How to STOP FLOODING with a FRENCH DRAIN - DIY

great certain stage video I'm going to explain how you can stop your patio flood by installing a French drain but before we get into the video I have been in the process of renovating my garden for the past two years I've got loads of videos on my channel such as how I've laid a patio how it builds to retain and wall however see that along from scratch so if you'd like to check out any of those videos please head over to my channel and if you like what you see feel free to subscribe now obviously the patio isn't flooded at the moment because we've had a dry couple of days but you can see how much dirt is sitting on the surface every time we try and clean the patio what happens is the water drains away from the house which is a positive thing but all the water seems to pull and sit here now the flipping goes up to about here and around this section here it's about an inch sometimes an inch and a half deep which is obviously a massive problem now my initial idea was to put the French drain behind this lawn boardroom however these gaps in the stone just aren't big enough for the water to flow through at an appropriate rate what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to remove and all of this lawn edging from here all the way down and we're going to be running the pipe that entire way down into this drain over here you can see I've already made the start I've taken some of the lawn edging out so far just to see how difficult it would be and it's not too bad so the plan is to remove all this bordering to dig a trench down put the drainage pipe in that space cover it a stone and then get some new lawn edging in in front of that to separate the patio from the grass so it started off by taking the lawn etch into running it break down the edge of the current lawn boardroom just taking into account the width of the pipe and also the width of the lawn board run too if you want this to be really crispy you can run a String Line This is what I did when I put the law Embroidery in in front of the retaining wall but it's not something you have to do [Music] foreign [Music] to dig the trench and this came in really useful because the width of the matter was roughly the width of what I wanted the trench to be which made things really easy when digging it through I bought this from Tool station about two years ago when I first started the garden renovation and it's honestly worth its weight in gold I've used it so many times I've used it to dig the actual trench when I was building the retaining wall I've used it to level the clay soil so if you have one of these tools in your garage is shed it is definitely something you should be invested in if you are doing a similar renovation to what I'm doing to my garden [Music] as an expert landscape Gardener I thought I'd use the very fancy technique of sitting on my backside and just booting the lawn Button as hard as I could just to try and get it Loose now I did use the Mata to chip off as much of the cement from the back of it as record but it just needed a bit of force to get it out of place where they've been sat for the past couple of years the Ikea bags came in really handy as well just for putting all that loose clay and the bits of stone that I was Finding into them as I was working the aim was to try and keep the work space as tidy as possible but as you can see as the video goes on that sort of just goes to the pot but the bags they come in useful when it came to taking all the clay to the tip save the oven to buy a skip which would have been you know around 100 and 780 pounds foreign [Music] [Applause] has been taken out now so most of what's below here is just clay so it shouldn't be too difficult to dig through with the Matic I mean there are still bits of cements and things left over but they're all loose now which will be easy to sort of take out but this last piece of engine which I'm going to leave the time being because it's not going to have any impact on where the pipe is going to go and I've just lifted the drain now I mean I did this beforehand but you can see that there it is a drainage pipe on the left hand side here so this pipe here is obviously running underneath the patio and this patchograss I do remember when we first had the patio extended the people who did this said there was a drainage paper on underneath but obviously it's not actually doing what it's intended to do so what I'm going to do to make life a little bit easier is instead of faff and about and trying to cut through this fabric here and take some of the stones away and connect the pipes together I'm going to run the pipe straight down here and I'm just going to have it run onto where this fabric is here because underneath this fabric there is a stones and then that's where the drainage pipe is so having the water just run into this General space is going to help it drain down into the grid and it's the exact same thing it is for the French drain at the top of the garden too and that seems to have worked really well so the next thing to do is to get a rough level of the actual trench itself now this needs to slope down ever so slightly just so that any worse that runs down into the trench goes straight into the pipe and down towards the Grid on the left-hand sides of the garden [Music] you see that the water's slowly flowing in the right direction which is your indication that the trench is ready if stones and for the pipes to be installed [Music] but before we move down to installing the pipe I thought it'd be best for the lawn engine in first and the reason for this is because I've been knocking posts into the ground thoughts it'd be a bit of a nightmare to get it as accurate as possible if the trench was full of stones and a pipe [Music] so for the line engine I opted to put the posts behind the actual launch and instead of in front A good rule of thumb is to make sure that you get your posts in front of whatever the load-bearing part of your actual you know edging or wall is the reason for this is that if the poster in front of the wall it's the actual posts themselves that are taking the actual brunt of the weight and the pressure that comes from the ground behind it and this is essential because those posts are the things that are in the ground and the things that are anchoring your edging in place now as an optical what I opted to do was to put them behind purely for Aesthetics the reason for this is that the wood that I'm using is only 150 mil tall and it's not exactly bearing a lot of weight behind it although this does put the pressure on the screws rather than the actual posts that are in the ground aesthetically it's going to look better and it's not that big and it's not going to make that much of a difference some people may argue that it will but trust me it won't you'll be fine another good rule of thumb is to make sure at least one third of the post is in the ground now my piece of wood were 50 centimeters long and I made sure that's 20 centimeters was knocked into the ground now that is more than one third of the post but it was for the very specific reason and that's because I wasn't using any postcrete or any cement to sort of secure these in place I was just using the pressure of the clay and the ground below it's probably not the best idea to just knock them in without any post treats or without any cement because it means the moisture in the soil will rot you Wards much quicker but this engine is able to disintegrate within one year two years three years it's going to last quite a few years [Music] [Music] each of the posts were at 175 mil away from the passio which meant that when I put the longboard run on it was about 130 mil away I made sure that a double triple quadruple checked all the measurements just to make sure that it was super even all the way around the patio [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] stuff which is the same as what we have on the top tier as well I started by pouring in some of the 10 mil Stone as like a bed for the pipe to sit on because what you want to do is one ship pipe into the trench you want stones to surround the entire outside of it and this is just so that water can flow freely from the ground above into the pipe and it's not going to get all stodgy full of coyote at the bottom of the pipe either install the paper is no simple part of the whole project as well because all you've got to do is unspool it and lay it in and put stones on top to wear it down [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] one thing to mention as well is that the main aim of the landscape fabric is just to keep the dirt and the clay and things like that away from the pipe just to make sure that the water can flow as easily as it can down to the drain and I finished off by putting some of the Cotswold Stone down once I wrapped the rest of the pipe with the stones on [Music] please [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] today's video useful if you did feel free to give it a like and if you'd like to see any more of my videos such as my garden renovation Series where I've taken a sloped new build lawn and converted it into a garden with two tiers with a patio a retaining wall and a half decent lawn then head over to my channel and if you like what you see feel free to subscribe and finally thanks for watching

Channel: NoviceGardener

Views: 169,148

Keywords: garden renovation, garden renovation uk, renovation uk, garden, lawn care uk, french drain, how to fit a french drain, how to install a french drain, sitting water, water in garden, perforated pipe, french drain pipe, retaining wall, drainage, garden draining, ground drain, remove water, renovation, french drain diy, yard drainage, lawn drain, garden drain, clay soil, french drain clay soil, uk garden, uk lawn, lawn, stop flooding, how to stop flooding, patio flooding

Id: TSEBK3uSaHU

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2023