Drainage solutions in Duluth MN and surrounding areas
Are you experiencing soft, spongy spots in any area of your lawn or property after rain? Or is water seeping into your basement? You likely have drainage issues on your property. Drainage issues occur due to an improper grade in your yard, or the landscaping around your foundation has no slope due to the soil settling over time. This also can occur on newly built homes, if the soil around the foundation was not backfilled and compacted properly.
Grading and Drain Tile To Correct Drainage Problems
Most issues related to water pooling up during rain storms or from snow melt in your lawn can be repaired with scraping the troublesome areas, then regrading the area with topsoil and then installing new sod or seeding over top. If the issue is widespread, your entire property may suffer from a drainage problem, and in situations like this, a French Drain or Drain tile installation will be your best ally.
If water is getting into your basement, usually the correction lies within your existing landscape depending on the foundation. The proper repair method is removing the existing landscaping, correcting the grade/slope of the soil beneath your landscaping along your foundation with additional soil to ensure a proper slope to allow water to run away from your home or other structures on your property. Then installing a new landscape over the recently repaired slope.
A common issue we have found in the Lakeside neighborhood in Duluth MN is that most foundations are backfilled with sand which is the standard material used for backfill but the surrounding native soil is clay which is not permeable causing water to be trapped in the sand surrounding your foundation causing your sump pump to over work. On this instance we recommend capping over the back fill material with native clay soil and grading away from the property.
To learn more about our drainage solutions or if you have questions about yard or landscape drainage specific to your property, call us or request a quote
What is a French drain?
A French drain is a system designed to collect water from surface water and also beneath the surface in a capillary action. Our French drains are designed to where they never need maintenance. We use non-woven fabric that allow 90-120 gallons of water a minute to pass through 1 square foot of fabric. Our drain tile is virgin material with no containments. Most corrugated black 4- and 6-inch pipe is not virgin and has been made by using recycled plastics. They also have containments that make it weaker and doesn’t allow it to last as long.
Won’t the drain tile freeze and back up?
If improperly installed, a drain tile system can freeze. But by using corrugated pipe and sloping the pipe at the correct percentage, the water will never be moving slow enough to freeze until it exits the pipe if sloped right. Also, this pipe is under ground, there is no wind to freeze it faster.
Why don’t you connect spouts to your French Drain? It would save pipe, excavation and labor.
Water from your down spouts can be dirty. Bugs, Leaves, dirt and sticks can all get into your gutters and then travel down into your down spouts. We don’t want that contamination getting inside our French Drain. This will cause your French Drain to clog and fail. That is why we always run a separate non-perforated pipe all the way to the day-light or water containment area (storm sewers, driveways, drainage ditches etc.)
The other contractor says I need 6-inch drain tile and that 4 inch is too small.
4-inch drain tile can handle up to 240 gallons a minute by just gravity feed. Most down spouts from average size roofs will never see more then 30-40 gallons a minute in even the worst storms. We calculate your square footage and convert it into gallons and use data from the National Weather Service to design the right system specific to your yard.
The other contractor said he is going to put in a dry well that will handle all the water
In poor soil conditions, water drains very slow. Prime Landscapes calculates how big of a drainage system your property needs using the 100-year 24-hour precipitation data from the National Weather Service. This means that in 100 years, this is the max rain fall received in 1 time interval of 24 hours. This should only happen once every 100 years. We calculate your square foot and convert it into gallons to design the right system for your yard. Going off of this