Just realized I wasted $800 on a fancy French drain system

Everyone said spend the money on a proper drain system with gravel and pipe, but after the May 2023 flood my neighbor's simple dirt trench handled the water better than my setup. Anyone else have a basement drain project that totally backfired?

2 comments

2 Comments

spencerw7217d agoMost Upvoted

Wait, did you use a geotextile fabric around your gravel? I read somewhere (maybe it was a blog from some university extension program) that the fabric is actually super important to keep the pipe from clogging up over time. If you just dumped gravel on the pipe without wrapping it, the soil can wash in and fill the voids, making it drain way slower than a simple trench. My neighbor used that old school clay pipe in his ditch and it outlasted my fancy plastic setup by a decade, honestly makes you wonder if the old ways are better sometimes. The key difference I'm hearing is about maintenance too, because a dirt trench you can just clean out with a shovel every spring, but with gravel and pipe you're kind of stuck if it gets clogged deep down. Might be worth digging up one section to check if the pipe is actually clear, because maybe it's not the system itself that failed but just one part of it.

stellat8717d ago

You definitely changed my mind on this one, @spencerw72. I was all in on the fancy gravel and pipe setup because a contractor told me it was the "only way to do it right," but now I see my neighbor's dirt trench outworking mine every heavy rain. Never even thought about the geotextile fabric issue until you mentioned it, and I bet that's exactly what happened to my system (just dumped the gravel on top and called it done). Makes me want to dig up a section this weekend and check, maybe switch to a simpler setup next time if this one is too clogged to fix.