DIY French Drain | Cheap Yard Drainage Solution | pt. 1

welcome back to the channel today we're talking drainage all right so here's the plan and you can see what i did yesterday off off camera technically i don't own this area so i will explain what hypothetically may have happened in this area but that's not part of what we're doing right now so i'm going to continue from here up through my yard in a low point of my yard in those blue dotted lines and connect to this black corrugated pipe that's been sticking out of the ground since last spring last spring i did a project where i put in a french drain in this low swale along that grass line along the fence all the way to the back of my yard so the first step for me was to remove the sod um i'm doing this by hand with a flathead shovel but you could go to a local rental place and rent a side cutter and it would make it a whole lot faster to save a little bit of money though i did it myself i dug down about two inches so that i could get a good root base and then i watered it while that it was off the trench one thing that to keep in mind is i would dig probably three or four inches wider than you actually want your trench that way it's going to be a lot easier later to put this back down so now the labor intensive part of this project starts digging the trench i'm going about down the depth of the shovel which is about 10 inches deep i'm leaving a ledge on either side of the trench about an inch and a half on each side like i was talking about with the sod that will make it a whole lot easier for us to fill it with gravel to know the height that we need to go down to and then also to put the sod back on on top of it i had plenty of fall here so i didn't really have to take that into consideration it was just digging 11 basically an 11 inch deep trench all the way down and it's about eight inches wide i'm removing all of the dirt and getting rid of all the dirt because we won't need it because the entire thing will be full of gravel later [Music] [Music] [Music] here's the fabric that i'm wrapping my trench in this is not a landscaping fabric it's a geotextile drainage fabric so water passes through it but dirt will not i'll leave a link in the description below here's the fabric installed in the trench i rolled the fabric out and then i walked on it to make sure that it sat down on the bottom of the trench well and stuck against the sides then i pinned it in but then i ran out of pins so you can see that i used pieces of sod to hold the fabric tight and that's going to hold it tight while i'm pouring the gravel in there there's one of the pins you can see and then on the other side of the trench i was also using rocks to hold it in place really you just need something to hold it in place while you put the pipe in there and then you put the stones on top of it this is three tons of number 57 washed river gravel and i'm gonna have plenty left over for another project so as you can see i'm putting old pavers on top of the pipe just to hold it in place because i don't want the gravel moving it around too much or getting underneath it we really want it sitting right on the bottom of the trench [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now we're finishing up the gravel burrito just by wrapping one side of the fabric over top of the other then using a landscaping pin we're going to pin it in place i would just try to pull it tight as you can get it pretty tight it's not a huge deal long as you have a good amount of overlap the sod's going to sit down over top of it and hold it for the rest of the time anyway all right so this is what the trench looks like fully wrapped and you can see it it does make a burrito now one thing that i do want to point out is these the ledges on the edge are flush with the top of the wrap and then you can see that the fabric's nicely pinned in there and there's not too many gaps so dirt isn't going to be able to get in here but water is definitely going to be able to flow through it the fun part we put back the sod then the last step is just to water the side real good in my case it was sitting out there for about two or three days so it really needs a good soaking just to make sure and then i'm gonna come back and water it every single day for about the next week all right so this project's done and really it's hard to tell that i did anything it took me about two days of work to actually get this done so this is something that you could do on a weekend my trench is roughly about 35 feet long all put together so that gives you kind of an estimate of how long i took with that one i did go a little excessive on the trench although the walls are straight down and it's about eight eight or so inches wide so it was it was definitely a little bit beefier than it needed to be but i think it's going to do a really good job i didn't explain much of what went on on the other side of the sidewalk because i said i didn't own it but hypothetically speaking if i were to do anything over there i would put in a solid 4 inch pvc pipe something a little bit stronger and i don't really need a french drain over there to suck up water so hypothetically i would do a solid pipe all the way through uh one inlet in my side of the yard just to act as a cleanup and to pick up any surface water that might be running down since the pipe is in the lowest area there and then another inlet on the other side that's just a little bit lower than the height of the sidewalk because water sits on the sidewalk there and so this will help drain any of that water that sits on that sidewalk then also hypothetically i would run that four inch pipe down run a 90 about two feet down and hook into the main sewer line storm sewer line that goes into the storm sewer that's right there this style drain is the closest thing that i think a diy person can get to a professional level drain it's we completely get rid of all of the dirt we use that non-woven geo textile fabric that lets water through really efficiently but holds the dirt back so between that and the gravel that pipe should never clog up so this thing is going to last the lifetime that i own this house if you're a person that's thinking about doing a drainage project like this please leave any questions you have for me down in the comments i'd love to answer them i hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did please give it a like if you're liking some of these projects that i'm doing please hit subscribe so that you you can always see the next project that i'm working on because i've got a ton of them planned but other than that i'll see in the next one

Channel: That Tech Teacher

Views: 1,762,056

Rating: 4.8968401 out of 5

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, soggy yard, drain, drainage, french drain man, lawn drain

Id: V17s91XeqvU

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020