DIY French Drain | Cheap & Easier Yard Drainage Solution | Trencher | Fix Wet Yard

welcome back to the channel my name is ryan and today i just finished another drain project this time i had a little bit of help from my neighbor and we decided to tackle this project a little bit different we went the easy route and probably the route that most diy-ers would tackle this project all right so let's take a look at what we're going to do here the black arrows represent where french drains or drainage systems already are so over on the street hand side of my property you can see the black arrow that represents a french drain that i put in last year that runs in a swale the the length of my property and then there's another black arrow right behind my house that represents the french drain that i did in one of my other projects that carries water over to the other one we just talked about then over in my neighbor's property there's a red x there where he has a an existing drain that goes out to the street so the blue arrows are what we're going to do in this project so we're going to run an open french drain all the way down that connects into my neighbor's previous drain and then behind my pool we're going to drain water to either side of my property half of the water in theory is going to flow into the new drain that we're putting in his yard and then the other half of the water is going to flow into my existing drain on the street side of my property all right so if you watch any of the other drainage videos on my channel you know i have dug them by hand that didn't seem like such a hot option here it's the end of summer the ground's super hard plus i had 250 feet to do here that was that was going to take a while so instead we went to a local rental place and rented this ditch witch trencher this one goes 36 inches deep which is way more than we needed but it's what they had on on hand and i have to say this thing was awesome super powerful made short work of this and it really helped us when we were doing this project the only downside to this trencher and maybe it was just operator air it seemed like it was always pulling to the right maybe that was the soil we were in or the slope that we were on but the trench didn't come out as straight as i wanted in this area but i can't complain [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so once we got the neighbors trench done then we opened up the fence and we started going off into my yard and this is the point where we had a problem as you've probably already seen i don't think we hit anything too crazy big there's that one rock in front of us that was kind of big but something broke within the bar the tensioning spring or something and the chain became too loose and and popped off we ended we ended up getting the chain back on but we could definitely tell that it was too loose to continue with so we we exchanged it with another one and the rental company was real good about it they got us a new trencher and we kept going the next morning all right so this is what the trench looks like after the trencher is done piles of dirt on either side this 100 foot stretch in my backyard here only took me about 25 minutes once we got the trencher going again then the worst part about this project or the most labor intensive part was picking up the dirt so many many loads of dirt got moved here if i could do this project again if i was doing this again i probably would just rent a mini excavator that way i'm not touching the dirt twice we're just scooping it out of the trench and then putting it directly into the back of the trailer uh but these three tools right here kind of saved my life uh the one on the left the orange one that's a trenching shovel uh naturally dirt is going to get back into the bottom of that trench so cleaning it out with that trenching shovel was was awesome uh then the middle shovel is just a a big flat shovel that i found at lowe's that was awesome for scooping dirt up off the side of the the sides of the trench make sure you mow your grass really nice and short and then you can use that to scrape up the dirt and get some really nice big scoops with it and then the thing that was on the right hand side was a spud bar that was used for any rocks or anything that the trencher didn't want to go through we pried out with that thing [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] after the trench is clean since we're not using any geotextile fabric or anything like that i'm just putting a small bed of gravel down at the bottom it only really needs to be an inch or so thick and the reason that we're putting this gravel here is to make a little bit of a barrier between the bottom of the trench and the bottom of the pipe so that it helps keep the pipe from silting up then it's a good idea to double check your slope you should probably have this already calculated and good to make sure water is flowing downhill but if you have any high areas or low areas you can kind of compensate with putting more or less gravel in and using a level is a cheap and easy way to do it then it was really easy to connect into the neighbor's drain since this thing's going to be filled all the way up to the top with gravel we really don't need that surface inlet anymore so i'm just running our pipe directly into that and then rotating his tee down and water will just flow right into there the only downside is we can't look down into the pipe like i always like to do and see how the water is flowing the pipe that we're using i bought it lowe's for 38 dollars for a hundred foot roll it is a corrugated perforated pipe and it has slits on all side of the pipe so water will flow in from all sides there there is better pipe out there but this stuff so far has worked really well for me i'm using the same gravel that we used in previous projects it's a number 57 washed river gravel i think it's around 33 dollars a ton and this is eight tons and we only used about five of it so i've got some left over for another project all right so then we started filling the trench and we quickly realized that this was going to take forever we have one person holding the pipe down in the center of the trench so that we can get gravel on all sides of it and keep it at the bottom of the trench but this was taken forever so really quickly we just made a kind of crude cut out here we cut a hole in some old pegboard and put it as the tailgate in the back of the the trailer and we just started pushing rock out the back of it he was driving and i was just pushing rock out the back and then you can see underneath the trailer there's patio pavers every so often and that's what's keeping the pipe centered in the middle of the trench and held down to the bottom and we got a pretty good system going and this actually ended up working pretty well here's where the drain branches off into my yard and we elected to go with a y connector to try to help promote better water flow coming from my yard into this drain then on the other side of the drain we used the same method that i did before when i did one of my previous of my other previous drain projects i really like this so i cut a square shaped hole in the french drain that i already had in the ground and then i used this gutter connector to fit in there and i really like this because it goes from round to square so that that gutter connector is never going to slide too far in there and then i i can also put it halfway up the pipe so that water that is flowing through the other french drain doesn't back up and go into the new one that i'm installing and it's also still flowing downhill and i didn't have to dig up the old french drain to put this in normally people use like a t [Music] all right so this is what the finished product ended up looking like there is gravel filled all the way to the top and over a period of time the grass will kind of encroach on this and that gravel line will get smaller some people really like the open gravel look and you can incorporate it into your landscaping and make something really cool looking in our case we're just going to let the grass kind of grow over it over a period of time i'll keep you guys updated on how that goes but for our purposes this works awesome the entire thing is a surface drain it's also collecting water from the ground so it's kind of a win-win there and i think it's really going to help our water issues that we're having behind my pool and all along his yard all right thanks for watching yet another drainage video if you enjoyed the video please give it a thumbs up if you want to let me know what you thought or have any questions please put a comment down below and i'd love to get back to you but as always please subscribe please hit the bell notification so you can see some of that some of the other projects that i'm doing we're going to try to get away from drainage for a little while and tackle some other stuff around the house that i think is going to be really cool so i hope to see in another video yep

Channel: That Tech Teacher

Views: 140,191

Keywords: That tech teacher, DIY, do it yourself, home improvement, yard drainage, how to install a french drain, perforated drainage pipe, french drains, french drain pipe, french drain system, french drain diy, french drain installation, curtain drain, french drain depth, drainage trench, french drain cover, yard drain, yard drains, yard water solutions, apple drains, yard drain fails, fix wet yard, drainage solutions, trencher

Id: DibOVx3ziwM

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020