How to Move More Water in Your Underground Downspout System

Downspout Cleanout

FDM replaced this Vented Wye Clean Out with the New and Improved Downspout Leaf Filter and Clean Out

Marcello’s doing a downspout and we’re running it in the same trench as our French drain on the property line. So we have a WYE then we have one of our four-inch grates because they fit so nice. So this is going to help vent this downspout and it’s going to be able to move a lot of water. You’re not going to end up with air gaps.

How Venting Your Downspout Moves More Water

What happens is you get air trapped down in your downspout system and if you don’t have any way of venting it slows down how much water you can actually move through your downspout from your gutter.

So what we do is we do a two by three by four gutter adapter to some Baughman Black solid. Then we go to a WYE fitting with one of our grates. That’s for a vent. And then you could pop it out with a screwdriver and you can run a garden hose through it once a year just to get all the shingle gravel and debris out.

So we got our High Octane and we’re running our 4 in corrugated pipe down the property line because there’s a drainage issue between these two houses. We’re taking this gutter downspout all the way to the street. Our average runs now on gutter downspouts because I get asked that a lot. You know, it does vary, but I want to say our average gutter downspout run is 30 feet. We want to get them as far away from the house as we possibly can.

Update for 2023: New Downspout Vented Cleanout

A lot has changed in the last 4 years and French Drain Man no longer uses the vented WYE cleanout described above. We have manufactured our own downspout cleanout right here in Michigan! Primarily, this is a vented downspout cleanout, but we also built in the functionality of a leaf filter. It has a screen that is removable. You can also remove the center of the screen and run a garden hose through your system or run a heat cable in the winter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Downspout Cleanout Leaf Filter is available in black and white.