Sump wells, and dry wells with overflows, collecting groundwater in areas where the soil does not perk well, can still solve your saturation problems, if they are… connected to professionally installed hand excavated french drain groundwater removal systems to stop groundwater entry below grade.
If the yard area that you wish to use for the installation of a hand excavated dry well does not perk well, do not worry. A sump well, or dry well overflow line, installed within the dry well is your answer.
If the area that was chosen for a hand excavated dry well does not perk satisfactorily, after a few days of watching, while you excavate the rest of the french drain system, this is your solution.
Dry wells perk well when broken in.
They either perk right away, or within a few weeks, in the worst of cases. Once broken in, and cracks have formed on the bottom of the dry well, professionally installed hand excavated dry wells work for decades or longer, and dry wells function and last beyond your memory of them.
The groundwater simply continues its journey to the middle earth caverns, running right through the cracks formed on the bottom of the dry well, or sump well, without standing in the dry well long, if at all.
However, when dry wells are newly constructed, they can take a few hours to a few weeks for the groundwater to start soaking below grade.
Homeowners seldom need either an overflow line off the dry well, or the installation of a sump pump in their new dry well, to turn the dry well into a sump well.
Your professional home drainage contractor will give you adequate advice with respect to which method would serve your home drainage needs best.
In severely sloped locations, a homeowner may be well advised to consult with a geo-technical engineer, with respect to their opinion concerning the overall stability of your home site first, and which groundwater removal method would service the home site best in his opinion.
I completed a project this week, where in one location the hand excavated dry well perked extremely well, right away.
The second location for a dry well that was selected was not perking, even after a few days, so I installed an overflow line, which can either be vented to another dry well location that perks better, or day light vented downhill, which I did in this case. You need a downhill slope to make a day lighted vent work.
The bottom of the dry well was 4 feet deep and had been finished on a hard basalt rock bottom. The top two feet of the dry well was dirt. The bottom two feet was basalt rock.
The solution to this drainage problem was to first test the dry well, after it was excavated, and second create a sump well or overflow line coming out of the hand excavated dry well, if it showed signs of not perking adequately.
A few days will not produce much perking in many cases, where in the next week or two after rains, when the dry well is broken in, the same dry well will not hold groundwater for even a few minutes.
I urge homeowners to understand, that when a new dry well is constructed, it will sometimes, even with successful perk locations, take a few days, to weeks, to get newly installed dry wells working well. You will not see this, as your home drainage professional will engineer the amount of groundwater estimated to comply with the location, size and number of dry wells recommended for your home site groundwater project.
Keep in mind as well please; when a septic permit is issued from a city or county, for a satisfactory “perk test”, which is paid for by an applicant wishing to build a home in an area the lacks a public sanitary disposal system, patience is expected, as well as practiced, when testing home sites for perk ability.
The prospective home builder wants to get a permit for a septic system. The function of the dry well perking, and a septic tank perking is exactly the same, except a septic tank captures solid material in a solid tank first, and lets the grey water rise to the top of the tank and flow out the pipe into drain fields, which are actually day light vent systems or bio-swales.
When a perk test is performed, the city digs a large hole, about the size of a dry well first, with a back hoe.
They fill the hole with water from a water truck, and wait about 2-3 weeks before they ever judge if it perks or not, because they know it is breaking in slowly first. Typically the rain does this for the homeowners naturally.
When the dry well breaks in, it runs fast, once groundwater saturation caused by perking below grade has formed cracks on the dry well bottom.
If the test hole has dropped a foot or two in volume of water, or if the water is all gone, the applicant receives a standard septic permit.
If not, he or she will be asked to install a sand filter system, to mitigate some of the grey water, and clean it some, prior to perking it eventually below grade, after first sand filtering it.
The sump well is plumbed with a sump pump installed within the dry well/sump well, inside concrete cylinders with a top on the installation, with rock surrounding the tank.
This system should be installed only well away from the exterior of the home, and never within 10 feet of the homes foundation walls. I see many companies installing sump pumps and low to no grade ditches, right against foundation walls, after first removing the dirt as well.<> This becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for the sump pump installer, because he has told you that underground rivers and springs destine you to have groundwater forever, making his sump pump the only groundwater system that will help you.
This is b.s. to the fifth power, and he has just damaged the foundation area, making it worthless for a proper french drain installation, as he has ruthlessly dug up the soil around the foundation. It is no longer load bearing soil, and not able to be used for french drain installation prior to removing his junk and compacting the entire area along the foundation wall.
The sump pump installer has conned you, taken your money, and poisoned the well on the way out the door with your dough.
In a proper exterior foundation sump well system, the groundwater is collected and vented along the foundation, 18″ away from the foundation wall, with hand excavated french drains, in the same manner as always, but the collected groundwater is pumped from the dry well/sump well, before it can overflow. Ball or slider floats up, pump goes on. Sump pump ball or slider goes down when the water is pumped out, which shuts off the pump. No water. No pumping. Fewer burnt out sump pumps.
This method of groundwater collection and removal is a much better way to collect and vent large amounts of groundwater than trying to excavate a shallow sump pump drain system in a basement or crawl space. That is failure, looking for a place to happen.
If you have a downhill topography slope, sloping away from the sump well and the homes foundation, and your dry well is suspect of being a difficult perk site, you can perhaps engineer an overflow line, that is around 8 inches deep, 12″ wide that contains a solid 3″ ads flex ads overflow pipe with a hardware cloth galvanized screen put over the end installed into the side of the dry well.
This overflow line system is back filled with dirt.
This is a better alternative to sump pumping.
The overflow line will always be plumbed in solid flex ads pipe, either 3 or 4 inch pipe.
No sump pump ever needed there after. Let the electricity goes out, and it’s o.k. And besides, it isn’t installed under your bedroom floor either, keeping you awake in rain storms as the pump comes on and goes off constantly.
Not to mention, look in your crawl space after the installation and during heavy rains, to see an immediate difference in groundwater entry, if any at all. In time as the ground firms up more around your foundation, less, to no groundwater comes in, permanently, without electricity.
This is the very best alternative, when overflowing can be accomplished, if your dry well doesn’t look like a good perk candidate.
An overflow line off your dry well should only be installed without sending the groundwater over to a neighbors property, or trashing a lower grade sidewalk with debris, etc.
Spill out groundwater at day light vent locations on a wheel barrow of river rock, to spread out the groundwater and prevent erosion.
Crawl space sump pumps need shallow interior hand excavated french drain groundwater removal systems to gravity flow the groundwater that has already saturated below grade to the sump pump.
Spend your money on exterior hand excavated french drain groundwater removal systems and get results instead of head aches.
Without professionals installing them, crawl space french drains turn into non functional and damaging, flat sloppy ditches in your crawl space, full of water and debris when it rains, until the groundwater finally saturates and disappears in your crawl space floor, rotting everything and making mold and mildew part of your respiratory challenge as well, in many cases.<
Interior french drain groundwater removal systems are the very last alternative groundwater solution to consider, not the first. Because it is never a solution. It is an expensive ploy, and a failed system for prevention. It does not even do evacuation well, once the whole crawl space is flooded.
Too little, too late.
Just because you talked to the sump pump installer first, and he planted the concept of sump pumps in your mind, first, after the home inspector sent him out to the home, first, doesn’t make him an expert in home drainage.
He most likely installs sump pumps. Get it? And his buddy the home inspector is a clown working with him to influence your opinion, through repetition of b.s concepts, for their own profit.
The key to the exterior sump well construction is having exterior electric power available on the outside of the home to power a sump pump.
Gravity, geology and engineering hold the keys to home drainage success, not electricity.
You may hardwire these sump pumps if you wish, but in most cases, from my experience installing them, with the smaller (1/4hp-1/3 hp ball float sump pumps,) hard wiring is not required for functional common sense and other reasons. The pump should be connected with a 12 guage contractor grade, all weather extension cord or larger in diameter. It should be , installed within a solid abs or schedule 40 pvc pipe conduit, and plugged in to a gfci rated electric circuit, with protection from the rain, in the form of a weather head, or located under a covered area against the home.
Run out of power for your crawl space french drain system, without first installing exterior hand excavated french drains, and you will likely be swimming in groundwater that will be in your crawl space for months, to years, to forever; if you don’t fix the entry problem from the outside first, making a sump pump never needed.
Fixing does not mean just pumping groundwater that should never have gotten into the crawl space to begin with. That is not the definition of a home drainage solution, or of success.”
“With home drainage, an ounce of prevention is worth thousands of pounds of cure”. They help right away when you are bombed with groundwater, yes, but better to not get sick and never need pills, right? Prevent the groundwater from saturating and you cut off the weight of the groundwater pressing along your foundation walls.
Now your getting it, right?
One of the most helpless feelings you will ever have will come as you look into your crawl space full of dirty water, with the insulation floating in two feet of groundwater perhaps, among items of debris and wood pieces.
You know this is very bad for everything and everyone. But panic doesn’t seem to be solving the problem. Time for AAA Home Drainage.
It comes to your senses, finally, that you are literally living over a marsh, and you and your family have been for years perhaps, without ever thinking a thing of it. Maybe even the homeowner knew about it, and simply deemed it too expensive to finance and fix, if the cash was not available to do so. It just was never a priority.
Now all those frog noises below your bedroom floor make sense. Hum. lol.
“We’ll fix it later, perhaps.” Or homeowners just don’t know about the groundwater entry, because they have not suffered viewable damage yet, or tried to sell their home, or never have ventured into their crawl space.
You must collect and vent groundwater on the outside of the home first to solve your home drainage problems. No exceptions.
If you keep adding groundwater weight to the side of your building, you will deteriorate the foundation walls, sink the footings, and basically, over a few decades, send the home to its slow death, without a serious five figure home drainage solution being funded to prevent it, before the structural damage is fixed.
I recommend a 30 amp gfci, 110 electric circuit, hard wired or with a plug in weather head cover installation, if possible.
Sump well systems that use exterior gfci plugs with weather heads, do not need additional electrician charges on the night your sump pump goes out in your crawl space or yard.
The sump pump in the exterior sump well construction is mounted inside stacked concrete cylinders, just like your interior crawl space sump pump should have been installed, with a concrete top.
The concrete cylinders are installed and leveled on a bed of 3/4″-11/2″ river rock in the sump well.
This draws and pumps clean groundwater that has been pulled through the rock below it.
The concrete cylinders are surrounded with river rock.
This draws the groundwater through the rock, and pumps clean water.
The trouble with all sump pumps installed in crawl spaces is that they never pump out all the groundwater, even when installed correctly, so the whole idea fails right away. Many sump pump installers are often just pumping mud through a dirty hole in the ground, and calling it a sump pump installation in your crawl space. I have seen them installed in every wrong way possible I think. I know I am wrong though, because next week I will see another dumb sump pump installation.
Plumb the sump pump with black 1 1/2″ abs pipe, and vent it to the chosen location in the manner you feel most appropriate for your site. Reading this web site will teach you how to install it.
Always install a backflow device on the sump pump as well.
Just remember, pumping is the very last thing you should count on to improve your home drainage, either within the exterior foundation wall area, or inside a crawl space or basement.
Without collection and removal of groundwater near your homes foundation, with gravity flow hand excavated french drain groundwater removal systems, nothing is going to change for the better with your home drainage problems. That much I can guarantee.
You might get your transaction closed by installing a sump pump system somewhere, and conning the buyers into thinking that a groundwater solution has been installed, but the drainage problems will remain, that is a lie, and the drainage problems will continue, and get worse, with time and heavy rain.