Fabric or no Fabric in Red Clay EXPERIMENTS

hello folks welcome to my first video on YouTube and it's going to be a dandy because there's probably gonna be all kind of errors in it the I'm not a professional speaker or anything like that so bear with me as I make many mistakes through this and say the wrong thing and use the wrong words so let's get right down to it of why I'm making this video okay so basically I'm making the I'm doing a yard drain I'm not a professional yard drain person I'm not anywhere near that but I have gotten some tips on YouTube on how to do a yard drain so I've seen a lot of different ideas and whether or not to wear wear but whether or not to use geotextile fabric which is the 4 ounce geotextile fabric or not to use the geotextile fabric and whether or not to burrito wrap it in geotextile fabric so I was basically going to do a couple experiments today with that bin right there to show whether or not in this clay that we have here in the south it's mainly red clay and it's very hard to deal with it doesn't really drain real well and basically if you put it on the bottom or on the top of anything it will act as a liner for a bathtub pretty much it's like a bathtub liner so it holds water in so it doesn't really drain really well so it also brings a lot of muck and mud to the top so if that happens it makes your life even worse so what I'm going to do today is a couple experiments on whether or not or to see whether or not with our Sorrell soil here in South whether or not it meshes well with the fabric or not fabric or whether or not to wit basically which is the best way to you know use whatever combination of rock pipe fabric or not fabric that works well with our soil here and so I'm going to go ahead and do these experiments and as you can see what I'm what I'm trying I do need to to show exactly what my problem is is that this yard would have water all the way all the way to the surface and this is on a hill right here and it would be to the surface and they would have bubbles on it and you can see even after four days of no rain you can see inside the trench here the water is coming from up the hill there and it's a subsurface water so that's really what I'm dealing with here and I do want to get rid of some top or some surface water also so let me do those experience impairments and I will basically show you what I found okay I'm just gonna test this to see if this theory in the way that I'm gonna do my French drain works so I'm going to test it in a bin I've got the pipe here I've got the fabric underneath it just like it would be on the ground the perforated pipe and I'm gonna wrap it and we'll put rocks in it and wrap it like I would and the regular pipe so here it is I put the dirt around the edges like it would on the regular yard would have and dirt on the edges this is clay dirt and then I put some rocks and some perforated pipe and the perforated pipe is coming directly down on the bottom there's no rocks under it and I'm just gonna keep filling it up and then I'm putting dirt on top so there's my dirt in my wrap I don't have too much overlap there there's not much overlap so we're gonna see how it works I'm gonna put some dirt on top of it okay so there's about maybe two inches of dirt right there that I've stepped on well yeah step down compact it down and the pipe going out the front okay and I'm gonna simulate rain with our hose pipe here and I've got a little bit of a slope on this walkway so that'll that'll be kind of like our slope that we would have in the drain so here we go see what happens and I'll let you kind of look down in there too into the drain as you can see there's nothing in there okay see what happens doesn't even percolate well there goes to water it's coming down through the pipe now you see it kind of but mind you this is really for a grain that would have more so groundwater not much so the you know top the rainwater and all that this would be more so for groundwater and the groundwater would already be coming through all that and as you can see the it comes through pretty slowly but it was coming from the top and a lot of that groundwater will actually come from the bottom anyway so you can see here that it does come down through the rocks and through the fabric and the top is pretty well getting dry wet it down some more see what happens this clay is pretty hard - pretty hard to percolate through anyway so it takes a little while for it to actually soak in as you can see it is actually going through the fabric when this all drains out I'm gonna do a different experiment with kind of a blind drain kind of thing where I'm gonna put the the grate on straight on top of the fabric so what I'm doing here is basically gonna put this drain right up on top of the fabric and just see if it like if I have some water that is not like just surface water that needs to be going down the drain let's see how that works I'm gonna put this thing here it'd be kind of like in here but a little bit deeper of course a little bit deeper we'll just kind of simulate that and this mud we put this kind of around it yeah let's see how that works all the way down in there straight down into where the fabric is see what happens now that is a blind drain for surface water and that right there will percolate no problem so what I'm gonna do is put a couple of these blind drains in there that go straight to the fabric itself and it will it will eventually drain all that water as you can see it's going straight it's going straight through the fabric a lot easier all that's going into the drain but you can see it's going easily through that fabric remember when I was praying the fabric and then the dirt and I took the dirt out and of course now that I've got just really just fabric on top it obviously works with the fabric it goes through but for some reason the clay won't let it flow through the fabric but now that I've got it pretty much I'm you know opened it's pretty much letting it soak right in and it's working just wonder if I should get some different soil to put on top of it just so I know that it'll it'll work all right what I've done here is put some sod on top directly on top of the fabric directly on top of the fabric but it has about maybe an inch of dirt that goes with the side watch this just straight through and into the fabric although I'm pretty good was really good so the only thing other than that to try is just to put some of this mushroom compost which is probably the closest to this dirt right here that's on the back of this side so I'm gonna try that all right so what I've done here is put topsoil about our inch and a half that mushroom compost which is about as close as I can think of that is on back of that side and so I've filled it up with water and it's it percolates a little bit better than or a lot better than the the clay and it takes a little bit less time for it to actually soak through as you can see it sucked in a lot quicker and the water is pretty much gone okay so for my last experiment what I'm doing is I am putting the dirt directly on the rocks just to see what the difference is see as you can see I got the pipe under there I got the dirt on the sides dirt on the sides and I'm gonna put the rock in the middle I've got I got rock all packed in there also but I got the dirt on the sides just to simulate this so let me finish filling this up so I'm gonna try to I've got all the rocks in there and I'm gonna put the put the dirt right on top of it and I forgot to tell you that I did put fabric on the bottom of where the pipe was I put fabric on the bottom just cuz around here you've got this clay and it just has a big thick silt that forms at the bottom of any trench then with running water so I just went ahead and put the fabric on there since I've already bought it anyway so didn't hurt so this is so this right here is just straight clay over the rocks and as you can see there's really no percolation whatsoever with any kind of clay as you can see look there's hardly anything coming out and that's that's clay over rocks with no fabric on top of it it was hardly any percolation so immoral the story here is that doesn't matter what you do if you put clay on top of anything it's pretty much not gonna it's gonna be hard to percolate through or it's gonna be very slow I forgot the show what happens when you when you poke a hole in the dirt watch this poke down to the rocks and just move it over a little bit your that that shows you that clay is like a big bathtub liner and it will just hold the water in it's like a big bathtub liner and all I did was just put all in it so after the experiments it looks like basically the fabric doesn't really make much of a difference with clay clay is not gonna let a whole lot through to begin with but the next video I put out is actually going to be of the actual trench and an actual simulation of what the fabric will do and what not putting fabric in the trench will do you can watch for my next video on that coming up right after this one so just give me a an idea of what you think about basically my experiments and why or why not to use fabric in this situation if the fabric and the clay just just does not mesh well all right thanks a lot

Channel: VEALCO

Views: 5,981

Rating: 4.7857141 out of 5

Keywords: french drain, geotextile fabric, french drain man, apple drains, filter fabric, yard drain, corrugated pipe, perforated corrugated pipe, How to install french drain, french drain fabric

Id: t-W20DTz_w8

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020