11 ways to make solving home drainage problems with hand excavated french drain groundwater removal systems pay off big time…while additionally insuring the structural integrity and air quality of your home, as well the habitability of your residential landscape for safety, cosmetic and functional necessity.
1. Prevention of groundwater entry below grade into crawl spaces and basements is probably the most emotional event for homeowners around the world who did not even know the condition existed, but now have less than a week to find out, what, how, and why, all before closing of escrow. This is a game well written upon in this web site. I refer you to this topic in other articles where the system you are up against is documented and described.
Basement and crawl space groundwater entry is a little understood type of groundwater entry among contractors and homeowners alike.
Collecting groundwater when it is already on the surface with an exposed river rock hand excavated french drain, installed to slope on a hard bottom of clay or dirt, within the top 18″ of the soil, will make success out of former failure, if engineered and installed right by those around the world that can and do install them world wide every day of the year.
2. Preventing groundwater from sinking foundation spot footings and perimeter basement or foundation walls. Insuring the structural integrity of your home foundation and footings.
3. Hand excavated french drains for groundwater saturation prevention along the homes foundation walls, where you are planning to build a deck, finish a basement below.
This is a smoking gun problem if you don’t put the drainage in before the deck or basement remodel.
Install hand excavated french drains to collect groundwater where topography of the ground under the deck slopes towards the foundation wall or is flat. If a grade of at least 6″ per 10 lineal feet away from the foundation walls cannot be achieved in slope to run rain water away from your homes foundation walls, install a french drain approximately 18 inches from the foundation wall anyway. It is the best you can do if low foundation vents or siding prevent raising and compacting a splash block foundation grade improvement.When done, put the decks boards back on the deck, and rain that runs through the deck will run away from the foundation walls preventing your saturation of groundwater below grade.
4. Hand excavated french drain groundwater removal systems are environmentally sustainable and “green” .
5. Snow country snow removal.
Snow country snow melt is big trouble if you live in snow country and have a combination of bad topography sloping to your homes foundation walls, and no home drainage in the former of professionally installed hand excavated french drains.
Hand excavated french drains and compacted grade work at the exterior of the homes foundation walls, most often solve those formerly tragic groundwater problems right in front of your eyes, within days; while multiple neighborhood homeowner friends struggle with not pumping out water in a basement or crawl space, for life. And that with the whole neighborhood having popped for sump pump installations that do not prevent groundwater entry. And when you talk to many of these homeowners, they look at you as though you are consciously speaking a language they do not speak. And the beat, or the beating, as they say, goes on. You believe what you need to in life I have found.
6. Agricultural tiling. More for large farms.
Large industrial sized french drains. Not hand excavated, because of their large size and scope.
Used to drain and firm agricultural land in the midwest of America in particular. Minnesota in particular has restored peat boggy soils into farm land with this method of groundwater removal, which essentially does exactly what your exterior foundation french drains do today.
Turns peat soils that will not support the weight of a tractor into farm land within a year or less, often when it had been a swamp prior.
Protect wild life areas and natural areas from being drained in the first place if you can. Seriously consider if this is what you want to do to that “swamp” however, from an environmental conscious view point. You will change the entire habitat. The frogs, birds and creatures that inhabit it. All gone in place of grass or grain. Tread softly.
7. Hand excavated french drains keep pests away from your home. French drains make your investment more sound in your home. No doubt about it. Air quality protection and prevention is the main reason for keeping your below grade areas dry. A close first priority is to protect your foundation from sinking into the ground damaging your home. And a third is to prevent it from staying wet and dry rotting the post beam structure of crawl space spot footings.
8. Retaining walls.
Hand excavated french drains provide groundwater venting for lawn, garden, and building sites.
French drains support the integrity of the garden and hillside retaining walls, preventing the retaining walls from prematurely falling over within a few years, due to freezing and thawing groundwater left saturated behind and under the retaining wall when the freeze hits, instead of lasting for decades and decades.
Most new freeway retaining walls have french drains of some sort installed, above and below them, and your home should too.
9. French drains installed in soggey yards. With this french drain application, a hand excavated french drain is installed through the lawn after a 12″ wide strip of grass not to exceed 50 feet in length is first removed and discarded or used somewhere else on the lawn.
This type of french drain system pulls groundwater, again usually caused by heavy rain, or over watering with sprinklers, out of the soaked lawn soil and deposits it into a river rock, dirt topped off over weed cloth, hand excavated dry well; which is 4 feet deep by 4 feet in diameter; where the groundwater perks into the ground faster and faster with each deposit of water into it due to cracks formed on the bottom of the dry well that the water runs out of below into the earth.
Lawn installed home drainage systems can become functional and cosmetic in a non-viewable way, as described above, when the homeowner overseeds grass over the system when completed. 6″ of dirt over your layer of weed cloth is best in most lawn drainage applications with 3/4″-1 1/2″ river rock used in both the dry well and french drains.
Rain water is removed to one point 4 feet in diameter by 4 feet deep, where a foot or two of water puts pressure on the earth to accept it, and does for hundreds of years or more from that time on, in some cases. The lawn starts looking better within days after installation, while firming areas that used to be sloppy kid traps, and moms frustration.
10. Repairing low point drains.
Low point drains are installed when the home is built. They are located in the crawl space of homes, and are not installed and plumbed properly from my experience in a huge percentage of cases where crawl space groundwater is the complaint.
Many low point drains do not flow out to a dry well, where the water, if it does come into the crawl space, can flow right out.
Low point drains are often written up on home inspections during home sales because of standing water in the crawl space.
The most common complaint on a home inspection is the low point drain, which is just a piece of 3″ abs pipe, often around 8 feet long, poured into the foundation wall at what was the initial crawl space ground level when the foundation was poured.
This will seldom be the same crawl space floor level in present time, due to factors that have compressed and lowered the dirt floor of the crawl space or dirt basement for decades.
A new lower ground level for the crawl space becomes impossible to change.
So the low point drain does not connect to anything often in these homes. It is buried in the ground and extending into the concrete foundation wall, but it plugged on the back end, and does not flow. It soaks so water out slowly at best.
This is how it happens. The existing low point drain pipe made of abs, with a backflow flapper on it usually, is poured into the foundation concrete wall when built, but subsequently upon years of the crawl space being saturated and sunken, the floor of the crawl space sits many inches below the low point drain pipe.
This means your crawl space would need 2-3 inches of water deep in it lets say on average, over the entire crawl space floor once it seeks level, to even start flowing out of the low point drain, even if it did flow, which I just explain often it does not. This example is if the crawl space was flat. And then that so called “low point drain”, it would never drain the entire floor of the crawl space at all. The crawl space in the above example would still retain 2-3 inches deep of water on the floor of the crawl space. Everything after that depth, for example in this case, would spill out, if it could through the low point drain.
11. Quality interior hand excavated crawl space french drains.
Only when no other way exists, or when there is a proven year round below grade interior crawl space spring that needs to be tapped and vented. And not some water running during the winter time after some sump pump guy called it a spring or underground river, and it has been raining for days.
Real springs are super rare.
I doubt you understand just how rare that a spring appearing in your crawl space is.
I see a true year round spring, not caused by rain water during and a few days after hard rains, once every few years perhaps. This is after looking at hundreds of homes with that contended condition by homeowners, realtors, inspectors, sump pump installers and most neighbors; who also are many times the blind leading the blind in home drainage land, while perfecting stories of underground rivers and springs being the whole neighborhoods problem.