How to Stop Yard Drains From Clogging and Fix a Muddy Yard

Clogged Downspouts are the #1 Reasons for Flood Damage

The number one problem to flooded homes is when the grass grows over the discharge end of the downspout. We recently had a really big storm come through yesterday. We had over an inch of rain, so that was ideal. A lot of water in a short amount of time. And it literally opened up the turf grass right here. And you can see that there’s been leaves trapped, debris trapped. Again, this is the number one reason why homes flood, basements flood, when you can’t daylight your downspout and the drain gets clogged in your yard.

Here’s a great example of how fast the grass can grow over a four-inch yard drain pipe of any kind. It doesn’t matter what it is. And when the drain can’t daylight, you’re going to say, “Oh, my pipe collapsed. Or my pipe doesn’t work anymore.” That’s not  always the case.

So what happens when the water can’t come down this downspout and daylight properly due to grass clogging the discharge, it fills, then the water just pours over the downspout when it’s full. It just literally cascades like a waterfall, just pours right along the basement wall or the crawl space, whatever you may have. So it’s super important to daylight your drains.

If you can’t find where your roof runoff system daylights to, wait till a good two-inch rain, a downpour that just blows open the turf grass like this and the leaves just come up and shingle gravel and whatever happened to be on the roof.

This is a six-inch Speed-D basin and the grass grew right over it. The homeowner could not find it but a really good hard rain exposed it. And I’m used to looking for this kind of thing after a big rain. It pretty much tells the story. So this is how debris ends up inside a roof runoff system. The grass grows over the discharge end, debris can’t get out.

Now we have a muddy yard and a water bed over here and the grass guy was driving on the waterbed, mowing the lawn. But yet we can’t find where this daylights, nor can we find where that daylights. So we have to do that, but the water will just stay under the sod and it’ll turn into a water bed. It’s just unbelievable. Number one reason for water problems in residential homes.

How to Stop Your Yard Drain or Downspout from Clogging

So this is going to be a great opportunity for me to show you how we go ahead and we take a D-box. We removed those six-inch Speed-D basins, and that’s where they were daylighting. So we went ahead and put a D-box in to catch shingle gravel, leaves and debris. We ran it further. Now, I purposely ran solid yellow with our eight-slot blue so we can see easily what we’re doing here. This is how you run a downspout into a French drain. We’re putting one of our pop-up emitters with a turf restrictor plate so it doesn’t disappear. We have our French drain pipe on the bottom, always put the French drain pipe on the bottom and your solid pipe for your downspouts on top. So this is the location of the other Speed-D basin. We put a D-box in, and then we went ahead and ran this another 20 feet.