Large french drain solves standing water and MUD

this is shawn with gate city foundation drainage we are on a job today in greensboro so let's take a look at what we got going on so you can see here we've got a pretty good slope going down into the house so one of the things we're going to be doing is bringing in some dirt to try to build this up a little bit and shed it away from the house the other thing that's going on here is they built this garage and they've got just a ton of standing water over here and so it's going to be a little bit tricky but we're going to put a french drain across here so i guess we probably ought to catch that gutter too and get that done but you can see just how wet it is over here and so luckily we have a pretty decent amount of fall going down to the creek right there so we're gonna take our french drain water and we're just gonna pipe it across here and send it right in there so that's what we're working on today so you can see i don't know if you can see or not but we've got just a tiny bit of fall over here and so that's that's what we need for our french drain to work well keep in mind the french drain should be fairly flat with just maybe a sixteenth of a bubble or an eighth of a bubble facing down so we've got the mini and i'm a little bit concerned about getting gravel down here so we've got the mini bobcat as well and i'm looking into getting a tracked buggy so we'll see if i get one of those saying that i had a couple considerations i wanted to talk to you about so there's my 24 inch bucket and we're going to be digging along here now the dirt that comes out of here we're going to be using up against the house there and so you can see that we have quite a slope here so the plan is to put a dirt pile right here and so what i'm going to end up doing is starting up here and then just tracking back throwing my pile up here and tracking back and forth now take a look here we've got power coming in we've got communications coming in these have not been marked power's been marked right there so power is going to be you know 24 36 inches deep communication is probably an old one it wasn't marked so we we're going to go kind of easy right here and we may hit something but we shouldn't be hitting any power here i am getting started with my first bucket there and this french frame is right up against the building and so there's really not a lot of room in there there's i've got the the tracks pulled all the way in on the on the excavator so it's a little bit narrower and there's not even enough room for me to swing and dump the dirt off to the side and so what i'm having to do you see me right there backing up i'm just having to go in there and back up and it's so close you see me looking off to my left right there i'm just trying to check and make sure i don't hit anything or hit the building and so it was getting started was kind of slow because i was tracking the furthest possible distance away and you know you can only get so much per scoop but just kept on it and after about an hour and a half or so i had my trench dog so it worked out pretty well that gets on the outside of the trench i can't pick that up so if you can keep all that in the trench i can get it in the next scoop no you're talking about yep yep yep having a person down there in the trench while i'm digging is really really helpful and like i was telling lin there the material that spills out over the sides if she can keep that in the trench then i can actually scoop it up so the person that person's kind of standing around a little bit but they're still a very valuable part of getting this trench dug quickly [Music] area that's a candidate for french train there's a few things a few criteria that need to be met and so i want to show you what's going on here so this was the this is a little bit uphill here and it's a little bit more downhill there so when you first start digging you can see that we got a lot of wet area here and if this is going to work correctly as a french drain you need to be in dry dirt the reason is because the way a french drain works is this whole trench is going to be full of gravel but it's going to fill up with water and so the fact that you're hitting dry dirt with wet dirt on top tells you that the native soils here are impermeable to water and so this trench is going to be a waterproof basin basically that's going to fill up the other thing i've just been digging for a few minutes here and look at what's happening here this trench is filling up with water by itself and so when that happens we know we're in a good spot for a french drain now we just hit this conduit for power right here and there was a little bit of water in that but take a look here at the at the meter i noticed this there's no power hooked up there so i we i already mentioned that i was going to be kind of careful over here and i guess i wasn't very careful but this was supposed to be way deeper but luckily it was in a conduit and so we didn't do any damage here we're just going to hand dig it i found out later from the homeowner that there was power on the building and the reason there was no meter in the meter base was because he removed it because the company was charging him extra and so that conduit that we bumped into was a conduit that he had run himself and that's why it wasn't very deep and he he said he forgot to tell us it was in there and i forgot to ask if there was anything in there so luckily no harm was done on it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that's gotta go up a little bit um [Music] all right holes look good yes ready hang on all right try that there you go all right good i think so pull it your way a little bit all i right i'm ready to bring more gravel in the previous clip you saw ronald and i getting up that second segment of perforated pipe and we were really concerned about where the holes were and of course the holes have to face downward and so when you're putting the perforated pipe together you need to make sure that each piece is straight on the other piece and so we were pretty happy with that and so now i'm just dropping some gravel in here and ronald's again checking to make sure that clean out you see standing there by the shovel make sure that's nice and vertical and straight and so i'm just bringing in some gravel here this is this gravel just to stabilize our pipes because they're falling the way we want them to they're positioned the way we want them to and we just need to get a couple loads of gravel over top of that to stabilize it and then i'll just start running load after load after load to fill the trench in in this clip ronald and i are working on getting the two pipes into a single pipe down to the creek there and so you can see we've got a sanitary tee on our piece of solid and then we've got a long sweep 90 on our piece of perforated and so the reason we have two pipes in here is because the gutter water is already in a pipe it's coming down the downspout already in a pipe and so we keep that in a pipe we would never ever ever send that into a perforated pipe the perforated pipe one with the holes on the bottom is the one on the right there and that's for collecting water so perforated pipes are for collecting water and that's how a french drain works and so it may be tempting to send that gutter water into the french drain but that would be counterproductive you're trying to get water out of the french drain and down the way so here we're dry fitting everything and you can see that sanitary tee is falling the wrong direction and so we're gonna have to dig this out quite a bit more in the next clip now so what i would do first is i would let's get that one going yep and that way we can get our grade on the are you happy with this yep keep your eye on that pig in the background in the back left corner oh look at that pig you launched it all right so we we just turned this corner so i wanted to take a look at what's going on here so this is our perforated pipe and this one is our solid pipe and so it may be tempting to drop that gutter water into the perforated pipe but my philosophy is if you've got water that's in a pipe which is the hard part keep it in the pipe and so you already saw over here there's our clean out for the french drain and we we drill some 3 16 inch holes for venting in there and then this one is just for the gutter and it passes right by it so you saw us messing around playing with this pipe the solid pipe there has to be falling the french drain and the solid pipe has to be falling about a quarter bubble the french drain the perforated pipe wants to be falling maybe about a sixteenth of a bubble and the reason is because when the water floods into this trench water is going to be level so if your french drain if your perforated pipe is falling too much it's not going to be level like that so coming across this corner here we worked really hard we want to make sure that once we once we pass and turn the corner that everything is falling really hard and what that does is that gives a really easy escape route for that water so starting with this coupling this this long sweep 90 right there we're following a full bubble everywhere so you can see that falling a full bubble everywhere and you can see on down to the creek that is one happy pig so we're about to run out of gravel we'll have to bring back bring some more in tomorrow but we got all of our pipes pretty much stabilized and we're turning this corner here and we're going to stub out we don't we didn't bring enough pipe i i guess i failed to remember or realize that we were catching that gutter so we don't have enough solid pipe to make it to the creek so we'll get another piece in here and then we'll get that done tomorrow when we bring some more gravel in all right i'm gonna bring some dirt up against the house i ended up running back up to the quarry and getting another six tons of gravel and so here what i'm doing is i'm just just running loads i'm going up to the dump truck grabbing a scoop of gravel running that down the hill to the french drain lens down there spreading gravel and then while i'm down there i'm grabbing a scoop of dirt from the pile there and then taking that back up against the house and ronald is up against the house and he's leveling the dirt so this was just a bunch of different trips back and forth trying to run material back and forth but we ended up getting that part done for the day once we get the dirt somewhat leveled out with the rake i come in with the bobcat and you see i've got a full bucket of dirt there and what that full bucket does is it puts some weight in the bucket for me and here i'm just trying to grade this back away from the from the foundation and get a nice slope going down and really when you when you bring the dirt in like this you have to pack it in it's not that complicated to bring the dirt in but it's got to be packed in really well and so here in a second you'll see where i track over it with the machine and then ronald and lynn just just tamp it with the tampers and getting that dirt compacted is the only way that it's going to shed water away from the foundation uh we are back it's the next day and so this portion of the job we brought in some dirt and first thing this morning is get these shrubs pulled out we're gonna pack some dirt in here so that it slopes away a little bit better but the homeowner said that they want to expand this and so we're going to stub out about two feet off for that gutter right there we're also going to set a piece of channel drain in here somewhere we got to grab our level and see where the best place for that would be but this is just going to stub out like right here similar to that corrugated so i would have liked to have taken it all the way to the creek but you know we're already spending a bunch of money on this job for the homeowner so we're going to stub out right there and see how it does so that's what we're working on this morning [Music] when you have concrete that is sloping into the house it can be really tricky to figure out where to put your channel drain and so here i'm just trying to figure it out i'm checking all different directions for level and seeing which way it's falling and so we're going to put our channel drain parallel with that sidewalk going up to the steps and i think that's what is going to be the best place for it so we'll find out when it rains [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we are just about finished with the grating and bringing in more dirt and we're putting the shrubs back so the the customer wants to to bring this porch out right here and so she asked us to move these out 24 inches off the current slab so they want to do a wrap around porch connecting over to that porch so you can walk all the way around the house and so we're just getting this all finished up here it's looking pretty good and we have yet to get some concrete in we got to get the concrete in the channel drain between the concrete and channel grain right there but yeah it's looking really good we are finished with this job so let's take a look we brought in a bunch of dirt here and slope this away they're gonna they're gonna redo this porch and redo the gutter so they wanted us to stub out so we stubbed out right there this was a little bit tricky here and we use the level and it looks like everything is falling this way so we got a channel drain in there we got ronald just got that concreted in place and then there's our other stub out right there so the homeowners are going to bring some mulch in but as for the grating over here i didn't get any good footage of this beforehand but it was just like i guess the chickens had been digging it out and the gutters were just draining right along there so that was a big big problem for them so we got all that done we got some seed and straw put out and there's our french drain so the customer's really excited about that this is just usually just like constant mud down here and then we dug out a little bit a little bit of a swale going down to the left side of the bridge over there and so that should keep that should help a lot of this water shed out of here and there's our outfall and ronald just piled some some uh stones right there but that's that the chickens are messing up my nice straw job here i was spreading seed and they thought i was trying to feed them so they were all very confused so can't wait to get back over here in the rain and see how this is looking this is sean i am back out here to check on this system that we installed so let's take a look so here you can see water flowing right there into the channel drain and this we talked about we just put this on temporarily until they get their their uh porch redone so that channel drain seems to be working okay that water is flowing in there too looks like the homeowner hasn't gotten any mulch out here yet but let's go check on the french drain oh and this is carrying the water out as well so i don't know if you remember or not but this was like sloping into the foundation here so we brought all this dirt in so they definitely need some new gutters on here oh but this area seems pretty dry this used to be a complete swamp over here look at how dry this is this was all mud over here good how you doing came to check on the system yeah looks like we got some gutters that need to be replaced and that are overflowing here so that'll be an easy fix for that and let's take a look at our outfall so we definitely got some water coming out of that i'm really excited though about how dry this is i'm back out here to check on this french drain it's the next morning and it rained pretty much all night and it hasn't been raining for about three hours or so so i guess the rain stopped about three hours ago so they used to have a ton of standing water over here and now the swale is taking it all that way so that's good news that we don't have that standing water and then check out what's going on here at the outfall this is what a french drain does a french drain is going to collect non-point water so what that means is all the water coming off that hill and it's flooding into that trench the trench is flooding up into or the water is flooding up into the holes in the perforated pipe which are facing down and then flowing through the pipe and so this is what a french drain does it represents a path of least resistance for non-point water for that water to get out of here and so that i i would guess that that pipe will trickle like that for probably all the time so at least for several days after a rain i've got a french drain at my one of my properties that trickles all year round it doesn't matter how dry it's been it trickles every time i look at it it's trickling so that is a french drain that is working very well and that will keep this area dry so that's really really good news here that that's working so well

Channel: Gate City Foundation Drainage

Views: 48,943

Rating: 4.9210219 out of 5

Keywords: french drain, how to install french drain, holes go down, gate city foundation drainage

Id: 41QpCJTI7H0

Length: 28min 50sec (1730 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021