"Walsh" wrote
My house is a ranch with a garage (under) and driveway with very little
pitch to the street. Worse yet, there's a 2-3" "lip" where the driveway
meets the street - resulting in very large puddles which cover about 1/2
of
the driveway (at the street end) whenever we get heavy rain.

The driveway needs to be repaved, but I want to make sure that the water
problem gets addressed. I can't pitch it sufficiently from the garage to
street because of limited clearance at the garage end.

I've had 2 paving contractors and one DPW engineer from the town look the
problem - all 3 suggest putting in a trench drain to a dry well. The 2
paving guys would put it near the street, but the DPW engineer suggested
putting it at the garage end. He suggested creating a "hump" about 1/3 of
the way from the street to create enough pitch to the street - the pitch
back to the house would be caught by the trench drain. His thought was
that
this was better than putting the drain right where the puddle forms as
this
would also catch run-off from the street and likely not drain well enough.
Seems to make sense - my only concern is allowing water to drain towards
the
garage.

Any thoughts and/or experience with trench drains??

Thanks in advance.

I had a similar problem with my drive, same type of house. Water would run
back towards the doors, but would seep down between the garage floor &
drive. I have a sump pump with footer drains around the house, you could
hear the water running into the drains when you would wash the car. Wasn't a
bad problem until winter, the freeze/thaw would raise the garage floor, and
the doors would go back up when using the door opener.

Had no less than 8 contractors look at the drive when I was ready to go from
asphalt to concrete. Some never got back to me about correcting the
problem. Some said they would put a grate across the front of drive with it
draining into the sump. One fella stood out. He brought a tripod, rotary
laser level and a pole. One guy held the pole at one end of drive, the
other set up the tripod with the rotary laser, they did both sides. Come to
find out, I had a 2" fall to street on one side, and a 6" fall on the other
side. It's because there is a small hill out front. My drive was never put
in correctly the first time, and was sloped towards the house, but to the
eye it looked like it was sloped towards the street. Needless to say, this
fella got the job of doing the concrete.

Unless potentials contractors or the engineer had the proper tools instead
of eyeing it up, I would keep searching for the one contractor that stands
out.