How to Install, Repair & Clean Channel Drain | Guaranteed to Collect Water

completely remember i showed you how we can clean the gravel around the french drain because the pressure of this thing is so tremendous that it pushes through the holes of the slotted pipe and it cleans the gravel as well it's amazing all these people that say don't put the pressure washer down there it messes up your virgin system they're wrong and you know we're showing you every day how this works hey good morning chuck here with apple drains today let's take a look at channel drain there's all kinds of channel drain we're going to show you this newer channel drain this is a two inch channel drain we've got micro channel drain we've got five inch nds channel drain we're going to show you how to clean it and also how to install it and some of the best practices of where to install it where not to install it let's take a look so there's many different types of channel drain and it's readily available lowe's home depot ace they usually come in 10 foot sections and sometimes they have you know the polypropylene grade on it like this sometimes they have a steel grate there's all kinds i mean there's all kinds this is five inch nds channel drain and it works great you know across a driveway across pavers around the pool it's a little bit overkill for the pool but it does work and one of the things i wanted to show you here before i show you the next piece is so many calls that i come out to and i see the homeowner has done this at the end of their pavers or their patio they've set channel drain down in the ground and of course it runs off and discharges to daylight someplace that's all good but they complain about it because what happens is it floats up it's like a channel it's a boat water gets underneath of it and it floats up there's really no way to secure this channel drain in the ground it really does not work it's made to be in concrete the concrete pours across it and you can see there's a little lip that holds it all in place it can work in pavers but it's much better in concrete for for that for this particular piece of channel drain let's take a look at what you could do still not recommended but you could do that so this is also nds channel drain and it comes in a what is this four foot three foot section and it's already got the grates you can see they're already screwed down in place looks real good this particular channel drain if you had to you could use some pins you can see they've got spots for pins and you could trench along here in the dirt and put pins to get down there and hold this in place would i recommend that still no because water is much more powerful than the pins when once that groundwater comes up it's just going to raise this up just like a boat and it's going to lift it up and of course it no longer functions or you're going to trip over it at the end of your papers or your patio so you could do it but strongly recommended that you do not if you're going to put a channel drain inside of the pavers you need to pave around them and we suggest that these be set in concrete so there should be a base of concrete that you set this down into and that concrete holds it in place a lot of work to put in a channel drain when you buy this section you know at this at the hardware store it comes with pieces and you can see we've got an end cap we've got a cap to connect things together to make another piece to hold them together and another end cap all of these things are going to be needed and you're going to need a whole bunch of them this is very expensive way to install channel drain remember it needs to be set into concrete without the concrete this will float up like a boat every time okay so we're getting ready to set the channel drain the first thing that we did of course showed you how we hooked it all up but now we're going to protect the grates by putting some blue painters tape across it that just keeps the concrete from getting down in there and they can easily pull that right off when we're done remember i showed you the connection there of the y we've already kind of covered that up we'll do the same thing on the other side over here cover that with the painters tape and then we're going to be setting that one here to the proper grade and then concreting it in so here we're mixing up you know the concrete that's holding that channel drain down in place we've got several things that we use as a guide remember that pavers are going to be put back up to grade so in other words we're not setting the channel drain in concrete which is a better way to do it but it looks pretty nice when you put pavers all the way across so the only thing that you see is the channel drain okay so we just got you know about four feet more to go remember how we're doing this is we're not bringing this concrete to grade they're going to put pavers back so basically we're holding that channel drain down in place we've got a real nice pitch you know just perfectly level coming across the existing channel or existing pavers sorry and so when they put the pavers back you can see my trowel they'll have to cut to size but it'll fit perfectly right here and lean right up against you can kind of see i'll give you the example see we're perfect all the way across so they'll have a nice fit all the way down through same thing on this side and it really is it might seem like that's a lot of work but it's really quick with a concrete saw you cut papers in in matter of seconds so we've got a nice channel drain going on we're almost finished with this side then we'll kind of sweep it off a little bit then we just have another 10 feet to go on the smaller garage again this was a tedious job so you know this was a fairly large job something that the homeowner could definitely tackle themselves it's not hard to do as long as you think of it as smaller jobs you know we did you know quite a bit of work here but break it down make it three four smaller jobs the channel drain is the tedious part of all of this because it's a finish and it would be like finishing the kitchen putting the cabinets in is something that you will always see underground drains hey they can do whatever they want nobody can see them but if you got a finished product gotta take your time okay this is micro channel drain and this is the most common channel drain you'll find this around your pool around your lanai maybe it's on your you just on your pool deck or on the deck in the backyard and what it is it's inch and a half pipe with a square grate across the top and you can see it this one's square there's an insert that holds these together it just slides inside one slides inside the other and what happens is that these tend to fill up with dirt because nobody ever maintains them so if you were going to have these in your patio that's great they they take tons of water they'll handle hurricane force water but you've got to maintain the system so over here we've got one already put together we've got the insert inside to hold it you can see it's an old one they've painted over all of the tops of the grate and of course that contributed to their problem dramatically what we're going to do is we're going to send the jetter down here show you how to clean this because if you can get this clean it'll save you thousands of versus cutting this out of the concrete and repairing it or replacing so this is around inch and a half and you can see the insert what it does it's a piece of inch and a half pipe it's about six inches long and it just slides in one side and then it slides in the other and this will be put together you can lay it any way you want but once you put it together then you set it down into your new area where you're going to pour concrete don't let the size of this fool you this inch and a half pipe works great this handles so much water it's unbelievable can we get more water with a bigger channel drain of course but this handles more than enough water around your pool and it looks so good so recently nds came out with this thing it's called a slim channel drain kit you see it slim channel drain kit and they say it's for patios and walkways it handles heavy rain small areas with foot traffic really it's a great little piece of pipe it really is and it's got the grates that pop on the top they can pop them off and clean it and it looks really nice it's a little bit bigger than an inch and a half right it's actually two inches wide you know at the bottom of the channel drain and it would handle a little bit more water i think that it looks much better than this you know in the around the pool and eye the patio great little kit this little piece right here i think is what four feet and it cost uh i think it was 40 bucks so a lot of money for these channel drains but if you get these installed properly they'll work forever and ever okay remember how i said that the channel drain needs to be set down into concrete and you can see this is just a dirt drive you know we've got mulch across the drive and it's really tempting here's a low spot right here where water pulls up it's really tempting to just set this down in the ground and let it discharge because it's off it runs downhill off to the side on that side and it runs downhill off to the side on this side really tempting to set this down in the ground and try to pin it but it will not hold do not do that do not lay it along the side either you'll have the same problem it'll just float up okay here's an old piece of micro channel drain and the installers here this is from a previous install that we took it all out because it was totally collapsed inside and just worthless but the installer the original installer they did a nice job this is how you would make a corner you need to make a nice miter see that it miters together what holds that in place is concrete that's all so as water floods across the deck drops in it would drain both directions the problem with this is not a problem but the problem is is cleaning it because when we send the cable or the hose from the jetter we can only get to this point so that means we have to go to the other end and start at that end and come through to get it clean so it's several cleanings to get this thing open next we're going to go ahead and clean a backed up piece of this channel drain so you can see how well the mini jet actually works and believe me we can save you thousands and thousands if you decide to try to clean it if if we can clean that line versus replacing it it's truly thousands in savings okay remember i said it's really tempting to put this across you know the the dirt driveway and it would work but as soon as that groundwater got high this would flood and push that channel drain up plus the weight of all the vehicles not a good idea so what do you need to do here if you've got a low spot in the driveway you could fill the area you know with more sand and soil bring that to a better grade or you could put a cat spacing in here or you could do a french drain gravel perforated pipe lots of gravel but you need a good discharge usually here we're going to end up with a sump pump for the discharge not just let it run out onto the ground it's got to go someplace it got it has to go to daylight the sump pump is considered daylight you can't just send it into the ground and that's the problem with most of the lanai's they put this you know channel drain all the way across and of course it's too close to the house number one but where it discharges it just goes into the ground there's no place for that water to go and of course the sand fills these things up in just a matter of months so we're going to simulate cleaning this thing and you can see this thing is just packed you see chance trying to push that down pull that back out there see all that dirt on the end of it i mean it's just packed full of sand and this is what happens on most of the lanai's in florida and across the country for that matter they just get packed full of sand and there's no way that you're going to get this clean without them in each other so let's go ahead and do that we're going to stick it in there we're going to fire up the jack got the pressure washer running and it should start to pull itself through there as it goes okay you can see the jet house how it's going through there you can see it how quickly it goes through it's coming all the way down you can see it pushing out the water you see it coming out the other end so now the secret is to pull it back slowly because we want to pull back we want to get that debris out of the line keep it running always keep the pressure on your pressure washer because without it it's not going to pull that dirt back but you can see it's pulling all that debris out of there looking really good let's come back here to the end and you can see all the debris coming out all that mud coming out of that line you can see where the pressure is right there it's just pulling all the sand back out of this line completely we'll go through this a couple of times to get this really good clean go slow go slow the mini jet is very powerful it's just like a jet engine those those uh nozzles on the back of the those nozzles on the back of the jet they push this down through the line if you let go of it it'll just go right through there so fast and we need to go slow so you can see it and it comes you'll see that it'll just push that all that dirt right out of that line completely remember i showed you how we could clean the gravel around the french drain because the pressure of this thing is so tremendous that it pushes through the holes of the slotted pipe and it cleans the gravel as well it's amazing all these people that say don't put the pressure washer down there it messes up your virgin system they're wrong and you know we're showing you every day how this works we're going to go all the way to the end and go faster you go all the way to the end you see it it's just blowing all that water or all that sand right out of there now we're going to pull it back real slow you do this a couple of times and you've got a nice clean line you can easily test it with your garden hose just you let it run remember channel drain across your lanai is pretty level and so what it does is it kind of fills up once it builds up to a point it begins to flow looking really good come on back you see that jet just pulling off pushing all of that dirt out of that line and you see we've got a real clean flow of water now it's looking really good really good look at all the debris that that pulled out of that line i'm gonna step back we're gonna pull it on out of there come on out perfect so now you can see all the debris that came out of this line all we need to do is just rinse this off on your patio there's going to be some stainings on both sides of this channel drain you need to wash that off directly because it will stain that patio especially if you've got a painted lanai which is what most people do they put this texture paint down to make it look good and it's great but we're ready to go here so again the reason that your your micro channel drain goes bad is number one where the discharges is on both sides on both sides of that line however long it is could be 60 feet doesn't matter usually these installers they do a great job of installing but they just put it right out to the end of your lanai which is usually just at grade and it's it's below grade in other words there's no place for the water to go the water has to have a discharge to daylight it has to so when we come out we clean the line we can get this open 99 of the time 99 the other times that we cannot get it open is because it's actually collapsed it's actually broken but the problem is always going to be we need to put a catch basin at below below the bottom of the channel drain that means we're down you know 8 10 inches right there and then we've got a discharge to daylight so here in florida we're going to run out of fall almost directly so it usually needs to go to a sump pump and that's how you achieve the perfect grade in any yard is with a sump pump because the sump pump sets two feet below grade and we can run that line down two feet have so much fall and the sun pump lifts it up and sends it out but look at all that debris i mean there's tons of it through there tons of debris it's all sand and concrete paint all these things that mini jetter will clean that line [Music] [Music] and [Music] um [Music] um [Music] hey good morning chuck here with apple drains today we're down in sarasota florida as you can see we're going to cut out a micro channel drain and these are the inch and a quarter or inch and a half drains that run around a pool deck so we've already cut that next we go ahead and try to get some of this concrete up that's kind of a mush just use the flat so we'll try to get up as much as we can so we don't keep tracking it all so basically what we're doing is we're pulling out that concrete we just use a pry bar and we do have our jack hammer available as you can see but the pry bar works far better than the jack hammer in the corners we'll probably have to use that hammer to because it's poured right up against the foundation they put this channel drain against the foundation typical florida home it looks great but yeah you know it should be a couple inches away but that's how they do it so once you have it all cleaned out you'll get all your debris out of there we're just going to rinse off the area we'll let this dry for just you know a little teeny bit because we want to keep working but we just don't want to have such a mess when we pour our concrete back micro channel drains not very deep and even at any channel drain it doesn't matter it sits at the bottom of the concrete it's all the deeper it needs to be if you take out too much dirt you've got to put something in there to fill it so it can set upon it so we've got plenty of concrete what we'll do is we'll use a dry mix just to level that out and our michael micro channel drain will set on that concrete so this is the slowest part of the job just to clean up before you can pour any cement it's got to be nice and clean we've got a good corner over here looking real good we'll wash all that off let's take a look at the discharge so right here there's a there's a screen lanai a piece of aluminum strong steel right here what we do is we just pound it out the old channel drain if you can see that you see the little tunnel underneath there we pound that out and we're going to slide our new piece right through there all it does is discharge right to the outside of the lanai outside so now we're just cleaning out the barrel because we had it really messy we need to have a nice clean barrel for the concrete and you can hear that blower back here what we're doing is we're just kind of drying off the area a little bit to help [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so putting the concrete back into the channel drain is really tedious work you can't put pressure on the channel drain you can't really even touch it you just got to pack it in on the sides and make sure that you get underneath of the thing when you trowel it down in so that it stays put yeah always stuff it down in so you hit the bottom and you see how far that sunk down so now we've got to put more it's just a real slow process we'll get it all in here and then we'll finish it off and we'll be all done so as you go along you can see it looks messy but remember that there's tape on the top so we just keep on going we'll come back we'll wipe off the tape when we're all done let it harden and then you just pull off that tape and you've got a real pretty channel drain that goes through so we also cleaned the downspout drain because it's been overflowing and of course causing that channel drain just to get even more debris in it we found out that that line comes right out here and you can see the pop-up and it was just full of mud and roots and debris and now it's got a pretty good flow coming down through here so we'll put the pop-up back on show the homeowner where it's at hey this is chuck with apple drains reminding you that if you believe you can do something i guarantee you and do it have a great day [Music] you

Channel: Apple Drains

Views: 64,684

Rating: 4.8303571 out of 5

Keywords: French Drain, Crawl Space, Exterior, Foundation, Waterproofing, Apple Drains, Gravel perforated pipe, yard drain, trench drain, sump pump, How to install a french french drain, how a french drain works, french drain tips, DIY, South Florida, channel drain, pool patio drain, micro channel drain, how to replace micro channel drain, Best Channel Drain, French Drain Installation, NDS Channel Drain, 2 inch Channel Drain, paver channel drain

Id: ydj7vEdROwU

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020