How to Drain a Flat Yard with No Slope

Drying a Flat Yard When it Has No Slope

The homeowner wanted to reduce the amount of water that gets collected at the discharge. There used to be a four-inch line. Whoever put it in did not run it flat, it was slow. They ran it PVC and it had a belly in it. So we replaced it with the Baughman Tile Company’s big six inch premium yellow.

We want to displace a lot of water here since we’re so flat. There’s not a lot of room for error when you have no slope. So we put a big six inch pipe in. So you can see how we stopped with our solid pipe and made a connection to knife cut. What’s the difference?

Knife cut, literally it lives up to its name. In manufacturing they run it through a process where a blade just cuts this in a few areas in each valley.  You can see how the water’s just slowly over the length of the rest of this run.

This is all going to be knife cut. Here, I’ll show you the knife cuts once again. This is the big six inch premium yellow virgin material. All virgin material, no recycled, no regrind. That’s why this pipe is so strong and it’s made so heavy, just so thick. This is the strongest and heaviest single wall corrugated pipe in the world right here. This six inch pipe, there’s not even a distant second to it.

We’re going to reduce the amount of water that ends up collecting here at the end of this discharge. We can reduce the amount of standing water even in a yard with no slope, because this last 50 feet goes to six inch knife cut.

Because it’s not ground out, knife cuts are just a cut, no material is removed. You end up with just a cut in the pipe. When you have cuts in the pipe, the water will still travel down the pipe. This is the beauty of knife cut. This is why we use knife cut all the time.

In the event that this pipe freezes at the end, we went ahead and we opened up some of the top cuts because I don’t want any problems. I want this homeowner to be able to evacuate that water. If that ices up at the end and it builds up at the discharge end, I know that if I build this right, there will never be any issues here.

Now this could be considered a leach line. I’ve done a few videos on leach lines showing you guys exactly this. All this situations that we use this in are different, could you have gone to, say, a four finger leach field on this? Sure, and then you wouldn’t have this at all. But this was done to fit a very kind little old lady’s budget. And this is in Almont, Michigan. It’s my hometown, so we got to take care of her and this was an affordable way to get this job done right to where she’s not going to have any issues.

Use 6 Inch Knife Cut to Drain a Flat Yard with No Slope

Hopefully you guys picked up on some techniques, some tricks, starting to see the value of knife cut and how it can help you when you need to drain a flat yard with no slope. And this is why we go to knife cut at the end of all our downspout runs, that way there’s not water sitting in a pop-up, it gets absorbed. A dry well doesn’t work because you just dig one vertical hole, and if there’s low peculation it’s not going to work.