Concrete and Channel Drain installed against foundation to solve stubborn basement flooding

this is shawn we are on a job in greensboro today so what we're going to be working on here is we've got this basement that's been flooding [Music] and so the homeowner has already had a couple people over here some the landscaper did a french drain across here and that didn't do anything and he built up this berm right here i talked to the landscaper and he said he built this berm up so the water would hold here and soak into the ground which is exactly the opposite of what you want if you're going to put a french drain in there you want the water to get into the drain so it leaves but we couldn't figure out where the french drain exit exited and within a week after he had done this work she had a huge flooding in her basement so she's got this is all a finished basement down here and so after making a few trips over here and thinking about this we are going to pour some concrete into a channel drain on each side so all this berm right here has to go and we're going to have to pull up the deck like the landscaper already did and dig across there so the concrete guys are coming later this week so we're gonna try to get this excavated and prepped for them so that's what we're working on today so so [Music] [Music] hello i wanted to show you this french train now this this is about three weeks old or so and so first of all at all possible you want your french drain to be open on both sides this one's capped second you don't want this sock thing on here because this just it stops the water from it plugs up really bad and perhaps most importantly is the landscape guy put gravel right up against the house and so you know the water flows through gravel so by putting it right up against the house that's just literally letting the water go right through there and so this french frame is just it was inferior products and it was installed incorrectly and it didn't do anything so that's about three weeks old right there and this guy apparently had uh hand dug it and everything and he spent a bunch of time out here and when talking to the homeowner she couldn't understand why i was telling her the exact opposite of what she had just been told and i explained to her that that landscapers you know when they go to the landscape supply house this is the stuff that's for sale there and so they're not in the drainage business now this would be fine if you're trying to put it around your rose rose bushes and but when you've got major flooding going on this is not the right stuff so you can't blame the landscaper he he went to the landscape supply house he bought the the materials that they had available and he installed it the way he thought he was supposed to but it's just not the right application for when you're actually having problems so i explained to her that the landscaper didn't do anything wrong he just isn't a foundation drainage specialist like i am so that's what we're over here doing is is solving this flooding problem you got a snail you should be our mascot that's our mascot [Music] so so we've made some progress here and i wanted to show you really quickly the landscaper had put gravel all the way up against the house here and critically all the way up against the window well and so there was water just coming through this window well and into the wall down there and so the pipe you can see where the pipe you'd run the pipe along here and so again this was just installed incorrectly so you can see how close the pipe gets right there and it's just kind of wrapping around and all over the place so this this this uh french drain wasn't doing anything if anything it was making things way worse because again water goes through gravel and so he was just giving that water just this easy entrance point so we're going to concrete across all this into a channel drain the channel drain is going to be open on both ends and so we're going to give that water an easy path to get out of here some of that concrete in there okay but the bricks are safe yeah we'll put them on a different place [Music] okay [Music] um we want to have at least two or three inches of concrete underneath the window sill to probably down to the level over here so more okay and we'll pull that pipe out of there too you haven't seen the best part yet i'm gonna wheel this into the back of the camera i'm gonna wheel this into the back of the dump truck is it on yeah and we're back i need to do a reverse dump and get all this in toward the front let me get the ice creator down here reverse dump y'all you heard it here first [Music] this is the dump ramp there you go so here he comes so we're coming back we're going to trench the drain are we installing that yeah then thursday they come and replace them the concrete concrete we are back on this job we're going to do some trenching today and my van's been in the shop uh the rear axle's a little bit messed up so we've got the pickup truck today which is a pain to work out of but we're going to get this portion of the job done and then the concrete should hopefully be here tomorrow or the next day all right we've got this all dug out for our channel drain is going to end somewhere over here somewhere and then it's going to go into solid pipe we're going to catch that gutter and then she did have some schedule 30 in here so that was good and just real quickly see this is schedule 30 pvc which is better than corrugated but it's still really really really flimsy so it's definitely better than corg8 but it's still quite flimsy so we go to the next step and only use corrugated i mean uh only use schedule 40. all right so that that piece that she had ended right here and so that's not really much of an outfall it's too deep it's back grading it's holding water and so that's why i don't do my outfalls in the middle of the yard here we're going to take this all the way to the street and have a nice outfall of rip rack or i mean all the way out to the sidewalk so all right we've got this stubbed out right here so whenever the channel drain gets set we can hook onto this got that gutter caught and you can see the extremely aggressive fall we've got there so she's got leaves and trees here and so the reason we gave it such an aggressive slope right there is any debris that gets into these gutters is going to get quickly washed out of here so we are heading on down to the outfall down here we got our pipeline in here and we're just getting things covered up on this side so this this yard slopes down quite dramatically so we have tons of fall that's not a problem and we should be good to go here so yep we're over here on the other side getting this dug out so let me show you what's going on here i like my my drains to be open on both sides if at all possible so we're just gonna open this up and have this channel drain draining on this side as well so again you're giving the water the path of least resistance on in either direction and so we're over here there was a schedule 30 drainage pipe right here and it ended right there so we're going to do something a little bit different we're going to put it basically to the driveway right there and then we're going to do a rip-rop outfall talk more about that later but i wanted to show you this little guy that we just caught this is a slimy salamander and so this is a terrestrial salamander you can see the very rounded tail on that and these guys are called slimy salamanders because if you handle them they secrete a really really sticky slimy paste that gets all over you and so if you've been catching these all day your hands get really dirty and then with all the stickiness and it never comes clean i don't know if you can hear it but that gutter is just barely dripping you hear that and that little bit of flow we just got back from lunch that little tiny bit of flow because this pipe has great fall to it and it's smooth on the inside that flow is making it all the way out here to the outfall so look at that isn't that incredible that just a little drip like that when run through a proper pipe that is properly set in every place to have fall is going to flow like that so you can imagine that when it rains this thing is going to pour out of here so what we're going to do here the neighbor this is the neighboring property here they didn't want to run a pipe through here and we didn't really want to either because they often drive on this area so we're going to end our pipe right here and then we're just going to pack some rip rap in here and i'm going to track over it with the excavator and pack it down so that you can drive over it but you're not going to damage it and the pipe's going to end over here somewhere and then just trickle across or maybe even sheet across the driveway and we're gonna catch that gutter right there as well all right we just got this three quarter this um street 22 and a half in how's that look jeremy yeah it looks like we got more than three quarter bubble there all right and then i'd say that's full bubble right there awesome there we go so that's going to give that channel drain on the other side of this fence a very aggressive place to drain to so any water that hangs out in that channel drain is going to hit this pipe and it's sweeping down so hard that that water is just going to swoosh out of here we also as we usually do we gave this gutter a very aggressive fall to it so we could have trenched it across there and come up but we choose to have the pipe exposed like this because it's behind a bush that's going to give us the most fall to aggressively take water out of here and also the other thing that does for us that high volume of flow is that's going to blow out any debris that gets in there and we already talked about how we've got a lot of trees over here so that's going to keep this system working by itself we are back on this job and the concrete guys are on the way so we've got our pipes dubbed out we're gonna the concrete guys are gonna get here do their thing form it up we're gonna set our channel drain i've got some plastic put up to try and help cover up the brick from concrete splashing and i got to get these boards off of here these were just temporary for safety so let's get this done you're not checking straight but we gotta have it coming back this morning let's get that late i got your eight double bubble coming off coming through the drain that should be plenty yup i gotta make sure the strings will go that way yeah okay [Music] oh push it down the level they're going down yeah it looks pretty good see and that one going down that one's going down hard well you don't need to cut none of that i've got my pipe set in here and the concrete guys got it all formed up and we are waiting for concrete so we took the channel all the way under the deck two reasons for that the first is if we get any water running across here it'll get caught but the second reason is if they ever get rid of this deck this will all be done and they can pour concrete right up to our concrete and have it look really nice so i hear a truck down there let's go see if the concrete's here [Applause] foreign so [Applause] we just finished or the concrete guys just finished the pour so there we go i'm gonna let this set up a little bit and then pull the tape off of the grate and put these deck boards back i want to show you what i just found on our board we're putting the deck back together this is a little perimiscus mouse so big whiskers whoop there he goes i am back over here on this job and i just wanted to take a look at how things came out so here's our first outfall and the customer has reported back that the system's been working very well and she hasn't had any more flooding going on in her basement on this side we just put in some class b rip wrap to give the water a place to go along the driveway here this is the neighbor's driveway and we we didn't want to put a pipe in here because this gets driven on quite a bit and the neighbor had no problem with the water shooting across the their driveway so it looks like it's been driven on a little bit already but that's the outfall right there so so that's good news her flooding problem is solved

Channel: Gate City Foundation Drainage

Views: 89,872

Keywords: Channel drain, basement flooding, channel drain basement flooding, channel drain concrete

Id: q6B4ummr7A8

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020