Many homeowners are overwhelmed by problems with proper drainage. When heavy rains come, your yards turn into lakes causing many problems such as grass and plants dying due to excess water, water entering your homes through drain holes or other areas where there is access, and simply not being able to enjoy your property to the end. the water dissipates and even then it’s a mud hole. These situations become tedious and many homeowners look to contractors for a solution to fix the problem. In a perfect world where everyone is honest and everyone who owns a business is an expert in their field, this would work great. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and there are landscaping contractors who don’t know the proper drainage techniques or two try to do the job cheaper because the customer wants a better price or the drainage contractor is trying to make more money. This article is to inform you so that you know the consequences and try to avoid them. First of all, you must have a positive grade on your property, which means that if you are installing a drainage system in your backyard, then the backyard must be higher than where you want it to be. the water to drain (most often the street). How tall your backyard needs to be depends on the length of your drainage system because to have the proper slope you need to have one inch of drop for every ten feet of drainage pipe, so if you are installing a hundred feet of drainage pipe, need the street. be ten inches lower than where you placed the first drain box (Catch Basin). If you don’t have the necessary slope, then that’s when you should look at other options, like bringing in dirt and raising the backyard (only when you have enough foundation visible, you don’t want to raise the ground higher than the foundation). needs to show at least an inch at all times), drain into a sump pump box and pump the water out (this option requires electricity and a much larger drain box where the pump will sit), and the final solution I’ll mention is installing a series of 30-gallon garden drainage basins and having the drains from the entire yard drain into them. The latter option requires a hole twice the size of each drainage basin you will install because to ensure proper landscape drainage, you need to install gravel around the drainage basin so water can seep through.
These solutions are usually only used in the worst case scenario, but I wanted you to know the real options available that work. In most cases where there is a landscape drainage problem and let’s say there is only five inches of slope when you need ten inches, a good drainage expert can install a drain that will work by creating a slope from the backyard to the front and then level it up to the street because the water that is level still flows but not as fast. They may also incorporate the gutter downspouts into the system so that the pressure from the header (the water coming down the downspout from the roof) helps expel the drainage water from the garden. These are options that a good drainage contractor will be able to look at and then be able to tell you which drainage option will work best for you.
Now let’s say you have enough slope to make a regular drainage system in your garden. The question then is what does a regular drainage system consist of? A normal drainage system consists of sumps, fittings and pipes. Let’s look at drainage sumps first, there are many types of sumps used by drainage contractors and all but a few meet good landscape drainage practices.
An approved type is the concrete sink used in residential and commercial applications. Residential usually starts at 10 inches by 10 inches and usually has metal grilles. They are well built but can be an eyesore in a beautiful landscape. Next you have the plastic drainage basins, these are made by a number of different companies and most of them are built to last a lifetime. These drainage basins come in many different shapes and sizes, but we don’t suggest you measure smaller than 9 inches by 9 inches for garden drainage basins and 6 inches round for garden drainage basins. These types of landscape drainage basins are typically used by drainage experts because they are more versatile and easier to work with. These drainage basins come with different grids (Tops) for different applications, green flat grids for grass and black flat grids for others in stone or flower beds. The grates also come in atrium grates, which are grates built taller in a dome shape to allow water to flow out if the bottom of the grate becomes clogged. If you clean around the grates after every storm, there will be no need to install atrium drainage grates as they are unsightly in gardens due to their domed shape, but you may want to consider them if using them directly in flower beds. flowers to prevent the mulch from clogging. drains Some drainage experts, but very few, prefer to build their own brick and mortar drains. This is also an acceptable practice and can sometimes be used to obtain a slope in the pipe where every inch counts because the ground slope is so small. because this will allow the pipe to rise to where it is needed and a few inches at this point can mean the difference between a successful drain or a failed drain. Always make sure the drainage contractor is using actual drainage catch basins and not sticking a four-inch grate onto the end of a fixture.
This brings us to the right accessories to be used in backyard drainage systems. The more accessories used in a drainage system or as many as French drains (which we will talk about in this article and more in depth in a future article below) will slow down the speed of the water, so an ideal system is to use the as few accessories as possible. Fittings used in a drainage system include long and short 90°, 45°, 22½°, Y and T. All of these fittings come in different materials for the different types of pipe that we will discuss below. Although they sell short and long 90°, the long 90° is the only one that should be used and is the only one that a drain expert will use. I myself prefer to use two spaced 45° apart to slow down the flow of water as little as possible. T’s are also sold by vendors, but are not an approved accessory on a lawn drainage system unless used as a cleanout access which is only necessary if you have an extremely long run without a drainage basin for access. Wyes are the only suitable fitting that can be used by the drain expert to connect other pipe to the main drain system. All other accessories can be used, but always try to find the straightest route possible.
The final material in a system that is also one of the most important is the type of drain pipe. There are several types of drain pipe used in drainage systems such as Schedule 40 (the thickest), SDR35 (the next step down), and sewer pipe (thin wall), and corrugated pipe. The only two that are considered correct installation practice by drainage experts are schedule 40 and SDR35; all the others are the cheap way out and have costly consequences later on. SDR35 pipe is the standard and is followed by all drainage experts because schedule 40 is considered excessive. If you choose to do a drainage system and don’t use approved piping within a few years, you may have to redo the entire system. The first of the unapproved sewer pipe options is thin and very easy to break under the pressure of roots or future excavation. Once the pipe breaks, dirt and roots can get into the pipe and cause the system to become clogged and no longer work as it should. Corrugated pipe, which is black flexible pipe, can retain dirt in the ridges and after years it will become clogged with dirt, slowing down or stopping the entire drainage system or another problem that can occur is that a root can grow underneath and since it is flexible it will cause the pipe to rise and stop the flow of the drainage system. All of the above scenarios will result in the system being dug up and redone, which can be very expensive.
Installing a drainage system is a big project and one should research the correct procedures to choose a drainage expert who will get it done right the first time and stands behind their work. I pray that this article has helped you in your quest for knowledge so that you can be informed.