What Happens When You Bury Yard Drainage Pipe Too Shallow

What Happens When You Bury Yard Drainage Pipe Too Shallow

In the north, if you don’t bury your drain pipe, this is what happens when it’s too shallow and you don’t bury it deep enough. This is a job that we’re going to redo. When it’s hard ground, like the clay that we’re typically working in, and I know from talking to a lot of our subscribers and the people that are purchasing the Baughman Tile that we’re doing the distribution for., There’s another, look at that pipes surfacing. I mean each year it’s pushed even further up. So the frost gets under these pipes and it pushes them up. That’s why we always put the pipe at the bottom of our French drain and then we put all the stone on top of it. For two reasons.

One, if you don’t have any water in that trench, you don’t have to worry about tree roots filling that trench. People always say, well, what do you do about tree roots? Well, don’t give them any water to sniff out and you won’t have roots in your system.

Notice all the guys that are showing you cleaning roots out of their French drain systems and they’re pulling roots out. You see all the water coming out with it. So we always build our system to where the pipes at the bottom so that the frost can’t push it to the top as you see here. Sure. This took more than one winter every year it got worse and worse. Now it won’t even flow water and you can see that the lawn service has been hitting that pipe. They put some tape over it.

This whole thing is just, you know, a great example of why here in the north we got a bury our pipe, a minimum, I know that it’s a lot of work to go 14 inches deep, but you know, you can see if this is what’s going to happen, why cut corners. So go 14 inches deep. Then that way you got 10 inches of base on top. That’s what I recommend for yard drains in the north, whether it’s Canada or the northern US any place where you have a real true winter climate and a freeze-thaw cycle.

So this is something I see a lot and I wanted to share it with you guys. I wanted to show you what it looks like.