Building a French Drain System

There are a lot of different pipes you can use for French drains. I prefer ones that have deep saw cuts. The way we build our French drains, they won’t plug or let dirt in and will move more water. That’s what you want.

We like to use 6A, not pea stone. It leaves larger gaps between the stones, which will move more water in a nutshell, and that’s what we’re looking for. We bring in semi loads so it’s not a bagged product.

If you are one of, I’d say about 5%, you’re fortunate enough to have a stormwater collection pipe with a sleeve on your property, most stormwater basins have no protectors. This property happened to have one.

Basically, what you need to do in this situation is; make the connection from the schedule 40 sleeve to a corrugated pipe. There is a connector that will help make this connection from schedule 40 to a 4″ corrugated drainpipe. There is also an adapter that slides into that connector and snaps into those ribs you can see on the pipe.

All dirt from the ditch will not be put in this trench at all, it will be towed away. The original sod is kept. We cut two and a half inches of the root to be placed back on top of the filter fabric.

Let’s line this trench with a filter cloth eight ounces, fill it with all that heavy washed stone, fold the fabric over the top and put the sod back. This system is maintenance-free, it’s completely contained.

For the downspouts, let’s put pop-ups right at the top of the French drain. But we will not tie them to the main. This way, you do not have to worry about debris from the roof clogging the pipe.