Plan landscape-drainage ahead of time and prevent disaster.




Proper landscape-drainage is essential to the overall landscaping plan. You need to know for peace of mind sake that when a heavy rain comes, the whole yard won't be a lake, or drain straight into your basement.

Lets say all, or a good part of the water from your yard runs down a hill to a specific spot. What if that spot is the downstairs basement patio. In the picture below this is just the case. The solution is pretty simple really, provide a path for the water to travel that gets it off of the lawn surface and collects it for distribution and absorbtion.






drainage system at botom of slope

The surface drain inlets are visible at the bottom of the slope shown here. These inlets put the excess water into a pipe which in turn dumps the water into a holding tank. The holding tank has leach line fingers extending from it in four directions to distribute the water into the ground.

As a backup plan, if the leach lines cannot distribute fast enough, the holding tank has a pump mounted just above the leach line level. If the pump kicks on, it pumps the excess water to the front city curb for distribution. Of course drain systems like this are not common, because most walk out basements are on a slope that lends itself to good landscape-drainage.


surface drain inlet

Most homes have rain gutters with downspouts. Consider creating an underground drainage system which will connect directly to these down spouts to disburse the water and drain it straight to the gutter.

catch basin drain

Sometimes it is necessary to create a catch basin to gather runoff water. In this situation the concrete ends here at the back of the garage and all of the water from the whole driveway drains to this point. You can see the rain gutter goes directly into the 4" sewer pipe and the basin is also plumbed directly into that pipe.

We surrounded the basin with a trough of sorts. I made this with mow curb mix and actually formed it just with my hands. It should do the trick when those summer down pours come along.


rain gutters connected to drain pipes
This is a pretty nice way to go, but always remember to have a back up plan if the landscape-drainage system should be overwhelmed or plugged. the water should still be able to exit the landscape through the slope of the surface without causing a problem with any structure on your property.

drain system delivery point

Above is shown an ingenious way to get the drain water to the gutter without running the water over the top of the sidewalk. A round piece of steel pipe has been welded to a piece of 4" square tube and then the tube was poured in place in a section of the sidewalk. A four inch wide chunk of the city curb was cut out and the steel fit in exactly. Then the 4" drain line was connected with a rubber coupling and the project was completed.

Look at this backyard landscape , looks pretty simple right. Well the back patio on this home some how ended up only one inch higher than the sidewalk level at the back corner of the lot. So I knew if I didn't fix the landscape-drainage problem the water was going straight into the basement with the first big rain storm that came along.

click picture below to see video of this yard

Sunken Trampoline

sunken trampoling


What we did with the landscaping planing . We made all of the lawn areas low in the center and then put in a subsurface drain system that sends the water to an underground vault. When the vault is filled with water the sump pump inside sends the water to the street curb. This same type of system has been used a multitude of times in jobs we have installed. Some of them actually send the water to the front yard curb because the homeowners were required to contain the water from their backyard from going into others properties below.



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