give you the most value added drainage success. Code wants a distance of at least 6″ from the ground to the bottom of the siding. As you see, this requires some planning, which many cities, counties, architects and builders do not do when building a new home.
The objective is to run the rain water, which becomes groundwater, to the inside of your hand excavated french drain with the splash block, for collection of the groundwater prior to saturation. The proper placement and installation of hand excavated french drains is not an option, it is a necessity.
The city or county may call hand excavated french drains an option, if they mention them at all. If groundwater is an issue, and no hand excavated french drains are constructed, you will likely always have groundwater to be removed by the footing drains along your foundation.Install hand excavated french drains as a priority, and have little to no groundwater down at the foundation footing level. When it comes to the stability of your foundation spot footings and post-beam construction there is nothing like making sure that groundwater does not go into the crawlspace or basement, or lay along the foundation footing on the outside of the home. If a foundation footing drain has a perforated pipe laid flat on the outside of the foundation footing, the groundwater collects there, but goes nowhere except into the air it finds, which is the crawlspace or basement.
Protect your investment from the beginning.