Ultimate Flow Test - PVC vs. Corrugated Drainage Pipe

this is shawn with gate city foundation drainage in this video i want to take a closer look at pvc versus corrugated pipe and i want to dig a trench and lay both pipes side by side in the trench and actually do a flow test and see which one if i pour a set amount of water in each pipe i want to see how much water comes out the other side and so i want to do this because i i feel like pvc is far superior are corrugated and i want to share that with my viewers so that's what we're going to be working on today is trying to see if we can simulate a pipe laying in a trench and see which one flows better i have thought for a long time about how to do this video and so what i came up with was to use my dirt pile here and see if i can simulate what a trench would look like with the pipes just laying in the dirt pile and so we just got a bunch of extra dirt from a big job that we're doing and that that video is going to be coming out at some point when we finish that job and so here what i'm trying to do is i'm making a little place for my excavator to roll up on and then i'm going to try just making a a simulated trench that i can then lay the pvc and the corrugated pipes in and i can control the fall and everything of the pipe and get them right side by side so it can be a true comparison both pipes laying side by side same kind of situation same kind of installation and so i think this is going to be a pretty cool comparison pretty useful comparison so that's what i'm working on in this clip is just getting the the simulated trench done after i got the trench done i'm just laying my pvc pipe in here first and pvc of course is much more difficult to work with so you've got to get all your angles right everything has to match up correctly and so you can see me gluing those two joints in there there's two elbows right there one nice thing about this corrugated pipe is you can cut it with scissors so here i have a piece that's been crushed [Music] uh so get that out of here and this is another style of way to couple these things this is a coupler they just snap together and that's that [Applause] [Music] [Music] so so here is my setup so i've got my two pipes laid side by side i've got one joint here with this 22 and i've got one joint here in the corrugated that's the bell hat the bell end and that's where one pipe slips into the other i've got another connection here in the pvc that's a 45 and i've got another connection here in the corrugated and this is a snap together so both of these are standard ways to connect the corrugated so i've got two joints in each pipe and this pipe is kind of squirrely all over the place so i want to put a little bit of dirt on top of it so let me get some dirt on top of this and then we'll give it a try [Music] so okay i think we're about ready to give this thing a flow test so so the first thing i want to try here is i want to try a bottle of water all right here goes all right there's in the pvc there's the corrugated so let's see if we got anything out the other side okay so neither pipe was able to get a bottle of water out of it still both pipes i just knocked that over all right what i want to do here is i want to use a one quart okay so let's put a quart in each of these i'll just do a full a full one so there's a full one there's a full one all right i hear something all right let's just go ahead and put the rest of this bucket through so there's two full courts in the pvc two courts in the corrugated keep it going three quarts in the pvc three quarts in the corrugated i don't know if we have enough there's well let's go check out and see how we're doing so that was three quarts in each plus a bottle of water and what have we got going on over here so all right so i wonder what's going on with the corrugated let's do that whole thing again all right i just filled up another bucket but look what's going on over here this pvc is still trickling oh there it looks like it stopped okay let's put some more quartz in there so right now we're at three quarts in each pipe plus a bottle of water all right there's four there's four there's five there's five there's six there's six there's seven and well there's about seven all right let's see how we're doing so okay so i think we can stop there but this is why i don't use corrugated pipe because all the little ribs each one of those ribs holds water and it slows the water down as well when it finally does fill up it slows the water down you would never get a tiny bit of water like that trickling through there on a corrugated pipe so what are some of the problems with the pipe holding water well the main problem is that it impedes the flow why do you want flow on your pot on your gutter pipes you want flow because it blows debris out so the smooth wall of the pvc has no place for debris to catch and so the the water moves so fast through that pvc that it carries all the debris out and look at this it's still going through there it's just very what they call a frictional resistance there's very low frictional resistance to pvc pipe as opposed to corrugated and so corrugated pipe the other thing about it the fact that it holds water these snap together rings and these snap together joints they're not waterproof and so the water leaks out of the corrugated and then what do you think goes for the water the roots do so not only does corrugated impede the flow of water it leaks out of the joints and the roots go in there for the water that's sitting in there so let's take a look at how much water we got out of there we put seven quarts plus a bottle of water through there and it's still going but we are at whoops we're at eight or no six liters so it looks like that pipe might be holding a tiny bit of water but this little bit of flow here shows us [Music] that we're doing pretty well so that's what it looks like inside a pvc pipe you can see how smooth that wall is and how that water just flows through there we never got a drop through this pipe so there's water in there somewhere but we don't know where so i'm going to let you see this whole thing from the third person right there so that might be a little bit redundant but that way you can see the entire experiment the next thing i want to show you here is an actual pipe that i removed [Music] and so look what's going on with this pipe you can see all the roots in there so this is an actual pipe that i pulled out of the ground replaced so i guess i just messed up my wheelbarrow but i just cleaned the wheelbarrow out got it all scrubbed clean just to show this and so we're gonna see what comes out of this thing there it goes okay so this is an actual pipe that i removed from a house and this is all shingle dust and roots so take a look at that so these little ribs right here you can see what's in here this is all fine material in the ribs and then it's coarser material on the uh the top of the rib and so what happens is the fine material falls in there and then the coarse material comes right afterwards and so that is why i don't use corrugated pipe in my drain installs so the next thing i want to do is i want to take some actual debris that came out of an of an actual corrugated pipe and i want to run it through the pvc and run it through the corrugated and see what happens see which one will blow out the debris okay so there is real life actual debris that came out and it's mostly shingle dust is what this is and that corrugator likes to catch that shingle dust so all right so i've got the same amount of debris in here take a look in there and i'm going to dump it in each of the pipes and then i'm going to put a few quarts through so there's one or that's eight eight and there goes my debris nine nine ten ten so oh look at what's happening here okay so that is 10 liters or 10 quarts through each pipe plus a bottle of water plus a little bit of debris and we still haven't i could probably return this bucket it's brand new never even had water in it so that's why i use smooth wall schedule 40 pvc pipe it stays straight in the trench the corrugated unless you have a perfectly flat trench the core gate is going to wind around and up and down and all over the place the corrugated catches debris it impedes the flow which takes away the debris blowing out capability of the pipe so what are some advantages what are some advantages of using pvc other than the fact that it carries water away as fast as possible carries debris away as fast as possible well there really aren't any other advantages to using pvc it's extremely heavy it's extremely hard to work with it's extremely expensive and the glue is expensive it's hard to haul and so unless you're having actual problems it might not be worth the extra expense it's a lot more labor intensive your trenches have to be perfect so what are some advantages of corrugated corrugated is super super cheap it is super super easy to work with you just lay it in there and cover it up and call it done you can cut it with scissors it's extremely lightweight it's easy to haul because it comes in a giant roll you can throw in the back of your saturn but if you want to carry water if you want to save your foundation if you want to stop your crawl space from from flooding you don't want to use corrugated pipe you want to use a quality pipe if you're going through all the expense and energy and effort to dig a trench you might as well throw a high quality pipe in that trench before you cover it up thank you here is the time lapse the third person that i was telling you about earlier so i hope you've enjoyed this video and if you have any comments about this please put them below if you have questions about my experimental setup i encourage you to repeat my experiment so definitely set up your own version of what i've got here and dump some water through it and see which pipe flows better and film it and put it up there and show it to us and let us let us see you re repeat this experiment so i'm very interested to see others and if we can get these results repeated i see these results repeated all the time where i'll be cleaning out some corrugated system and you know you just run water in it and you're trying to find where the water is coming out and they're you're just running water for like 15 minutes with a garden hose and there's no water coming out anywhere and then finally you'll start getting a trickle out of the the bottom of the pipe and so where's all that water going it's just holding in the ground it's going into the foundation it is a magnet for roots and whatever it's doing it's definitely not carrying the water away from the foundation like it's supposed to so this is a pretty cool example of why i only use schedule 40 pvc pipe even though it costs a lot more and it's a lot more difficult to install it carries the water away it keeps itself blown out it doesn't hold water it doesn't hold debris you

Channel: Gate City Foundation Drainage

Views: 100,095

Rating: 4.6018 out of 5

Keywords: corrugated vs pvc pipe, best drainage pipe, best pipe for drainage, pvc vs corrugated, solid vs corrugated pipe, what is the best drainage pipe, is pvc really better?

Id: ZJBKZ2mPKRU

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021