Reply to Basement leaking in DC - french drain company recommendations?

Forum Index » Home Improvement, Design, and Decorating

Reply to "Basement leaking in DC - french drain company recommendations?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP interior drains are fine. Don’t listen to the people on this board who are obsessed with grading the yard. Fine, sure, but unlikely to solve your problem if you’re in an old house and the perimeter drains have failed. Idk why people accept that roofs and hvac need replacing but not drains. [/quote]

Right, because why fix the problem for a few hundred dollars when you could spend tens of thousands and tear up the inside of your house and possibly make the problem worse?

Old houses don't have perimeter drains, they never had them. If your house was built before WWII, it never had perimeter drains. If your basement floor is lower than the lowest spot on your lot and you don't have a sump pump, you never had perimeter drains. If there is a lower spot and there isn't a drain pipe coming out at basement floor level or lower, you never had them.

The way people kept their basements dry before sump pumps was by keeping the water away from the basement. That meant catching the rain that falls on the roof and directing it far away, using gutters and downspouts, and making sure there isn't a path for water to run across the surface and into the basement. This won't work in every case, but it's simple stuff you want to try before writing the big checks. [/quote]You're insane and are spewing nothing but false information.  Houses had exterior footing drains for over 100 years and they almost never included a sump pump which was not a common thing, or required until about the 90s.  Most of those drains did not drain to daylight where the drain is visible. That said, most of those original drains are likely clogged, from the outside to where no water gets into them anymore.  An interior drain system is the modern, least invasive and inexpensive way to manage water coming into a home. [/quote]

Wha?  So where do the drains drain to if not to daylight and not to a sump pump? Because if they don't drain they're not drains, they're collectors.

You probably don't know this, but the primary purpose of perimeter drains isn't to keep the basement dry. It's to protect the footings, protecting the basement is a secondary benefit. If the soil beneath the footings gets saturated it can liquefy and lose strength, and the house sags in that spot. That is what perimeter drains are meant to protect against.

What you've described is not a drain but a distribution system, to make sure that the water does maximum damage to the foundation. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics