How to Install a French Drain: pricing, tools, setting elevations. 4k video

we've got a doozy of a job for you today it's a French drain system that we're going to be installing and we're gonna walk you through step-by-step how to install a French drain also how to price the installation of a French drain the tools that you're going to need everything hopefully to help you guys out on your own projects now this video is sponsored by LM and software company this is a software company that we personally use and I will tell you that we endorse and so a lot of times guys you'll see commercials on my videos and I don't control those so when I have an opportunity to actually give an endorsement or a shout-out to a company that I think is actually beneficial to you guys I'm going to do that so today what are we waiting for let's get into how to install a French drain system all right every French train must have an exit point and you're gonna see where we're gonna exit ours this is kind of unique all right so here's our the drain tiles coming out of from the backyard through this PVC you kind of see it dripping so that it's doing what it's supposed to do we'll see how just coming through there once we tie the rest of the drain tile in there I always get stuck in tiny spots man so this French drain job is going to be a bit different than what I would air quote a standard French drain now a standard French drain is really designed to collect your surface water move it along underground and daylight it out to wherever you can get it to go well we're going to be doing is what I call a modified or hybrid French drain and what we're trying to do with this system is capture the ground water because the groundwater table is so high in this area it's automatically flooding the house if we can dry and capture that water up underground before it has a chance to raise we're gonna hopefully be able to keep these guys's backyard drier and their basement from flooding out so this everything that we're going to be doing today is a standard French drain except deeper at the exit point in the field we get back to the right elevation but we'll show you what we mean in a moment now the first thing that you've got to do with the French drain is daylight it you got to have some place to go with it in this case we're actually going to be tapping into an established drain pipe that already goes into a storm sewer Inlet now you cannot perforate a storm sewer inlet without a permit but what we found in this case was somebody had already done that work for us so we're gonna tap into that pipe today light our drain tile so what we're doing here is using two fern cones with a six inch wide pipe and that's what we're gonna hook our system into it this does exit where you seen Sam crawling down into the storm sewer inlet earlier that's where this system exits out into the street so I want to go back to where I call this a hybrid French drain system in reality a French drain needs to be 12 inches below grade and is designed to capture surface water plus subsurface water at the same time but because we were able to identify where a big portion of the problem on this jobsite came from which was subsurface water we wanted to be more aggressive with capturing that subsurface water and getting it to go down into the storm sewer drain so this system is going to be deeper than your standard French drain just at the outlet now the rest of our real French drain is almost 200 feet away so we had to account for that elevation pitch when we were setting our French drain field and I want to reinforce that so that if you guys are out there looking and doing your own French drain system you don't follow this video exactly you want to go about 12 inches deep with your French drain now another question that's come up is how much do a charge for a French drain on a project like this will typically get anywhere from $25 per linear foot up to around $40 per linear foot and that does not include regrading the yard re-sodding or anything else what that does include it includes the drain tile filter fabric rock hauling away the excavation spoils which is part of the project and then putting everything back in place including the labor to do that but any other landscaping that happens to be a part of this project would be charged separately hope that helps [Music] so let's talk about the process of actually installing the French drain after we have the trench dug we line it with permeable filter fabric you don't want non-permeable and I know that may sound like a no brainer but permeable allows the water to pass through but keeps the fines out of the drainage zone so the drainage zone is the actual rock that we install so we line the trench with the filter fabric we then put our four inch / drain tile into that trench now we use a corrugated perforated drain tile we just like that we could use solid schedule 40 that's been perforated I don't prefer to use that because the corrugated gives me the flexibility to be able to make angles and changes in the grade and it's a little more forgiving but there's a couple things that we don't compromise on and that's the fabric and the rock the more rock the better the more fabric the better the longer the entire system will hold up those are two things that you've got to get right are you gonna be going back after the fact now one of the things we haven't covered much in this video is mobility on the job site now during the course of this project it continued to rain on us day after day making the site almost inaccessible with a skid loader with wheels we ended up using two different ASVs on this project we've got our standard ASV 75 which we used for a lot of the main dirt moving but we also ended up renting an AS VRT 30 just to get it into the site into some of the tighter areas because we had nothing else that could actually move around and also get the job done so that's something to consider when you guys are doing your own French drain remember it's going to be already wet conditions and then if Mother Nature doesn't cooperate it's going to make a challenging site even more difficult so make sure that you have the right equipment right out of the gate ready to go and because the site was so wet we had to actually do this job in stages instead of opening up the entire trench putting in our drain tile system our fabric our rock and then closing it up we had to actually open up a small section make sure that we had all our benchmarks right and then close it up because we actually couldn't get around any other way it was just too muddy to monkey and too challenging to crack open the entire site and hope that we could squirm our way past this trench without collapsing anything in or altering any of the elevations remember your elevations have to stay consistent or you're going to be trapping water underground so you want to have one inch of drop for every eight feet of run and that's a minimum if you can go more aggressive do it now in this case we had 200 linear feet of drain tile system that was going in and we knew that from the outlet in our storm sewer to our grade 200 feet away we had a 24 inch change in elevation and so we divided that up so that we had 12 inches of drop for every 100 feet of run so that's how we did this project whatever your numbers are whatever your calculations are make sure that you get that figured out before you start cracking open the ground so it's important to remember that your outlet elevation will set all elevations on the job from that point forward now if we go a little bit backwards to where we begin we begin at our outlet and you guys remember how deep that was we had almost three feet of pipe buried but in that zone all we were doing was trying to get the water to flow out and away we weren't as in worried about capturing it near the street as we were getting it to go into the storm sewer Inlet and go at the proper elevation all right we're back out on our green tile job today things pretty pretty good and frozen it rained like it son of a gun on Saturday and then snowed on Sunday and we got a high of 16 degrees today and that being said I am really glad I got my heated for walking jacket on this thing but started out super wet and now everything is super frozen all right so the ASB has been turning pretty sluggish today and what's going on is the guys did not clean out all that sloppy mud and stuff from this really nasty wet drain tile job that we've been working on so what happens is it's been getting well below freezing the last several nights and it's been staying below freezing during the day so all that freezes and hardens up like concrete and jams everything up so I'm over here with a hammer and a chisel busting out as much of that as I can that's a portent thing to remember especially with dirt work when it's starting to get cold like this it's easy thing to do at the end of the day but not such an easy thing to do the next day especially when we you know need it so this side I've gotten it's more cleaned off but this one over here you see that's basically solid so that's what's going on it's causing it to turn real sluggish which is so this is the backyard and this is where we wanted to make sure that we were getting our elevations set for that French drain but our outlet to this French drain is 200 feet away and so this French drain is set at the right elevation at about 12 inches below grade but as we come closer to that Street that's where you see that we had to deepen it to make sure that everything was still flowing downhill I know I've said it I just want to make sure that we're in graining how important it is to make sure that you don't have any unevenness in that elevation change [Music] so once we've got our French drain installed now we've got to make sure that we get the grades to flow into it and that remove means removing the excess soil that's on the yard and creating a gentle swale down to the French drain we don't actually want a trench going to the French drain we want the French drain to be invisible but we do want to direct and guide all the water down into that area and so that means we're going to end up regretting this backyard cutting down all of the grades to make sure that we have all of their elevation set not just in the drain itself but the surface elevations set as well so everything flows to where our drain tile is buried because if it doesn't then we're going to get pooling spots in different locations all right we're back out our drain tile job we're gonna finish it up here or you're gonna be laying laying inside and there's snow on the ground so but everything's straight it out the yard is pitching down this way can't really tell cuz there's snow on it but we have a swale from the corner of the house running all the way down here so we'll trap whatever water's coming this way whatever's coming this way that way and from over there because this house is lower than literally all of the other ones around so yes you actually heard Sam right we are going to be laying sod in the snow and here's some of the things that a lot of people don't know it's the best time of the year to lay sod period hands down there is no other time of the year that's better to lay sod then when it's just starting to snow because the sod is completely dormant the sod is sound asleep you don't have to water it you don't have to maintain it you don't have to do anything with this sod and in the springtime what will happen is it'll be it'll get covered in a nice thick layer of snow and then as the spring comes that snow will melt and it'll automatically water your saw for you you still don't have to maintain it you still don't have to do anything here's the drawback to laying sod in the wintertime you can't cut it in so what I'm talking about is that fine edge where the sod meets the existing turf we like to try to leave that as close as we possibly can accounting for settlement so your sod your grades will settle ever so slightly approximately 1/4 to 1/2 an inch we always like to leave it just about that much higher than the sod around it you can't really control that very well this time of the year you can still get the job done you're gonna have better sod results but you're not gonna have you're given up that ability to cut that edge in and make it look like magic when the job is done it just it is what it is so sodding in the winter time absolutely perfectly fine actually I prefer it's better for my customers all right guys let's recap what we had going on with this job site so although it was a French drain there were a number of components above this job that made it unusual and the reason why we're going to be covering this is because every single job that you guys go on is going to have elements that are out of the norm although the basic system of installing a French drain will always be the same every jobsite is going to be unique and so you're going to be able to have to understand what those elements are and overcome them now on this job site it was a tight site and it was super wet we also ended up installing multiple runs of French drain we stalled one through the middle of the backyard and one through the far end of the backyard and then one on the side yard as well and then another one on the other side and so because we had so much going out on this site it limited what we were able to do and how we were able to do that meaning we ended up installing this thing in a modular system we started at the street which was our lowest point it's also the deepest point of that French drain and if you remember that drain tile was buried literally almost waist-high it's not effectively collecting surface water when it's that deep but at the outlet point we no longer cared if it was collecting surface water all we wanted it to do at that point was get all the water that we had collected 200 feet away into the storm sewer inlet which was another unique characteristic about this job site typically all daylight a French drain at grade wherever gravity allow you put a grate over the top of it in this case we were able to actually connect into another drain tile system which was already perforated through us and into a storm sewer Inlet if you do have that on one of your sites don't puncture a storm sewer inlet without checking with your city first and getting the proper permits because you will need them another thing that was unusual about this site was how long of a run we had from our exit point to where our actual field was trust me guys we had worked a long time on trying to find a closer outlet and if we could of we would have but we weren't able to so this whole system ended up being well over 200 feet we had a 24 inch change in elevation and what we were the most concerned about was where our field was where we were doing the majority of the collecting we wanted that to be approximately 12 inches below the surface so we installed the French drain and then we cut the surface down to make sure that we had the proper elevation from our surface to our French drain and then we had the proper run 200 feet away all the way down and into our storm sewer Inlet so that was today's job and a big thanks goes out to LM and software company for sponsoring this putting this together this is a software company for service contractors like you and I we use it inside of our organization and I'm going to highly recommend you guys check it out I've talked to other contractors and it improved their efficiency and pays for itself month after month after month and it's something that if it can help you out I'll gladly endorse it and that's why these guys I'm proud to say are sponsoring today's video that's all I got for you today I hope your project goes amazing and if you have any tips tricks or anything you'd like to share please put it in the comments down below that's it for today guys god bless go get them and do me a favor check out the two videos I'm gonna pop up here for you we'll see you guys on the next one