How to Maintain Your Yard Drainage
Keeping your yard clear, tidy, and healthy throughout the year isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Your yard’s drainage system is all-important when it comes to keeping your yard free of standing water. It’s critical to ensure that heavy rainfall doesn’t lead to water pooling by your foundation. So, regular drain maintenance is a necessity.
If you’ve left your drains unattended through the year and they have become clogged, there are some steps you take do to get them back in shape quickly. This article shares eight essential tips for fixing clogged yard drains and maintaining them to keep your entire property in good condition.
How Poor Drainage Affects Your Home
Having properly functioning drainage, whether with gutters and downspouts or other systems, is essential. Malfunctioning drainage around your property and poor foundation drainage can lead to issues such as flooding, oversaturated soil, water in your basement or crawl space, and foundation damage.
All these problems compound, leading to additional issues that threaten your home’s structural integrity and your family’s health and safety.
8 Steps to Fix Yard Drains & Keep Them Healthy
If your yard drains are regularly clogged, there may be underlying issues that need attention. JES Foundation Repair offers free inspections that will uncover the cause of your troubles. Tree root invasion is just one of many possible causes, and our team will consider every possibility before recommending any invasive inspection measures or repair options.
Of course, exactly what you are able to do without professional help depends on what kind of drainage systems you have and how easily you can access them. Nonetheless, these tips should help you get your drainage system moving again, even if you need to call in help to clear it properly.
1. Clear All Debris Covering Drain Grates
If foliage or other debris has covered drain grates in your yard, water may be slow in reaching your drainage system. This can lead to standing water in your yard, especially during heavy rainfall. Clear away all plants, organic debris, and clutter from the grates to ensure water actually gets pushed into your drain system.
2. Remove Grates to Check for Large Blockages
If you are able to do so, you should remove the grates and check for large pieces of debris in the spaces below. Removing debris with a net or scoop, gently so as to avoid damaging the drain itself, could help with drainage hugely.
You’ll likely need to call a drainage expert for repairs if you find large blockages such as tree roots or large soil deposits.
3. Flush the System
One of the most likely causes of a clogged yard drainage system is a buildup of organic debris like leaves in the pipes themselves. Use your garden hose to flush the system; the force of the water from the hose should be more than enough to shift organic debris deposits from inside your pipes.
4. Check Inspection Portals
If you are able to locate and access the inspection portals for your drainage system, you should watch them while you flush with your hose. If you can see water moving in the inspection portal, there may be stubborn clogs in the system. If there is no water coming through, or if the amount of water going through the system is greatly reduced, you may have a more stubborn blockage.
5. Clear the System with a Drain Snake
A drain snake is one of the last resorts available to you when it comes to cleaning stubborn clogs from your yard drains. They can be rented at most hardware stores, too, if you want to give clearing your system a go. If this doesn’t work, you may have a severe issue like a root invasion on your hands. At this point, it is best to seek a professional opinion.
6. Replace Grates with Fine Screens
If your drain grates are too widely spaced, they can let debris into your drainage system and cause damage. Replacing these grates with a fine screen or less widely spaced grate can make all the difference.
7. Regularly Check for Debris
Forming the habit of checking and clearing your drainage grates on a regular basis will not only prevent avoidable blockages but will also enable you to notice problems before they snowball into more significant issues.
8. Consider Landscaping
Regrading your yard is a little extreme, but being careful about which plants surround your yard drainage can make a real difference. Certain plants create complex yet delicate root systems that hold the soil together and manage the levels of moisture. The right mix of plants and flowers in your landscaping plan could actually help your yard drainage system by reducing or controlling runoff water.
Contact JES for Drainage Solutions
If you need help with drainage solutions around your home or want professional advice about this and other waterproofing, don’t hesitate to contact the expert team at JES for a free inspection.
We have more than 30 years of experience with waterproofing basements and crawl spaces, ensuring your home and property stay free of troublesome clogs and potential flooding hazards.
Foundation Drainage FAQs
While it is often best to leave foundation repairs to a professional, there are some steps you can take to help your foundation drain more effectively before damage sets in. Some of the most effective steps you can take include:
Clean Your Gutters Regularly
Your gutters keep water from reaching the perimeter of your home whenever it rains or snows. However, if you leave your gutters full of leaves or gunk, then you put your foundation at risk for unnecessary damage. You can make a point to clean your gutters and downspouts on a regular basis if you want to try and avoid the worst of the damage that might come your way.
Grade Your Lawn
You can also work with a professional to determine what the grade of your lawn is and how you might modify it to better protect your home. Most lawns have either a positive or a negative grade. If your lawn has a negative grade, water will run toward your home whenever it rains. To compensate for this slant, you can build up a small wall of soil around the perimeter of your home, preventing water from coming into direct contact with your foundation’s sensitive materials.
Repair Any Existing Damage
When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to inspect your home for damage and to work with a professional contractor to try and repair anything that may have suffered as a result of localized hydrostatic pressure. Note that you’ll always want to try and repair your home before investing in any internal waterproofing measures, as those measures may only suffer if you don’t attend to the root of your home’s moisture problem.
Waterproof Your Home
Finally, you always have the option of installing a home drainage system, whether your home’s brand new or on the older side. The professional contractors in your area can talk with you about your waterproofing options and can even pair an interior drain or sump pump with other measures meant to limit the amount of water your foundation comes into contact with.
Your foundation is the bedrock of your home—literally. Whether you have a concrete slab or brick and mortar beneath your family room, you need that stabilizer in place if you want to keep your home in one piece.
As such, you’ll want to take steps to ensure that your home stays as stable as possible while you’re still living in it. That is where foundation drainage comes into play. Most materials used to make up home foundations do not naturally drain. These materials also tend to react poorly when exposed to excess moisture or groundwater.
Contending with Hydrostatic Pressure
The presence of water near your foundation can cause the molecules in your building materials to rapidly expand and contract. In doing so, your foundation can come under significant stress because of this hydrostatic pressure. In order to cope with that stress, the materials you have supporting your home might crack, thereby allowing even more moisture into your space.
A cracked or leaking foundation is a foundation that not only may begin to sink into the ground but that might also put other structural supports within your home at risk. For example, a damaged foundation can allow enough moisture into your home to cause your floor joists to start decaying. This means that you might find yourself contending with a sinking floor on top of the damage already done to your foundation.
Identifying Your Home’s Damage
Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to tell when your foundation has suffered from damage. You can work with a professional, however, to walk through your home and look for any signs of damage that might be concerning. Some of the clearest signs of moisture-based foundation damage include:
- Unpleasant smells
- Mold growth
- Warped door frames and windowsills
- Standing water in your basement
- Seepage
- High levels of humidity throughout your entire home
In short, enabling foundation drainage means that you can protect your home from significant damage later down the line. Some of the best tools to use when trying to ensure that your foundation drains consistently include interior drains and internal sump pumps.
The installation time for CrawlDrain™ varies depending on your crawl space’s condition, size, and necessary repairs. Our team at JES Foundation Repair works efficiently, typically completing installations in one to two days. Contact us for a detailed estimate and schedule your free inspection.
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