# Driveway gravel and under-driveway drainage lines...



## Wolf_22 (Aug 1, 2019)

I live in a home that experiences fairly bad drainage issues during bad saturations or heavy rains and I'm trying to get ahead of it by attacking my driveway with better drainage... You see, my driveway is one of the worst areas where a lot of water tends to move over from my neighbor's yard (who is either unwilling or unable to do much about it from his area). The bad thing is that much of this water makes its way into my home's old basement, which causes all sorts of problems. I have plans in motion to deal with that this coming January but in the meantime, I want to do whatever I can about the external stuff.

So I spoke to an excavation guy in my town about the possibility of installing a 6" PVC drainage system underneath my entire driveway. Basically, my idea consists of laying down multiple "fingers" of this pipe along the length of my driveway (maybe 4 fingers, total) and in the future, connecting those fingers to an external sump pump that would also be in a special spot of the driveway to maximize its efficiency. I'd like to lay down a thick vapor barrier underneath each finger for added capture capabilities but initially rely on gravity alone to direct whatever these fingers catch so that the water would be moved into the town's rainwater trunk at the end of my driveway--I think I have enough grade to do that, especially given how that rainwater line is about 1.5 feet underneath the end of my driveway, easily enough to provide an 8th of an inch per-foot of decent for the 15 feet or so of distance that this would play in. Bear in mind that my driveway isn't paved or blacktopped, it's just a basic crushed lime rock base and the majority of its rocks are about half the size of a golf ball.

Anyway, when I floated all this to the excavation guy, he said that it's possible the drainage PVC holes could get covered up once the gravel becomes compacted. This could lead to an ineffective drain system. He also advised against the external sump pump due to maintenance issues that sometimes come up... While I'm sure all of his considerations are 100% possible, my rationale for doing it despite his insights is that even if some of the holes get blocked up or even if the sump pump needs occasional maintenance, it would still result in a much better outcome than the one I'm currently banging my head against where the water just does whatever it wants. Sure, some of the drainage holes along the pipe my get covered but not all... And sure, the sump pump might give out at some point but not all the time.

When we were discussing all this, he floated an idea about adding a box grate near the areas where water tends to pool up and just connecting that to a 6" pipe that connects to the rainwater trunk and said that the thought this would have a better impact than my idea. So I figure, why not just do both and have the best of both worlds? I'd first build out the 6" PVC finger drainage system (with the vapor barriers) and then after that, add the box grate or _grates_, and then sometime after that (once money gets built back up!), add an external sump pump to everything and connect that to the rainwater trunk. This sounds like a good idea, right? God, it can't hurt anything. I know it will be pretty expensive to do it all but in the end, once all the pieces are in play, I can't imagine that this wouldn't have an awesome impact.

Any insights into this would be appreciated. I'm pretty convinced that this is what I'm going to do but thought I'd see if any of you have anything to add to this before I get started on it. Thanks in advance.

(I posted about this over on a different forum, too, so if I get any responses from there, I'll update this as a means of helping anyone else who might be a similar situation.)


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