How to Cut a Drainage Channel into a Concrete Slab

[Music] hi david o'dell here with odell complete concrete right here we're trying to solve a drainage problem we have a slab in the backyard that's higher than the garage floor and it sloped towards the building so the water goes into the garage basically and uh occasionally it fills up that lower patio and then it tries to come through the other door so what we're gonna do is um my idea is to just cut a channel through here and then put a channel drain all the way across and let the water come out the end on that far in there that you see me initially over right over there once we if we can get the water there it runs to the front yard well once we started cutting this uh we realized that this concrete was really hard and it was really deep and it had a lot of rebar in it because we started probing it i started drilling i took the roto hammer started probing the slab depth to see what was going on with it and uh we came to the conclusion it was about 18 inches deep and it had a double mat of rebar in it so we had to come up with an alternative plan to um solve this drainage issue and uh my first thought was you just putting a lot of cuts in it like this so slow the water down and it would uh trickle through the cuts and out the ends but then i can um i started making some phone calls to uh dewalt and some other companies but the wall ended up coming through for me on this one and they happen to have a tool that cuts channels a one inch channel simultaneously a dual bladed and it's a cordless unit so we got one of those and that'll be coming up here shortly but here's when we started probing i just started drilling here and there and uh what initial what this ended up being was a massive foundation for a structure at one point maybe a water tower or something i don't know but it's old it's like in the 50s or something so we're back on the job site about three weeks later maybe actually a little bit longer but uh we decided to do this a little differently on this job site we're going to cut a channel in because this concrete is so thick it's about 16 18 inches thick it's got a double mat of rebar in it why disturb it and you know we found the new another alternative to solve a drainage problem here and we got this unit here right now it's only distributed in europe but it will be coming to the states real soon so here's what we got here's the kit what this does right here take a look at these two blades here it cuts it cuts a channel basically one inch wide makes two cuts one inch wide and whatever depth you want and this happens to be in millimeters as you can see here so this is your adjustment this is spring loaded so when you press here this pops up to whatever depth you set and it's also running on wheels so when you're down on the ground it's designed to pull backwards with the cut we're gonna hook it up to the vacuum the new dewalt vacuum here portable unit see we've got the vacuum that this is all battery operated too it's all everything 60 volt system here and we've got dual hepta filters on this vacuum fleece bag inside here's the battery this is what you get in the kit here's a couple of the batteries you get two of these you get we got four blades here shows you the installation of it we got your charger now here's the crucial point here when you cut that when you do the dual cut at one inch wide this chisel comes with the kit it's the same width as those two blades if you take a look here then what you can do you take your chisel after you make your cut and you just pop out this pop it out now you have a trough and we're going to use that trough in this case to divert water because right now this slab that we're on drains towards the garage the garage floor is lower so this this way the rough water runoff will hit this trough kind of similar to a moat and it'll exit at that end from that point we have drainage out to the front we don't want to continue the cut here because we we don't want water on this low area so the mold will start about a foot in and go all the way down all right let's get down to it then so another thing i after working with this tool a little bit um i decided this would be great for like if you're going to retrofit an existing uh block wall building or just a block wall where you got to conceal maybe some wiring or cable you can make it since you're pulling down you're pulling backwards you could start at the top of the wall and just drag it down and then you have a nice channel to conceal some stuff in if you you know if you want to retrofit a an older building or a block wall or even stucco but it cuts surprisingly easy so it turned out that chisel um wasn't the same width as the blade so we couldn't get in there i mean that would have been ideal if it was the same size it would have made it a lot easier to chip it out if you could run lengthwise with the chisel but it was a little oversized so we just had to run it sideways and just clean it up as best we could at the bottom because what we're going to do on this is i'm going to put a self-leveling cement mix all right we just got done cutting with the dcg 200 from dewalt and uh this thing worked better than expected to tell you the truth i thought um it was going to be a struggle just like the last time i attempted to cut this job but this tool uh made it a lot easier um what we cut what i found that this can do is we went 20 millimeters which is about one inch we did about 25 feet with one battery and then i switched batteries out so 25 feet 1 inch deep is what you're gonna get pretty much and i was we cut through this whole thing in 30 minutes and then on the vacuum the dewalt vacuum over there it's still on its first battery it ran the whole time let's take a look see how much dust it picked up on this cut which is about 30 feet first let's check the battery life see what we got left dinner okay we still got two bars so this is still really really good to go now let's open it up check out the fleece bag see how much stuff we picked up here okay oh yeah it's heavy okay it's filled to about here so this did its job and you know this is actually the third time i filled this bag i've already dumped it two times and i'm gonna dump it again i'm going to reuse this bag oh i did a little research on google and then come to find out 20 millimeters isn't really an inch it's more in the area of 3 4 7 8 inch now after we clean this trench out i'm just to keep clean up the bottom and make it free-flowing so it doesn't snag a bunch of debris and dirt on a rainfall i'm gonna pour in um some self-leveling concrete mix that's going to be right along the bottom of this trench it's going to go in real thin so we're not going to lose a lot of depth in there also let's see what happened oh yeah when we were chiseling through here we chipped um spalled a little bit of the edges of the concrete so now i'm just going to run a grinder to kind of give it a little 45 dropping into that trench to smooth it out a little bit take care of the sharp edges in other words all right we're getting ready to mix up the self leveling for the base of our channel this stuff is good all the way up to uh five inches thick if you integrate some gravel into it you can frame on this thing within three to 12 hours or start your uh flooring but this is good interior or exterior so that's what we're going with since we're exterior all right let's do it [Applause] so depending on how much water you need to divert um and how fast the slope is down towards wherever you're trying to divert the water from you can put multiple channels in and then uh really catch any overflow if one channel doesn't handle everything you just put throw another one in there two or three more whatever it takes now if you really want to get really tricky with it you could start let's say we started at three quarter deep at one side at one side at the high end we could start dropping that channel down deeper as we go along to really get it to flow in this particular case the water will seek its own level and fall out the low end because we have a level channel here and that self-leveling product worked out really nice didn't really even have to touch it we just poured it in there it seeked its own level at about a quarter inch deep and smooth so that's where we're hoping that the water drains out right here on this end not a very good funnel i designed there would have been better to have like a metal coffee can and just crimp it a little something a little more solid but it turned out nice and uh from what i understand we've had a couple rainfall since we put it in i didn't get a call back so i'm assuming it's working like a charm by the way we do have the winner for the boots and google randomizer picked ricky ruzinski ricky rouzinski's the winner for the keen boots congratulations anyway thank you for watching and have a good day

Channel: Odell Complete Concrete

Views: 213,521

Keywords: how to pour a concrete patio, channel drain, drainage, how to install a french french drain, how to pour a concrete slab, how to install channel drain, how to pour a concrete driveway, concrete, how to setup a concrete patio, how to install a french drain, how to install a drainage channel, how to finish a concrete slab, how to fit a channel drain, how to install a concrete patio, how to pour a concrete patio slab, odell, odell concrete, odell complete concrete, david odell, KEEN

Id: dR0HFyFFvrA

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020