French Drains for Dummies

french drain construction

Although no one at the Antisocial Network subscribes to the belief that a yard should look like a putting green, there are some problems that our staffers will address. One of those is poor drainage that leads to muddy dogs, a situation that found our general handyman digging a trench along the back of the headquarters building and installing a french drain. Fortunately, he didn't get tips for installing the drain from eHow.com's Sharon Sweeny, who displayed the wealth of knowledge she got in her "general studies degree" while penning "How to Use Weeping Tile for Backyard Drainage" at HomeSteady.com (in the interests of full disclosure, he used this site, among other references).

Like most eHow contributors ignorant of a topic, Sweeny apparently googled the question and just reworded the first article in her results. We checked it out, and the site she references proved fairly useful, though not particularly well-written. What Sharon did to it, however, was worse...

You see, the site discusses digging dry wells and connecting them with a French drain. In case you don't know the lingo, dry wells are gravel-filled pits, vertical features, that collect water in low spots. A french drain is a horizontal feature that uses weeping tile to pipe water away from low spots; it may connect to one or more dry wells (but doesn't have to). Sweeny never quite figured out the difference and, as a result, she explained how to dig a dry well with a vertical chunk of weeping tile embedded in it. Idiot. This is the same idiot who'd defined a french drain as "...a hole filled with gravel and fitted with a perforated pipe known as weeping tile..."

According to Sweeny, you make a french drain using weeping tile like this: Dig vertical pits approximately 12 inches in diameter and 2 to 4 feet deep with a post-hole digger. Place... gravel into the bottom of the pits Place weeping tile fabric sleeve over a length of weeping tile cut approximately 6 to 8 inches shorter than the depth of the pit. Insert the sleeve-covered weeping tile vertically into the pit.  Back fill the pit with... gravel... Cover the top of the pipe with 6 to 8 inches of gravel.

Sorry, dumbass, that's not how you use weeping tile unless you have one teensy wet spot and want to use a dry well. If you can't install a french drain, you need at least one dry well a lot bigger than 12 inches in diameter and four feet deep (our staff geologist calculates such a hole can contain at most 8 gallons of water). To make a french drain, Sharon, you dig a friggin' trench and lay fabric-covered weeping tile on a bed of gravel, then backfill the trench with more gravel. The idea is to move the water someplace else, moron!
Sweeny extracted the instructions for one minor project from an entire website and presented them as the ultimate answer. That definitely suggests she had not idea what she was talking about; and that's exactly the kind of person we like to single out for the Dumbass of the Day award.

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