A drain that used to work and stopped, or one that was installed and never worked, is a diagnosis problem before it is a digging problem. We find where the water is stuck - silted stone, crushed pipe, a buried outlet, a run with no fall - and fix that piece rather than starting over.
Tell us what the Lexington property is doing and we'll take a look.
Most drainage systems here fail one of four ways. The stone and pipe silt up because the trench was never lined with fabric, and Bluegrass clay fines migrated in with every rain. The pipe was corrugated and got crushed by a mower, a vehicle or settling soil. The outlet got buried, covered by a later landscaping project, or was never really an outlet at all. Or the run was laid without consistent fall, and one low section has held water since the day it went in.
Roots are the fifth. Perforated pipe near a maple or a willow is an invitation, and roots find the water in the stone and then the holes in the pipe. Lexington's older neighborhoods have big trees, and a French drain along the property line under a 60-year-old tree canopy is often more root than pipe by now.
The first step is to find the pieces. Downspout lines get traced from the house to wherever they end. Cleanouts and basins get opened. A sewer camera goes into any pipe large enough to accept it and shows where water is standing, where the pipe is crushed or offset, and where roots have entered. A locator tells us exactly where underground that spot is.
For a French drain with no camera access, a test is simpler: run a hose into the head of the system and watch what comes out the outlet, and how long it takes. Water going in and nothing coming out means the line is blocked or has no outlet. Water coming out slowly and muddy means the stone is silted. That test, plus probing along the run to find the trench, usually tells us what the repair is before a shovel is picked up.
Jetting clears silt, grit and small roots from smooth-wall pipe and often restores a downspout line or solid drain to full flow without excavation. Corrugated pipe generally cannot be jetted effectively and, once crushed or silted, gets replaced in that section with smooth-wall.
A silted French drain is rebuilt in the affected section: the old stone and pipe come out, the trench gets fabric, new washed stone and new pipe with fall confirmed, and it ties back into the sound parts of the run. A lost outlet gets found and re-established, or a new one gets built where the old one cannot be made to work. A flat section gets re-laid with fall, which sometimes means the whole downstream run has to be lowered.
Cleanouts and access points go in wherever we open a system, so the next time it slows down it can be checked without digging. Many older Lexington systems have none.
Some systems were never going to work. A French drain in a bare trench with sock pipe, run flat to a buried end cap, cannot be repaired into a functional drain; it needs to be replaced along a route with fall to a real outlet. The assessment says so plainly when that is the case, along with what the replacement would involve, so you can decide with the facts rather than pay to patch something that will fail again next spring.
The other case is water that the drain was never positioned to catch. If the wet spot is downhill of the trench, or the basement leak is from a wall the drain never ran along, the drain may be working fine and simply irrelevant. Repairing it changes nothing. Extending or relocating it does.
Questions
Usually one of two things: the line to it has silt or debris and needs jetting, or the emitter is set in a spot with no surface fall, so what it releases has nowhere to go. Sometimes both. A quick hose test at the upstream end shows which.
If it was built with smooth-wall perforated pipe and has a cleanout, jetting often clears the pipe. But a French drain that has silted through the stone, not just the pipe, has lost the open space around the pipe that makes it work, and cleaning the pipe alone does not bring that back. That section gets rebuilt.
A camera with a sonde in the line lets a locator mark its path and end point from the surface. Without camera access, we trace from the head of the system by probing for the stone trench, and check likely outlet points along the curb and lot lines. A hose test at the head shows whether water is getting anywhere at all.
Often. Downspouts that go straight into the ground, a pop-up emitter or grate in the lawn, a pipe sticking out of a curb face, or a strip of grass that greens up differently all point to a system. Once we find one end, a camera and locator map the rest.
Send a few photos and a description of when it floods, and we will call you back to set up a free on-site look.
Request a free estimate Call (859) 484-8850