On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 09:20:27 -0500, William Brown
wrote:


| Thanks for the information. This is an old house in a suburb build
| before people had cars, so there is little space between homes, and
| almost all of it is now covered with driveway, so there isn't a lot of
| space for grading. My gutters drain into a storm sewer system, so the
| water I'm dealing with doesn't come from the drains, but rather from
| standing water in the yard, which apparently infiltrates due to the very
| clayey soil. My first thought was to put the drain outside, but that
| would mean ripping out a porch, an irrigation system, and the storm
| sewer system (actually I planned to replace part of the storm sewer
| system with perforated to catch this water, but that system also carries
| water from the driveway drain and the garage gutters, so it isn't clear
| whether a drain there would remove water or add it.
|
| I think a major contributor is the apparent addition on the back of the
| house (possibly original from looking at the joists in the basement),
| where the outside wall (and probably the storm sewer) is not as deep as
| the inside wall, so water that seeps under the outside wall hits the
| wall of the ledge, rather than passing under the floor. If that is the
| problem, I have to somehow intercept this water to relieve the pressure
| on the wall of the ledge.
|
| If I had space, I would just have the storm sewers redone, but because
| of the crowded situation, that would be very expensive and inconvenient.

My 1921 house lot was graded backwards, with the slope running down
towards the back of the house. This created a small pond next to the
foundation after rainstorms. Most of the water collected over a
concrete walk that had sunk about 5 inches below the soil level over
the years

We had a u-shaped French drain built outside the house to collect the
water, sacrificing the concrete walk and replacing it with the gravel
trench holding the drain. On top we planned to eventually put large
flat stepping stones, but as the years passed we just left the
decorative gravel pathway and it has been perfectly satisfactory.

The U-shaped drain completely encircles the back half of the house and
collects all the water running down the back yard. It carries it all
towards the driveway and just dumps the runoff onto the drive about
halfway down. This solves any problem of where to put the water, as it
just runs down the drive and into the street gutters. The system works
perfectly and has not failed in 22 years except once during Hurricane
Floyd when the drain itself overflowed from sheer water volume.

Tapping into storm drains is prohibited in my town. Even cutting
through the curbs is prohibited, so the driveway is the answer.

I don't know if this system would apply to your situation or not, but
it's a thought.