drywell (dry foundation footer!)

It's painfully obvious now that we should have put the drywell in back in the dry season (but somehow it didn't seem all that necessary then). The only positive thing about putting it in now - after a lot of recent rain - is that the water that cascaded out of the drain tile around the foundation footer made it easy to tell that the drain tube to the drywell was sloped properly.

The crawl space has always been a little damp - from rain before the roof was on, rain coming in through the window framing (before the windows were put in), from snow blowing in the window framing, and yes - even from a very heavy week-long fog that condensed like rain inside the house. So, last week, now that we have the exterior windows and doors, we decided to get a de-humidifier and put it in the crawl space to help it dry out. It was working great - pulling about 5 gallons of water out of the crawl space air every day. As long as I emptied the de-humidifier a couple times per day, it would eventually dry it all out. But that was before (1) we got some heavy rain and (2) we starting "fixing" the gutter drainage. (We just got the gutters on a couple weeks ago, but hadn't actually routed the water away from the house yet.)

Saturday (the day before Christmas), Morgan (Kelly's friend) and I did a little work on the gutter drain system. Christmas morning, I went down to the crawl space to empty the de-humidifier reservoir and found huge puddles (never saw any puddles down there before) in the crawl space. It was extremely dis-heartening. I could see the water trickling in thru the foundation wall thru the conduit for the water supply (no, it wasn't a leak in the water supply). Apparently, the drain around the foundation footer was filling up and, since it did not have a drywell to go to, it emptied into the crawl space.

We rigged up a siphon and sucked as much water out of the footer drain as we could. That at least stopped any more water from coming into the crawl space. Later that day (Christmas), Betty and I did a 2-person bucket brigade thing ... I scooped up water into buckets and handed them to her to take outside and empty (not near the house!).

Yesterday, I called Diamond Construction to see if they could put in a drywell. I really lucked out - they said they would probably be able to do it within the next few days. In fact, they did it today.

pictures...

This picture from last summer is the partially completed "drain tile" - it's a 4-inch perforated, ribbed tube covered with rock (then covered with landscaping cloth - not shown - which lets only water thru). The drain tile goes at the base of the footer all the way around the foundation.



So, here's the perf tube from the drain tile after "un-burying" it with the backhoe.


This is the view from the house (from upstream) of the trench which will transport water in non-perforated tubes from the footer drain as well as the gutters. Note the free flow of water from the just-unburied drain tube!

The non-perf tubes (one for the footer drain and one for the gutters) are going into the trench. By this time, the water has pretty much all drained from the footer. The hole into which this stuff drains is over 10 cubic yards (1 dumptruck load) starting from below the level of the footer drain (if it wasn't below the footer drain, then gutter water would flow back into the footer - which would be less than good). Also, the hole is deep enough to run into a sandy layer of soil beneath our heavy clay soil - this will really help the drywell function well.


Both tubes are laid in the bottom of the drywell. These non-perforated tubes are slit near the ends so that water can drain better (i.e. so that water doesn't have to go all the way to the end of the non-perforated tube before it can enter the drywell).


Drain rock being dumped.
Besides the 10 cubic yards of drain rock that was trucked in, we had about another yard in a pile, so we put most of that in the drywell, too. So, that makes the drywell capacity about 11 yards or so - plenty of margin over the 9.9 yards required in the building permit.


A liner goes on top of the drain rock to keep soil above the rock from filling the space between the rocks.


The "yard" is a little more of a mess today, but I've never seen a mess that I appreciate more than this one! (You can tell how happy I am to have this drywell, since I've included so many photos with this posting.)

This evening, I went down into the crawl space to empty the de-humidifier again. While I was down there, I noticed a frog in one of the holes that I had been scooping water out of. I have no idea how he got there, but maybe I'll leave him there so he can eat bugs. Maybe he'll just move out after it gets too dry.