Go to the FDM Canada SiteUse Water Drainage Systems for Outdoor Living Spaces to Avoid Problems
When you build an outdoor living space, you have to be thinking about drainage. Always think about the flow of the water and if what you’re installing is going to interfere with the flow of the water, damming it, go ahead and build a drainage system along with the structure at the time that it’s built. Then you never have a water problem.
When we built this outdoor living space years ago, I knew the water was going to collect in here. We put a French drain system and went around the elevated green.
We also knew that water was going to get trapped in here, so we ran a feeder pipe off the French drain. It’s covered with mulch, but the feeder pipes, this was put in in 2009. Everything’s working great. All the drainage here is working just the way it was designed.
So we have a French drain going around this elevated green. This green is in some drain easement, a swale, so we just put in a French drain system to accommodate. We wanted the real estate. The homeowner wanted to make use of the backyard. That’s what we did. We know that we’re in the swale, we’re in the drainage easement, the neighbor’s water’s coming through and it was just going to create damming effect. Standing water. The yard gets soft, spongy hard to mow.
We put the French drain system and before any side went down, before a rain or any irrigation, we knew what we’re going to end up with, so when we put in this 360 water feature every morning we have the sprinkler system fill it up. It’s not its own separate zone and we take it right to overflow.
You want to take your water features and you want to design the area that you want to direct the water at overflow. We have the liner a little lower right here and we have a dry creek bed, so in the morning when the sprinkler system turns on, it runs for six minutes to fill this up typically. We don’t know how hard it’s going to be. We don’t know what the evaporation rates going to be, so six minutes sometimes when it’s cooler out, you’ll end up with too much water. Well, this will just overflow and this dry creek goes through the grasses through the bed area, and then we have a covered French drain system. The pipes are underneath the lawn and like all our systems, the water, we’re not asking it to come up and into the grate of the storm drain catch basin. We cored through the sidewall for both these pipes, the one around the green and the one for the overflow of water feature.
For controlling your backyard water give us a call at 248-505-3065. Be sure to visit the French Drain Man YouTube Channel and subscribe.
