French drains are used to redirect surface and groundwater away from an area, usually the foundation of a house, septic tanks, retaining walls, low spots in garden areas, crawl spaces or basements and other areas susceptible to moisture accumulation.

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French drains are created by digging a trench, burying a perforated pipe and covering it with gravel or rock. Water seeps into the trench and is routed to another area of the yard. This type of drainage system is used primarily to prevent ground and surface water from penetrating or damaging building foundations.

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French drains operate on gravity and the trench must slope from beginning to end. The high-end of the drain is where the excess water enters the system and the low-end, or exit point is where the excess water leaves the drain system. The optimum slope for a French drain system is one percent. A good rule of thumb for calculating the slope is for every eight feet the drain must drop one inch.

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If requested for aesthetic purposes, we can install a soil-rock separator and apply topsoil over it and sod at an additional charge. If drainage must drain to the street because of slope of terrain, we can install a patented pressure release valve at the curb. It looks like a round sprinkler head and sits flush with the ground and pops up and releases water over the curb when pressure builds up and retracts when finished draining.

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DRAINAGE WORK

Excess water can be as damaging to your landscape as the lack of water. Excess water can also lead to property damage, instability in your home’s foundation and costly repairs. Our water and drainage professionals offer a variety of methods to solve water problems and prevent them from occurring in the future.

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Our drainage experts have extensive knowledge of grading and trenching techniques as well as the tools and technology needed to restructure your landscape and get rid of excess water. Solutions include downspouts or dry creek beds which can turn your water troubles into beautiful waterfalls and streams; diverting water runoff using systems such as French drains; and carefully-planned trenching designed to prevent water from collecting in your basement or settling in low areas.

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We can also drain water away from your house or wet spot to another part of the yard that has more slope for the water to flow away from the property. Depending on the situation we may even be able to connect your drainage system directly to the storm drains.

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Call us today and we will be glad to provide you with options from the most inexpensive low-tech solution to the most comprehensive and extensive solutions available. Remediation may include one or a combination of the following:

• Collecting downspout water and piping it away from the house (sometimes downspouts dump too much water too close to the house)

• French drain systems (from simple to complex, to gather and pipe away sub-surface water)

• Drainage ditches and trenches

• Driveway drains

• Lawn drains

• Catch basins

• Culverts

• Rain gardens (a detention basin designed to collect and hold run-off so it can soak in slowly and recharge a garden or forest soil)

• Re-grading for proper pitch

• Sump pumps

• Swales

• Water bars

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We try to make as little a mess as possible and we always clean up before we leave. Depending on the severity of a problem, we sometimes have to use heavy equipment to get the job done. Because we are in the landscape business too, we are familiar with lawn restoration. We can reseed or sod the area to make it look like we were never there.