French Drains

A French drain is a sloped trench holding a perforated pipe in washed gravel. Water moving through the soil finds the gravel, drops into the pipe and runs somewhere you choose — rather than collecting against your foundation and looking for a way in.

Around here the problem is rarely the amount of rain. It is that a monsoon dumps it in twenty minutes onto ground that cannot absorb it that fast, and up in the high country it is snowmelt soaking the soil for weeks. Either way the water ends up beside the house, and a foundation sitting in wet soil will eventually let some of it through.

The things that decide whether one of these works are hidden once it is backfilled: enough fall along the whole run, filter fabric so silt does not clog the gravel, the right stone, and an outlet that actually drains. We dig it to grade and we tell you where the water is going to come out before we start.

It is also worth knowing what a French drain is not for. If the water is coming from a failed supply line, a plumbing leak under the slab, or a gutter dumping against the wall, trenching the yard will not fix it. We find out which problem you have first — that is a camera and a look at the grading, not a guess.

French Drains calls in Farmington run out of our 1215 Mission Ave office. We cover Farmington, Aztec, Bloomfield, Flora Vista, Kirtland, Shiprock, Fruitland and the rest of San Juan County, and the Farmington crew is on call 24 hours a day.