Fixing my Backyard Drainage Issues (Rain = Duck Pond)

what's up guys no-nonsense know-how here what you're looking at are some photos in my backyard when I first moved in you can see I had some serious drainage issues and after a downpour the water we kind of just stick around for at least 3 or 4 hours now this back corner I ended up just throwing like five yards of dirt there firming that up and putting the garden in there that took care of it but still even during a downpour I would end up with this huge pond in the middle of my yard and of course my my docks they loved it they was cute to watch them swim in it but I knew I had to take care of it and so I have this old footage here that I made a short little video I just wanted to show you what I did to take care of it and yeah it's not the greatest footage ever but here you go all right so it's January 4th 2016 and I'm kind of making this video just so I can remember what I did with this drainage project essentially the problem we're trying to fix is water pulls up in the center of the yard right here and a little bit over near the tractor there so instead of making a French drain through the center of the yard which would have been most ideal I decided I wanted to keep this enter the yard free and clear because one day I might put a bunker in out there to do so essentially what would takes place is all of a driveway water from up here runs downslope down to here where I've actually taken some material out and then it rises slightly as you get towards back so the water has nowhere to go so in this section here all they landscape fabric down and then I'm gonna do perforated they got four inch pipe going all the way and then on the back we're gonna be using the six inch solid pipe well lay the fabric down we'll lay the pipe fill it with stone fold the fabric tamp it down this is gonna be getting patched over with some you know asphalt so then this is gonna run this way into our main sump basin right here which not sure how it got water in it but must be some groundwater Perkin in there okay and then we have two small french drains that go out I still got to finish the ends of them but they're relatively deep also on a one to two percent grade and they go out into the low spots of the yard so then our friend train continues on a 1% slope going down this about a hundred feet back to the fence so we'll continue on down here and show you where we're going I get back to here and we're gonna drop another basin in here I'm using four inch perforated for the majority of this channel here however I think around that this dogwood tree and possibly those fruit trees I'll probably leave the sections solid pipe because again I don't want these roots growing into the pipe so essentially back here what's gonna take place grounds all frozen right now since I picked a terrible time of the year to do this but I'm gonna slope this this back kind of over sloping you know the grade back into here and I'll probably drop a storm drain here too just because I'm kind of trying to do it a hybrid system because I feel like when the grounds frozen with this crazy weather we've had you get you can have a freeze crazy freezing the grounds frozen solid then we get like 50 60 degrees and we get in rain in December and stuff and so you know if you have storm drains you'll still have good flow and a way to clean them out versus if you just have a French drain the water what may not have a way to get in to fair with the frozen ground we decided to add conduit so we started running it through driveway one inch conduit underneath the trench going that way because I decided it's a good idea since I'll never mess with this again hopefully run the conduit through the top base in here so here we are February 3rd it's raining pretty good right now not super hard but looks like it's working pretty well so you go over to this first storm drain here oh yeah we got we got water coming from the top pipe up here definitely taken advantage of that 4 inch that 4 inch pipe for sure come down and oh yeah or plow some good water and it's it's barely barely raining it's just past the drizzle right now so you can imagine during a downpour these storm drains are gonna work very well it's flowing down down down down to a natural Creek like storm Basin down there alright storm system poor monsoon do a little grass working such but after a serious downpour I used to have pulling all over the place now we can see dry everywhere still some water down in there but that'll perk down into the drain over here I used to get freakin three four inches of water like crazy back here too and if water all along the sides here this drain right here another low spot so system works these are coming out because the rain has stopped and yeah here we are four years later in 2020 and I gotta say I've been very happy with the way the system performs I'm really glad I added these storm drains instead of just relying on a French drain because I think it's it's very necessary to have those with my soil condition here this is clay soil you can see my grass is suffered I had really nice grass for a couple years there and then I just kind of let it go and the crabgrass has taken over cuz I'm always driving this boat and Kubota and everything else over this grass so this back drain over here this only gets used during a severe downpour the front one any any kind of downpour it's always getting used but this back one here rarely does it ever get to the point where this one's flowing any water the bees are still doing just as good as they were before take a little close-up of them it's getting toward the end of the day so they're bunkering down for the day you can see I never ended up redoing my driveway I originally was just gonna patch this and go over this with some asphalt but I'm hoping to eventually rebuild the garage over here one day so until I do that I'll be leaving this driveway where it is as far as the storm drain I made this very heavy-duty since I Drive my truck over it all the time but just pop up on it and that's like one inch inch-and-a-half right there and this is actually an old belt from an old machine I cut the spokes out of it and you can see I haven't opened this and quite some time but I cut the center out of it and just left the spokes spoke ends on the side to be able to lay that in there so that should last a very long time before it rusts through and you also might be wondering about this conduit I ran through there some people probably think that's stupid in fact looking back I guess it is a little dumb but I figured I'd run it through here so it made it easier for me to pull the wires from the house I had a center section here and then also I can tag into here again in the future if I ever had to without digging it back up plus I figured this stuff gets buried anyway underground so I wasn't too worried about water getting inside of there its conduit with thh AM wire inside of it so anyway that's that and then on the bottom of here I just threw this piece of fabric so that way the sediment and everything settles down below that and then I can I actually haven't cleaned this out in four years I've never needed to but that way there's not standing water in here where mosquitoes will go inside and create home so how the water perks down in between there's you got water coming in this pipe in this one and my only regret is I wish I did a six inch instead of a four inch because during a severe downpour this four inch is actually at its maximum capacity and the water level will start to rise in here so I think that pretty much wraps up the tour of what I did again I'll just touch on it a buddy of mine was saying oh you shouldn't put storm drains in because they're always a problem and you've got to clean them out and he was saying just do a friend's drain but with the way my soil is I don't think that would have corrected my issue in fact during the downpour when I before I had grass I would still have tons of water pulling up over top where the French drain was it would take an hour to before it went away so that tells me French drain doesn't work that great and having those storm drains is much better I apologize if I miss anything or if that shaky footage gave you a headache you can see I'm rocking my quarantine hair really don't care cuz boat hair don't care right because the bars aren't open so yeah if you like the video and you watch this far consider given a thumbs up hopefully maybe give you a little bit of insight or some ideas to do your project I didn't do that trench I started doing it by hand and then I rented a mini excavator from Home Depot to take care of that that that thing was a godsend because doing it by hand would have just taken ages and I don't have a backhoe for my Kubota so yeah check out my channel toss me a subscribe any of that kind of stuff and until next time kz guy to hear Chris Brown no-nonsense though I'll see you next time [Music] [Music] 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Channel: NoNonsenseKnowHow

Views: 51,775

Rating: 4.8831344 out of 5

Keywords: NNKH, NoNonsenseKnowHow, mechanic, kzguy2, No Nonsense Know How, Flood, flooding, how to fix backyard flooding, how to make a French drain, how to fix a flooding backyard, drainage issues, French drain, storm drain, French drain vs storm drain, ducks, backyard chickens, backyard ducks, how to slope, how to repair drainage, how to fix, how to dig a French drain, how to fix flooding, how to fix a swampy yard, swamp, sewer, Kubota, best way to fix, how to, why, how to grade a yard, pond, ok

Id: sCsFwzjdVu4

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020