The Dry Well Solution

First, a little reminder: We’re heading toward spring and that means lots of rain. And sometimes that means as much as two inches of rain at once. In a single spring, it can translate to as much as two thousand gallons of water pressing against each corner of your foundation. A single gallon of water weighs as much as eight pounds. Two thousand gallons of rain isn’t just a lot of water—it’s a lot of pressure too.

So you want to make sure it’s draining away from your house. If your downspout is going into black (ABS) piping, and you don’t know where it’s going, you need to find out. Until then, you’ll be better off if you remove your downspout and set it aside until you can remediate the situation. Because if the black pipe gets clogged, it will flood your gutters when it backs up. All that rain will run over the top and cause a lot of problems around the foundations of your home.

The Problem:

You know, we get better as we do anything. I’m no different. Currently, I’m at a house that I did in Webster when I first started out and I did it wrong. If you’re going to get better at what you do, you learn from your mistakes.

 In the beginning, I didn’t worry a whole lot about what was going on outside of the house and its foundations. And I didn’t think a lot about the long term. I went in and chased the problem we were hired to solve and fixed just that problem without looking any further. Along the way, I’ve learned better methods and now I do jobs differently.

I’m talking about myself here because I figure it’s easy to throw a rock at myself so other people will feel better about their mistakes and learn from them too.

The last time I came out here, I put a pop up at the end of the drain line. But we now know that pop ups don’t pop up very well. The top on the pop-up I installed blew off and now it gets clogged with leaves. This causes the drain line to back up.

 The Solution: Correcting Our Mistakes

So what have I learned? I’m in PVC, I’m not in ABS. So instead of being a pop-up, this needed to be a dry well. A dry well is simply a hole in the ground filled with rock. The pipe runs from the house to the hole, and forms a T. The pipe runs to the bottom of the dry well. So if the well fills, then it can spill into the yard through a drain-lid where it will soak into the ground away from the house.

This is an easy fix. And I think it’s important that we share what we know as we get better at what we do. Thanks for joining me!