Help - flooding. Advice needed.

We do our best Jack, can't get everything right

 

well your Moo poo has tickled me pink all day

 

I forgot to say that not only do we not have any rain at the moment (barring our momentary downpour the other day) ... we don't have any water as the mains went off in the early hours this morning!

 

Nothing will cure a wet area other than drains. Plants just don't drink enough, sadly :(, and they have to get to a decent size before they drink a reasonable amount.

French Drain normally refers to a trench with stones in it. If you are going to the trouble of digging a trench then you might as well put a "perforated drainage pipe" in the bottom, and then cover that with gravel / stones. The pipe will make a, relatively speaking, huge gap through the stones that the water can easily travel along - whereas with just stones the process is much slower. The pipe doesn't want to go uphill, of course!, but it doesn't have to be all an even downhill slope either, so long as it is downhill overall - so no precise engineering involved.

Or make a sump and get a small sump-pump to pump it round to the back - that would be able to use a smaller bore, above ground, pipe, so easier to install - but watch out for the pipe freezing.

Soakaway is a slow-solution. It will store the water and allow it to drain away into the sub soil over time. This won't help for really heavy inundations (and, indeed, this year we had to pump our soakaway out as the garden was badly flooded). A trench with perforated drainage pipe can be made "faster", to drain surface water more quickly, if the trench is filled with gravel up to the surface (like Zigs photos), or "up to the surface in places" - a bit like individual drains. Soakaway is a reasonable solution if there is no "downhill" available to pipe the water away to.

Good info here:
www.pavingexpert.com/drainage.htm

 

As a retired builder I would agree with all above and especially the perforated pipe addition cheap and effective. Elevation is important a small run to a open ditch works well..soakaways don't always work too well in heavy clay.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions. Basically, what you're proposing is what I originally thought I needed to do - but my better half wanted me to just try some plants and she was trying to talk me out of anything involving lifting up paving flags! Going for the perforated pipe option, running out of a gravel pit down to the back garden.

Had a morning with little rain, but we're back in a monsoon so I'll be out in it doing more siphoning soon. Can't wait...
Tim

 

Victoria , I have just put a video of English rain on Youtube for you ! Its 72 hours long , I'll put part II on tomorrow

 

Pity, I just gave away about 15 metres of it on Freecycle.

 

Is that part I of 100 :-)

Jack McH

 

Harry, thank you so much for thinking of me as you know how it is here. xx

Thankfully, we had rain last night and our water was back on again today ... and then the sun came out ... as it should do ...