Landscape Drain Pipe Basics - Corrugated vs PVC Drain Pipe

[Music] [Applause] Maur climbing with home fixated here and I wanted to talk with you a little bit today about different types of drainage pipe and I recently took on a project here in our backyard dealing with putting in a French drain on a section of retaining wall we did a project on building a concrete block retaining wall a while back and you'll find that linked in the article related to this video and one long portion of that wall had a French drain added to it and another section did not and discovered that it needed one and so despite our minimal rainfall here in San Diego I dug up that section of the wall and I'm putting in a French drain to connect to the the rest of the French drain system on that wall and while I was digging up the yard I decided to tackle a couple other drainage problems in the yard and in that process I had to kind of figure out whether or not I wanted to go with corrugated pipe or smooth ball smooth wall PVC and I brought a couple samples here this is the corrugated pipe that you see it's pretty common in home centers you'll see it quite a bit it comes in two varieties this is the non perforated variety so you can see there's no slits or holes in this and so this is really designed to take water from either a area drain or sometimes a gutter downspout and have it daylight somewhere preferably not in your neighbor's yard because they tend to get upset about that the other variety is PVC and you can see this one is perforated and the way they do the perforations on these is they're actually you can see they're not on opposite sides they're actually on one portion of the pipe let me give you a a better angle there and a lot of people wonder and debate about where to put the perforation so this would being a French train type application and some people think you got to have the holes up because the water coming down is going to magically kind of head right into those holes and then carry away in the drain and the other option is to have it down and really the way these French trains work is there's essentially a trench with gravel in it and until that trench starts to fill up with water this pipe doesn't actually do anything and you want to have a relatively minimal amount of water in that trench and so by having the holes on the bottom like you see here the water's gonna fill up in that trench and once it gets above the level of those holes the pipes going to start carrying the water away so the advantage to PVC like this and then of course there's also a non perforated variety and you can see this is pretty thick PVC there's also a thin walled variety that I'm not a fan of that's that's fairly fragile but this is designed to either work in a French drain or for the non perforated again to carry water from a drain and and have it daylight somewhere so the advantage to a solution like this and this is actually spoiler alert this is the version that I'm going with in our yard is that this a is a very robust drain pipe it can take a lot of abuse you often see when these are dug up part of them are caved in or they're smooshed and the other problem with corrugated is that they tend to catch a lot of debris you know that's not this is not a smooth surface on the inside it's just like the outside and so that tends to catch a lot of debris and soot and dirt as it theoretically flows through the drain so the downside to this which is a stronger more robust pipe and it's smoother less likely to get blockages in it and and require cleanouts is that it's a little harder to put in so in most cases this is going to be glued in you know you have fittings like like this here where you're using a PVC glue to glue the pieces together there's some people that install them without glue but particularly if you're in an area that sees movement from frost and that kind of thing not that we have that year in San Diego in most cases it's recommended that that the pipes are actually secured together the corrugated variety the fittings for them are basically like snap in place so they're very easy to work with and and the nice thing about the corrugated is that it can adjust to contours assuming it's all kind of flowing downhill it doesn't need to be perfectly flat for the pipe to lay flat and and it's also much much easier to work around corners and curves and bends this is just not at all flexible and this you can actually move around quite a bit and you're not limited to the 90 degree 45-degree twenty-two and a half degree fittings that come with PVC but even so I'm a big believer in putting in something once and then having it last a long time and I think I think for a lot of folks this very solid PVC is really a great way to go so for more details about this we'll have an article on home fixated comm that talks a bit more about all this and also have some follow-up projects related to this little adventure dealing with french drains and and drainage so thanks for tuning in and we'll see you on the next one [Applause]

Channel: Home Fixated

Views: 87,137

Keywords: landscape drains, french drains, drain pipe, corrugated pipe, perforated pipe, landscape drainage, yard drainage, yard drain, french drain

Id: iC5fMjDT39k

Length: 6min 14sec (374 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020