Yard Water Drainage Tips – Never Fill In Collection Areas / Swales

French Drain Tips - Don't Fill In Collection Areas / SwalesYou never want to fill in your collection areas. I run appointments and I’m still hearing it time and time again. People want to always fill in their collection areas. What I mean by that, we have this pool yard and to code the pool decks, whether they’re brick pavers, whether they’re concrete to code, you have to shed the water away from the pool.

So all the water is running away from the pool to the property line. You have great elevation here on the house. Water’s running. This is the collection area. It’s known as the swale. You never want to fill in the swale. I run appointments and people are always asking me, well, should we just fill it in? No, that’s the collection area. We can grab up the water really easy and we can pipe it off the property.

If your soil is really poor in percolation and I had a client asked me that as well, what does perc mean? When your soil doesn’t perc. You know you’re on clay, you have a heavy soil. It’s very elastic. With sand or gravel, you’re going to get great percolation. If you got a mixer, some veins of sand and gravel. Here’s a roll of our drain tile. It’s a corrugated drainpipe. That’s our eight-slot. We’re putting that in and we’re right in the center of the swale. This is a great collection area. You don’t want to fill it in with dirt. Instead, you want to, we refer to it as you want to ditch it. You want to dig it out, you want to ditch it and remove all the soil and you don’t want to put that soil back in. You just want to take two and a half inches of sod off the top. Take, take the grass with its root, and it’ll grow over the filter fabric.

For a French drain system done right the first time in Macomb Township, Michigan, give us a call at 248-505-3065.