# Need Lawn/Drainage Help



## ShilpaMann (May 12, 2018)

*Short-ish story:*
I bought a house in a poorly drained area overall (Windsor, Ontario ... Riverside, specifically), with my house being notably bad due to poor decisions during the manufacture of my home. Over the past 3 years I've owned this house, rain/ground water ingress into my basement has been an issue that basic fixes aren't resolving (downspouts away from home, adjusting grading where I can ... mainly). So, since my exterior tiles at my home are compromised, I'm biting the bullet and having someone come in and fix that. Once that's done (in 2-4 weeks), it's time for me to start on project "dry-yard", which I believe starts with a proper drainage plan. The plan is to have the lion's share of the heavy lifting done by July, and be setup with a decent yard by spring of 2019 (landscaping/grass/yard features/etc).

*My Problem:*
Now, my issue (one of) is that I am no drainage expert, and given that my area in general is already a notorious problem-child for rainwater, I figure that I will pay dearly for rookie mistakes, so I'm trying my best to "do it right" the first time. What I AM good at is conceptualizing, I am quite handy, and reasonably fit, so most projects should be doable. Additionally, I am also neither a lawn expert, nor landscaper, nor an irrigation specialist, but those are future* battles to be dealt with once I have this project sorted.

*The Plan:*
Hopefully, below this, you will see a scale drawing of my yard/home. The main problem area is the backyard (far left of the image). I also have not yet been able to get the proper tool for measuring the grading of my yard, but my rudimentary testing seems to indicate the backyard to front-yard is about a 12-18" drop (a 94.8' distance, roughly, I am REALLY hoping it's more).



*Legend (everything except the cement, and the house, are "proposed"):*
- Magenta solid is the area that will be exterior waterproofed; plan is to use solid pipes close to the house as a "highway" for water from the back-yard to the front-yard (solid white is the remainder of the "foundation" of my home, in which the exterior tiles are largely useless).
- Downspouts are labelled A-B-C-D (Yellow), and ROUGHLY each deal with 25% of my roof's water during a storm
- Yellow boxes are proposed dry-wells; their designs are detailed inside the floorspace of my home (I still might bury drums topside-down instead of gravel, for much higher volumetric efficiency, and cheaper, but i'm concerned about smells).
- Yellow lines from downspouts are hard-pipes (no holes); I'd love input on sizing for these, but I figure 4" should be plenty.
- Orange lines are either porous black "agricultural pipe", or solid pipe with holes drilled, either of which will be surrounded with gravel French-drain style.
- Red are city services; mostly shown to see digging constraints (largely only relevant for gas, which isn't deep)
- Anything "dashed" (e.g. - - - - -) means this is a "maybe"; the ones under the garden/greenhouse area are maybe because I don't know if I want to move water away from there (boxes will be 12" tall), and the curved one under the cement is a maybe because I don't know if I am removing that cement anytime soon (probably am).

*Reasoning:*
At the outlet of downspouts A, B, and C, I plan to have little water-towers with 55gal drums (165gal of capacity total, and likely linked to each other; will be used for a simple drip irrigation system ... I am aware I will only have 2-ish PSI to work with). The overflow of those "water towers" will connect to the drains in the ground, and the primary direction of flow is shown with arrows.

During a normal storm, I figure the French-drain system will draw water away from the surface, and drain into the dry-well. Downspout "A" will do the same, albeit at a much faster rate. In a storm where the rear dry-well gets overwhelmed, the water will force up into the underground tee, and travel slightly downhill to the front yard dry-well. Once that fills, the same thing will happen @ that tee, except the outlet is vertical (and lower than the bottom of the drain in the backyard [TBD]). A concern I have is that, in order for water to be able to empty out of the front yard drain, the BOTTOM of the system in the back will have to be HIGHER than the TOP of the drain in the front yard. If not, the system will start filling up until that point (and, in fact, will allow the front downspouts to drain into the backyard), and I am not sure if that is bad for the French drains. If it's not a big deal for French drains to be half full of water until it dissipates into the yard, then this concern is moot. See illustration:


In a "normal" rain, it fills roughly 1/3 of a barrel. During a theoretical 1" storm (a normal "big" storm around here), the barrels will quickly fill, thus needing the water to be dealt with otherwise (hence the dry-wells). During that same theoretical 1" storm (with my house, that's about 900gal being dealt with by the roof), assuming those barrels were already full, the backyard dry-well would have overflowed about 50gal (assuming 0 absorption by the drywell during that time; I plan to do a percolation test over the next few days, but it will be in the "poor" range regardless). The large front dry-well would have also filled and overflowed about 150gal (100gal from downspouts B and C, plus the 50 from the rear dry-well), and the smaller front dry-well would have overflowed 200gal (this dry-well is largely useless, but it will allow the pipe to typically not have water in it).

What I am looking for is, basically, an opinion on whether what I plan to do makes any sense. If something doesn't make sense, I'd love to know why, and what I might alternatively do. I realise this is a lot of reading, but I put some thought into this, so I wanted to clearly justify the reason for my decisions.
_*Edit:* Thanks in advance to any assistance anyone can give. I really don't feel like having to rip this up and do it again, and I take criticism extremely well._

As well, I will likely be killing my entire lawn once this is done (or even during it, but I think I'm late for seeding grass) and re-starting from scratch, since it's like 40% creeping charlie.

*Random extra info:*
At the far-left of that pic (the end of my backyard) I plan to put in a small greenhouse, and some garden boxes (3 boxes + the potential greenhouse will use up about 60% of that area). The cement around my house @ the thick magenta line will be removed for the waterproofing (not to be replaced for at least 2 years), and the cement pad itself may also be removed. If I go out to my shed right now and step inside, I can hear water squeezing out from underneath the cement pad. Loose plans for the backyard are an at-grade deck; nothing fancy.


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## 440mag (Jan 29, 2018)

Wow. That is a lot! But, having "been there," I get it!

Despite your incredible effort, it is just sooo hard to conceive everything, without being there so, I guess my first suggestion would be to leave no stone unturned in looking for others THERE who can actually walk the area and give you feedback. Obviously, that does not mean just contractors as I n our experience, even the best are really just focused on what they can do for a profit (I.e., in our home just about EVERYone we called wanted to handle the issues from the "negative" side (inside of foundation).

Any area home inspectors, college vo-tech staff, local govt planning / permitting staff, etc. We had to get pretty creative

Interesting note: of the two individuals we had come out from our county planning/permitting dept (even though nothing we were doing involved permits we figured they've "seen it all" and might know what does and doesn't work in our area, etc.), one guy was useless as a leaky Dixie cup but the next guy from the same dept offered us incredibly effective advice we hadn't even thought of. (Back to that "leave no stone unturned" thing. Seriously. 

Also, despite my own misgivings, a HUGE part of the answer for us was (drumroll) .... MORE DOWNSPOUTS! One local "jack-of-all-trades" fellow who stopped by pointed out the square footage of our roof and explained architects don't like putting downspouts in their drawings cuz, we'll, customers (and other architects) don't want to see them. Thus the builder doesn't add any and that was a huge factor contributing to our wet foundation.

I may have missed it but I don't recall your mentioning the dimensions of your gutters / downspouts and id venture almost 80% problems getting water away from foundations is the smaller dimension gutters and downspouts. (I.e., I no longer care how "small" a roof is: ALWAYS at least 6" gutters, never 5". I might consider 5" gutters on a shed or a bird feeder but, never on a house...Never again!

You mention "theoretical" storms and I guess something else we learned the hard way is that we should've been thinking of the theoretical storms as "the norm" in amounts of water we needed to figure out ways to handle. "Our mantra has become, "Worst case scenario, worst case scenario..."

You really seem to be on the right path in "measuring everything to death before cutting" as there is often a "disconnect" between our ability to "conceptualize" what water will do versus where water itself actually wants to go / winds up.

Oh, and pretty savvy of you to think about smells; we actually wound up with some (just as you approach the front entry way of our home, no less!) but, as the smells were coming from excess water above ground (or in the basin drain we had installed) I quickly learned a bit of vinegar sprayed (or poured into the basin drain) made those smells go away. Talking maybe a couple times a year, when it is both wet and hot out.

All that and, if there is anyway you can go with 5" hardpipe, I'd do it ...!

Looking forward to input you get from any others here.


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## Rackhouse Mayor (Sep 4, 2017)

It looks like you have it figured out. I went through the same issue a few months back, and I haven't had an issue since. I have a wet lot in an area of the country that gets the highest volume of rainfall annually, so if I can do it you can do it. I used this website to double check some of my math and options: https://www.ndspro.com/. My system was different than yours but here's some high level advice I'd have for you:

Call 811 or whatever before you dig. Even if you don't care about your own personal safety you should do it to reduce your risk of a hefty repair bill should you damage a line.
Never connect drainage lines directly to downspouts. Always let the downspout flow into a basin that then flows into a pipe.
If this is your forever home use PVC pipe over corrugated. This allows you to snake any future clogs plus corrugated pipe will collapse over time.
If you're doing it yourself renting a trencher is a life saver. Just make sure it's the right size.
Any project that involves digging a ditch is a PITA, so spend the money upfront and overbuild the thing. You don't want to have to dig that ditch twice.


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## ShilpaMann (May 12, 2018)

440mag said:


> Despite your incredible effort, it is just sooo hard to conceive everything, without being there so, I guess my first suggestion would be to leave no stone unturned in looking for others THERE who can actually walk the area and give you feedback. Obviously, that does not mean just contractors as I n our experience, even the best are really just focused on what they can do for a profit (I.e., in our home just about EVERYone we called wanted to handle the issues from the "negative" side (inside of foundation).
> 
> Any area home inspectors, college vo-tech staff, local govt planning / permitting staff, etc. We had to get pretty creative
> 
> Interesting note: of the two individuals we had come out from our county planning/permitting dept (even though nothing we were doing involved permits we figured they've "seen it all" and might know what does and doesn't work in our area, etc.), one guy was useless as a leaky Dixie cup but the next guy from the same dept offered us incredibly effective advice we hadn't even thought of. (Back to that "leave no stone unturned" thing. Seriously.


This was my first plan; get a professional in. I started with the city, to see if they could do anything about other people who have graded their yard into mine (admittedly, vary slight grading). Apparently, no, they cannot do anything unless their downspouts are within some distance of my yard. Second was a local irrigation company who came by, said they are too busy, and left. That was repeated two more times, with two more companies; not encouraging. A friend is a landscape artist, and she said my plan seemed good, but had some modifications (which I've implemented in the plan you see above). I also called someone (when I bought my house) to come by to winterize my front-yard sprinkler system, and I asked him about the backyard re: drainage, and he said they're too busy for a job like that. In Windsor, apparently nobody likes hard projects, because easy projects are abundant. Discouraging.


440mag said:


> Also, despite my own misgivings, a HUGE part of the answer for us was (drumroll) .... MORE DOWNSPOUTS! One local "jack-of-all-trades" fellow who stopped by pointed out the square footage of our roof and explained architects don't like putting downspouts in their drawings cuz, we'll, customers (and other architects) don't want to see them. Thus the builder doesn't add any and that was a huge factor contributing to our wet foundation.
> 
> I may have missed it but I don't recall your mentioning the dimensions of your gutters / downspouts and id venture almost 80% problems getting water away from foundations is the smaller dimension gutters and downspouts. (I.e., I no longer care how "small" a roof is: ALWAYS at least 6" gutters, never 5". I might consider 5" gutters on a shed or a bird feeder but, never on a house...Never again!


This is interesting, and I'd like to understand the reasoning for how more downspouts helped. Maybe your situation ends up being different, but when there is a rainstorm, my house is surrounded in a puddle; water sits on the surface and pools. Originally my downspouts drained into the city storm system, but those pipes cracked years ago, and were draining straight into my weeping tiles. Disaster. It seems possible that, in your case, you're spreading the pain out across the exterior of your home more evenly, thus the dirt can absorb the water more readily.

When we had a "100 year" storm here 2 years ago (and again last year, lol) I was home during them both, and my gutters/downspouts were handling the water coming off the roof with seemingly no problem. In fact, during that storm is when I found out flowrates of my downspouts "experimentally". Turns out, a 5gal pail filled in 12 seconds. Yeesh. Regardless, my 2" x 3" downspouts easily flowed ~30GPM. I will look into this myself though; the Internet seems to say 1 downspout per every 20 feet, which seems very excessive, though it probably assumes it's just flowing into your yard, which is not workable for me. I have 199.25ft of gutters, so I'd need 10 downspouts! My roof area is 2100sq.ft (assuming it's flat, so maybe 2200sq.ft of surface) and "only" has 4 downspouts. My gutters are only 4" as well, which apparently don't exist anymore.


440mag said:


> You mention "theoretical" storms and I guess something else we learned the hard way is that we should've been thinking of the theoretical storms as "the norm" in amounts of water we needed to figure out ways to handle. "Our mantra has become, "Worst case scenario, worst case scenario..."
> 
> You really seem to be on the right path in "measuring everything to death before cutting" as there is often a "disconnect" between our ability to "conceptualize" what water will do versus where water itself actually wants to go / winds up.


Background with me: I design/audit robotics safety systems, automation systems, and various industrial programming. My actual job is to look at something, and figure out every possible way this system could deal with the unknown, or kill someone. If this water beats me, I will be sad .

You are right though, I should probably bee assuming a bit heavier storm than I currently am. Looking at historical storms, our "worst" storms (historical) are about 3-4" of rain in a day. The crazy storms these last few years accumulated about 5" over a few days. For flow-rates, I seem to have a pretty good grip. Potentially with holding-capacity, I might consider increasing the size of the dry-wells.


440mag said:


> Oh, and pretty savvy of you to think about smells _(*ED:* thanks!)_; we actually wound up with some (just as you approach the front entry way of our home, no less!) but, as the smells were coming from excess water above ground (or in the basin drain we had installed) I quickly learned a bit of vinegar sprayed (or poured into the basin drain) made those smells go away. Talking maybe a couple times a year, when it is both wet and hot out.
> 
> All that and, if there is anyway you can go with 5" hardpipe, I'd do it ...!
> 
> Looking forward to input you get from any others here.


I will probably get pipe for free (not elbows), so I am probably just going to go with all hard-pipe. I expect this to be my "forever" home, but even if it isn't, I'm not messing around.

I am leaning more and more towards the upside-down barrels; they're like $5/ea, and will never "clog". I have no trees around my house, so rotting biomass should be minimized, which I hope means the only "smells" I'll get will be water/dirt, which is probably preferred. As well, the downspout catches will be screens, so that should also keep any stray foliage out.

Thank you for taking the time to reply, and for the helpful feedback.


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## ShilpaMann (May 12, 2018)

Rackhouse Mayor said:


> It looks like you have it figured out. I went through the same issue a few months back, and I haven't had an issue since. I have a wet lot in an area of the country that gets the highest volume of rainfall annually, so if I can do it you can do it. I used this website to double check some of my math and options: https://www.ndspro.com/. My system was different than yours but here's some high level advice I'd have for you:
> 
> Call 811 or whatever before you dig. Even if you don't care about your own personal safety you should do it to reduce your risk of a hefty repair bill should you damage a line.
> Never connect drainage lines directly to downspouts. Always let the downspout flow into a basin that then flows into a pipe.
> ...


That site is cool! Turns out, when I select my "problems", it comes up with solutions that match my proposed ideas (generally); encouraging!

I appreciate the advice; those seem like fantastic suggestions, especially the trencher (I was thinking how much it was going to suck to dig those, and honestly completely forgot those machines exist). I'm going to try and throw a few bucks at the exterior tile guys to dig my dry-wells for me as well, which is another reason I am trying to ascertain capacity (12 hours for me is like 12 minutes for them).


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## Colonel K0rn (Jul 4, 2017)

I'm reading through your post, and I too know the despair of watching your yard be surrounded by a pool of rising water. Read through my reno thread to see what I have been facing. We had 3.75" of rain on 24 Apr, and I had standing water in my front yard for 2 days. This same time last year, 0.5" of rain would have caused the same problem.

I've been working on amending my soil to improve the percolation through the perched water table that we have, as I was not only facing chemical barriers that prevented percolation, but geological barriers in my lot. We have a naturally high water table, so any rainy season we have becomes problematic. In my opinion, a dry well wouldn't ever be dry on my lot. I'm going to re-read the thread tomorrow/today, but I've got to get some sleep. Looks like you've put a lot of thought into your design, and @Rackhouse Mayor did a good job on his drainage that he has in his thread.


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## ShilpaMann (May 12, 2018)

Colonel K0rn said:


> I'm reading through your post, and I too know the despair of watching your yard be surrounded by a pool of rising water. Read through my reno thread to see what I have been facing. We had 3.75" of rain on 24 Apr, and I had standing water in my front yard for 2 days. This same time last year, 0.5" of rain would have caused the same problem.
> 
> I've been working on amending my soil to improve the percolation through the perched water table that we have, as I was not only facing chemical barriers that prevented percolation, but geological barriers in my lot. We have a naturally high water table, so any rainy season we have becomes problematic. In my opinion, a dry well wouldn't ever be dry on my lot. I'm going to re-read the thread tomorrow/today, but I've got to get some sleep. Looks like you've put a lot of thought into your design, and @Rackhouse Mayor did a good job on his drainage that he has in his thread.


I am currently concerned with the same thing; will these dry-wells ever be truly dry. We've been getting hammered with rain lately, so my yard is currently a pool (can't tell, because of the grass, which I can't cut, because of the water). 
I'm going to try and dig a hole today and see what happens. I recently dug a 3-4' hole to bury a pet, and was surprised to not hit water (this hole was reasonably close to where the proposed dry-well would be). I am hoping that, with my waterlogged yard, I can dig a hole a few feet deep, and it won't be full of water, indicating my issue is with the upper layers of my lawn. As well, with my lawn saturated, a perc test will be "worst case scenario".

As for @Rackhouse Mayor's "drainage thread": I was unable to find it; if you could link it, I'd appreciate it. I am finding a lot of "this is how I did this project" on the Internet, but not a whole lot of follow-up to report back if their plan worked.


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## g-man (Jun 15, 2017)

I was thinking about your layout last night. I have a question, why channel the water from the downspouts to the drywell instead of taking all that water all the way to the street? This way you keep the drywell for the french drain system. Also, why not add a sump pump to the bottom of the well with a manual switch. At the end of a heavy rain, you could manually turn it on to empty the well and avoid any potential smell.


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## ShilpaMann (May 12, 2018)

g-man said:


> I was thinking about your layout last night. I have a question, why channel the water from the downspouts to the drywell instead of taking all that water all the way to the street? This way you keep the drywell for the french drain system. Also, why not add a sump pump to the bottom of the well with a manual switch. At the end of a heavy rain, you could manually turn it on to empty the well and avoid any potential smell.


That is actually a fantastic question; thank you. Though to clarify, "only" downspout "A" (bottom left) would be going to that dry-well; "B", "C". and "D" will go to the front yard/their own dry-wells.

Originally, the idea was just to have a backyard dry-well for downspout "A" to deal with the water. After doing some testing for how much water I need to deal with, I realised that, eventually, the dry well would fill up (with any reasonable sized design), so it needed to overflow somewhere. That realisation brought the "around the house" idea, but mostly as a "bypass", since I might as well try and deal with the water in the backyard. I also realised that the downspout was only one part of the "wet backyard" problem, that rain falling on my yard was also an issue, which made the French drains become a thing.

If I follow your modification, basically the rear dry-well becomes a buffer/holding tank for my backyard's "surface" water only. The problematic downspout "A" would then be a solid pipe that ALWAYS flows ONLY to the front yard (unfortunately, the "fast" way -straight up the bottom of that image- is nice new cement, and I'm not in love with carving a 4" wide path for 55' to install a pipe under it)?

IMO, a potential issue is that, once my backyard is waterlogged (my backyard is approximately 25% larger than my roof, so it is dealing with ~45gal/min of rain during my newly chosen system-design storm ... VERY MUCH guesstimating, the French drain system will be then handling about 20gal/min, which fills the drywall in 10 minutes), I'm still screwed, unless I build-in an overflow system that connects the rear dry-well to "somewhere lower", which then basically mirrors the system I proposed.

Reducing the water that the rear dry-well deals with probably IS a good idea though. Slight proposed modification:


Instead of the downspout draining into the dry-well, it now by-passes it (the grading of the pipe [partially], as well as the flow through the wye [largely], will encourage this). The blue circles are barrels, which I am almost definitely using; gravel is spendy it turns out.

A sump-pump in the dry-well poses a few issues of its own (I believe):
1. A hole in the ground would now require electricity, which I guarantee I cannot get a permit for.
2. I'd need a large access door for maintenance (which would require being done seasonally, if not more often, especially since it won't always be submerged, which is "required" for most/all submersible pumps).
3. Removing the water does not solve the smells issue; the water should not be "stagnant" (when it's wet season, new water is coming in often. when it's dry, the dry-well should be empty most of the time), but rather biomass laying at the bottom of a dry, cold, moist, oxygen-free pit will potentially rot (this is my understanding, which might be wrong).
4. Requires input by me, and I am very unreliable compared with the level of "always functional no matter what" that I want for this type of system.


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## Colonel K0rn (Jul 4, 2017)

FWIW, I'm sorry for your recent furbaby loss.


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## ShilpaMann (May 12, 2018)

Colonel K0rn said:


> FWIW, I'm sorry for your recent furbaby loss.


Thank you, but it actually was a duck who seems to have died of natural causes on my roof. Went out one day to cut grass, weed, etc, and saw a brown duck pacing on my roof. For like 4 hours. Turns out, on the side of my roof, her partner died of something (no physical trauma I could see [I was concerned some ne'er-do-well may've shot it with a slingshot or something]; looked like he just sat down and died).

I went up there, and was actually able to pet the female duck as I inspected the situation. We buried her partner in the backyard while she watched. It was really weird, but felt very much like I was doing her a favour. Hopefully she didn't think I was eating him or something, but she was right at my side the entire time.


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## ShilpaMann (May 12, 2018)

Baby steps: I've downgraded this project to simply reducing the amount of water my weeping tiles are processing. I had the exterior tiles fixed, but general disasters all around my house re: water (sump drain leaking, eavestroughs leaking, grading around the home sinking, etc) are causing my new tiles to STILL be overwhelmed (worse than before, actually, but that was expected somewhat).

The new plan is similar to the last one, but does not include any of the French drain stuff. Attached is my new proposed design; hopefully it's clear enough.

I am still concerned about slope (apparently 1-2"/10' is recommended, but I think I'll only be able to get about 0.5"/10' [TBD]), and whether I should include cleanouts (other than counting the downspout inlets as cleanouts) to minimize theoretical clogging/ease potential maintenance (*Note:* my roof gets zero leaves, so clogging isn't a huge concern at this time).

The "outlet" is another concern: if it's shallow, it is more susceptible to freezing I believe (though I'm not sure if I should REALLY care about this) ... if it's deep, it will "fill the system" before overflowing from the top (with a 1" slope, and the pipe being buried only 2", the water will reach back 60' ... it will be "full" back around 25'). I expect the dry-well system should mean that, during cold seasons (winter, where the dry-wells will be drier), any water going into the system should easily be absorbed by the dry-wells, meaning no/little standing water during this time (I am installing 800gal of capacity, which is a "reasonable storm" out here). During "wet" seasons (not-winter), I expect the dry-wells will often be full (perc test is pretty garbage for my yard), and thus there will often be "back flow" into the system until it fills up to the point where it can spill out from the overflow (not sure if this is a concern).
Yellow = 4" PVC pipe (hash-lines in the middle are 10' indicators)
White = House
Grey = Cement
Brown = Fence


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