Learn from my mistake - drainage edition

I have a driveway that slopes towards my house, meaning that water runs towards my garage and basement. There is a box culvert and 4" line to carry this water away, but it is easily clogged with leaves. This allows water to buildup and seep around the garage door and flood my house. Despite regular cleaning, a storm can easily blow in new leaves and dump a few feet of water against the house. UGH. 

So when I finally bit the bullet on re-paving the really crappy driveway, I decided to take the nuclear approach and install a BIG auxiliary drain line as extra protection. Why waste my time with wimpy 4" lines when you can go with 8" right? I did no online research, just devoted myself to solving this problem with a big hammer approach. 

Step one was to dig a trench in the narrow space between my house and the neighbor's fence. I rented a trenching tool from HD and got to work. The YouTubers insisted that you could rock tool side-to-side to widen the trench a bit. Perfect, I would end up with a nice, deep 8" wide trench, it's only an additional 1" on each side, what could go wrong? Everything it turns out. 

You can't easily widen a trench that is as deep as the machine can dig. Also, the bigger machines only spit out dirt to one side, so the very narrow space beside my trench was quickly overwhelmed and poured dirt back into the slot I was digging. DOH!  I gave up and swapped the trencher for a mini-excavator. What could go wrong? Plenty. 

The smallest unit they had was one size larger than I really wanted. The bucket was 12" wide, not 8". OK that's a little wider, but I'm sure to have enough room for the pipe and more reach on the arm. The downside is that it removes even more dirt, with nowhere to put it. I was driving back and forth over the trench repeatedly, which started to collapse the sides of the trench. That meant more digging and clearing, with less and less solid ground to drive over. Eventually the wife said "do not drive any further forward!!!" Yeah, falling into the hole would be bad, so I ended up doing what I could to rebuild the sides, but had to throw in the towel and accept that the slope may be compromised in a few spots. I hand-dug what I could and laid some pipe with my wife. (No, literally, we put an 8" corrugated pipe down into the trench. Jeez guys, get your minds out of the gutter.)  I used the excavator to fill in the hole and set the catch basin in place, ready for paving. 

Fast forward a week and the driveway guys tell me that 1) they need the catch basin to be a foot lower to connect their system and 2) it needs to raise up a foot to drain properly.  The stream of obscenities that I uttered made a sailor aboard the USS Kentucky faint despite being 200 meters under the arctic ice. Back to HD, rent a smaller unit this time, dig out the first 20 feet of pipe, rip it out, dig it deeper, reconnect, and success, the pipe drains...from where the surface of the driveway will be. Channel drains won't work. Another stream of obscenities. This time, I tell the driveway guys to proceed without it and I will figure something out. Any further delays and they had to move onto another job. 

The driveway came out great, we rebuilt the box culvert and added a channel drain higher up to help drain water from above the level where the leaves and debris tend to collect. The 8" line is still there, waiting. I will be building a retaining wall, and I am brainstorming options to incorporate a round pipe into a square hole. 

So what did I learn?  USE 6" PIPE YOU MORON. Everything is designed for 6" pipe; grates, fittings, basins, EVERYTHING. Heck, use 4" pipe and run parallel lines. Anything would have been better than 8" line...and cheaper. But I am not giving up, hell no. I will figure out a way to have an 8" line that will carry away any amount of water and debris and keep the house from flooding, this I promise you. 

Wisdom. Sometimes it's worth it to pay the pros. 

Also... never, ever let someone stand in an unsecured trench like that.

So what else did I learn? Well, the driveway project also includes re-doing the retaining walls on both sides. They were a combination of blocks and railroad ties that were past their expiration date when we bought the place 16 years ago. So, my wife and my 11 year old son and 80 year old mother took on the challenge of removing them. No, I am not kidding, mom insisted on helping. Old photo, but it kinda looked like below. You can see that I already replaced the top ties due to rot. 

We rented a large dumpster that came with 2000 pounds free, anything over that would incur additional charges at the dump. 

The four of us removed the walls, cut the ties down to 4 feet sections with a chainsaw, and loaded everything into the dumpster in two days. I even removed the treehouse from the backyard and tossed it in too. Packed carefully, we did not go above the fill line. Total weight? Just over 16,500 pounds. Oops. But it was only an extra $300 or so, and the crap was all gone. Lesson learned? My family is a bunch of bad-asses. 

Yeah, Woody is right. 3' is maximum trench depth to stand in. 
 

Im glad you got it sorted out, but please be careful. A collapsing trench is a terrible way to die. 

Did I learn anything else? Why yes, don't be an idiot. When I was digging the front of the trench, the boat was at the bottom of the driveway and had to be moved. I used the excavator to drag it up the driveway, easy peasy. Did my digging, then went to move it back down. I told myself to use the van, but the excavator was right there. What could go wrong? Well, the chains slipped off and the boat rolled down the driveway and slammed into the house. Small crack in the fiberglass, and a crack in the gear case on the outboard. DOH!  

A replacement gear case is easy to find, but everyone wanted $300 or more. I found a complete outboard for $100, so I jumped on it. Turns out, it is a 140hp version of my motor. Hmm, maybe I can get it running over the winter and swap it out...

pinchvalve (Forum Supporter) said:

That's a big ole Johnson. Or so she said...

I am always amazed the sort of equipment that Home Depot rents to anyone with a pulse and a credit card.  Great way to do a lot of damage in a little time.  

When we were property shopping, a prospective house looked exactly like yours.

We lived in a temperate rainforest.

I vetoed that place as soon as we drove up to it. I don't want an indoor swimming pool.

In reply to pinchvalve (Forum Supporter) :

So the water still runs down the drive and toward the basement, you diverted it to the right where it shoots down an 8" tube?  To where?  In the older photo it looks like a hill and woods pitching down behind the backyard, is the pipe pitched down also?

In ski lodges, there are gaps like ditches in front of a lodge door, covered with catwalk material.  The ditch is pitched left or right giving show from your boots to drop in and eventually melt down the ditch.  Is something like that what you had in mind or are you on the "Lets Percolate thru the Earth" team?

If I had to hazard a guess, either the 8" pipe runs to a sump/crock behind the house, set in washed rock to allow for a perk/drain field or their is enough of a grade to the property that the drain pipe can just poke out of the ground behind the house, essentially diverting the water around.

I can appreciate the effort that went into this; I share some of the sentiments of others.  I, too, have looked at houses like this and I have never seen one that is dead nuts dry in the lower level due to fighting gravity.  

I have the same problem with a sloped driveway and crappy drain that clogs.

6 inch pipe, I'll remember that!

You will probably rather not hear this but just to save someone else sometime and expense a 4 inch pipe is all you need. It will flow almost 250 gallons a minute.( proper SDR 35 rigid pipe). The trick is a large 2 ft or 30 in catch basin with a baffle to catch leaves and debris and a deep sump. You can intercept the garbage there and then the clean water will flow just fine through the pipe. Your plastic catch Basin is honestly far too small for the application. You are still going to be cleaning that thing during a heavy rainstorm. Look for a 24x48-in concrete catch basin with a steel lid to really solve the problem.