French drain

[bgott]

One of my rent houses is lower than the rest of the lot. I decided I needed to drain the lake so we have tunneled under the house and replaced the sewer and we're going to put in a french drain to try and keep it at least semi- dry. Have any of y'all used this stuff? I think it will save me a ton of labor compared to getting recalcitrant helpers to trolley gravel under the house.

 

[bgott]

It comes in ten foot lengths, $22 and change at Lowe's.

 

[bgott]

This is how we're, or they're /w3tcompact/icons/grin.gif, getting the sand we're using for fill under the house. I found this section of roller conveyor at the dump.

 

[Harv]

Brad -

Never used it, never seen it before. But now I'm real interested in how it works for you.

Please keep us posted.

 

[bgott]

This is one of my other tenant's kids, Nick. Nick is smiling because he just got out of jail AND found a few days work to make some partying money for the holiday! Life is good! Nick's little brother is the one under the house. That's because Nick is bigger then him.

 

[bgott]

Gotta get my tractor in here. The tenants renting this house have about three more kids living here then they said they had when they moved in. They're friends with the four kids next door, also. A dumptruck load of sand is one he11 of a fun toy so I had the sand dumped at my house. I live about five houses down and it's easier to just haul as much as we need when we need it rather than scraping it back up out of the grass.

 

[MarkV]

Brad,

The drain material you have looks like the same thing they call “Easy Lay” and is used for septic systems down this way. I don’t know if that is the product name or a slang name used by the locals. It gets good reviews from those I have talked to.

MarkV

 

[patrickg]

One thing that comes to mind is that, over time, silt and or other materials could get between the plastic "peanuts" and plug the works. In similar applications I have used Tyvec sleeving over the perforated drain pipe burried in gravel but better yet is some geotextile over the whole thing to keep stuff from getting in over time and ruining the drainage capability.

Another possibility where gravel is too much work is to use recycled tires (ground up i big gravel sizes) as a substitute. Works fine in leach fields, french drains, and similar applications but is much much less labor to move around.

Best of luck to you,

Patrick

 

[wroughtn_harv]

I've never used the lamb's leg looking stuff. But I have put in french drains. I like'em plenty fine, maybe more.

When we first moved into our house the yard stayed a bog. It's heavy black clay and took forever to drain. When I put in the spa I went ahead and ran french drains all over the place and then to the street out front.

Now it can pour down. And an hour later you can walk back there and instead of it being ankle deep in water the grass is wet like the sprinkler was just turned off.

The biggest glitch is getting a place to drain off to. Here when I planted my oaks and pecans I dug eight inch holes seven feet deep and still was in black clay. But sometimes if you can get to a break in the soil that will do the draining for you.

It is amazing how a foot thickness of clay can be like a yard of concrete when it comes to stopping perculating in the soil.

 

[patrickg]

wroughtn_harv, I don't think your black clay could be any worse than some of our red clay unless it is just the color. I'm shopping for floor coverings that look like they already have red clay stains.

Right you are with the layer comment. If you can punch through to another layer it can be like pulling a stopper out of a basin. I was all hot to make some of my ponds a lot deeper but was warned that I could go through the water retaining layer and drain a pond like draining a bath tub.

Patrickg

 

[bgott]

I took it to the ditch. I wish the ditch was close enough to my house to do that, but the water under my house drys up in a day or two. I sure prefer trailer houses. They are high enough that you can sling the dirt under them with a shovel. It's also a whole lot easier to find leaks

 

[bgott]

I left the flier with my handyman and I forgot the name of the stuff. The flier states that it is good for leach lines. I know it has to be better than what's happening now. This lot is so saturated that we dug the trench and amazing amounts of water ran out for a week and it was still saturated. Water is leaching up in the ranshackle old garage next to the house and it is marginally higher ground. I thought that there was a leak in one of the buried water lines but neither the water bill nor the low flow needle on the meter show that. After the underside dries a little bit we are re-plumbing the water lines. After that if there still is a problem I'll spray under there for mosquitos once a week and they can deal with it. Water stands under all the old houses in this neighborhood after a rain, it just wouldn't go away under this one.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

It's pretty obvious to me what has happened here. In the old days they built the houses without building up a pad. They just used footings and had a crawl space of sorts underneath.

Then they walked in, around, and over the place all these years. Anyone that's walked in a clay area knows that you are an earth mover. You can't help yourself. You pick it up here and it falls off there. The only variation worth mentioning is when you picked it up there and it falls off here.

So over the years the underneath of the house has become a shaded bog. We have one next door to the shop. They're waiting until it dries up a bit to demolish it. The good old boy who has the contract to demolish it has a stipulation in there that if he has to demo prior to what he considers right the property owner gets to pick up the tab for the extra cost of dumping the clay and mud that will be attached to the debris. Good old boy told me it will double the cost of the dumping just because of the mud.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

Morning Patrick,

I see you came out of so Cal into this clay. It can be a shock to the system.

One day I was digging with my dad here in norte tejas. Of course when you're digging in the wet clay you need a sharpshooter shovel. You need it to scrape off the mud off of your shovel you're digging with. So it takes three times as long and six times the effort to dig a comparable hole here to so cal.

As we stopped for a break my dad looked at me and told me about my grandpa. He said that when he was growing up grandpa would tell about driving a wagon through wet Texas clay. And how they'd walk beside it with shovels scraping off the clay off the wheels of the wagon. He'd also tell them to not be afraid of Texas cowboys cause they couldn't move fast with their boots on and they weren't near as tall with their boots off.

My dad shook his head a bit and then confessed that all these years he'd suspected his father of stretching the truth about Texans and their clay. Now he understood his dad had really been soft soaping the issue.

There is one good thing about clay though. There is one phase in it's journey between wet to dry that has it like glue. And man with the right set up your car on a dirt track can hook up. Whoa! a good thing as the blond in a bind would say.

 

[bgott]

"There is one good thing about clay though. There is one phase in it's journey between wet to dry that has it like glue. And man with the right set up your car on a dirt track can hook up. Whoa! a good thing as the blond in a bind would say."

And then it goes dry slick.

 

[bgott]

http://www.ezflowlp.com/

I went back to Lowe's and remembered to get another instruction sheet. We aren't going to be burying the drain as deep as it recommends so I'm going to wrap it with landscape cloth, cover it with sand and them put some concrete base pads every three feet or so for weight in case it decides to float.

 

[patrickg]

wroughtn_harv, Yup! It is different from So Cal. A lot of So Cal when dry is like concrete but the rocks are bigger. I used the largest walk behind DitchWitch to work on my front yard. Too difficult to work up the whole thing so I dug intersecting ditches, N-S & E-W, in part of it and filled them with ameliorated soil, lots of saw dust, sand, mature compost. Put out the recycled tire sprinkler hoses and covered the whole thing with HD Visqueen. Put plantings in the ditches by cutting small "X's" in the plastic and then covered all the plastic with lava rock. Keeping the rain out with plastic isn't such a BAD thing when there isn't much rain anyway and the plants were chosen for low water needs, easily supplied by two or three good soakings/year. 13 inch of rain where we were in So Cal and about 33-34 in south central OK.

I recall seing a short documentary about John Ford filming a western (probably John Wayne epic) where everyone got several inches taller during the course of shooting a scene, depending on how much walking they did in the mud from a recent rain.

Patrick