WV Bob
Member
Not sure if this is the right place for this, but since it deals with an exterior drain I thought I'd try.
I've got a trench across the front of a driveway that won't drain. It's about 20 feet wide, 12" deep, and 9" wide. We dug it up (6' deep!) and straightened it up some at the house, but we can't find the other end of it. It has a small 3" drain exit, and that goes into a 4" pipe along with a downspout. There's a standpipe on the drain, so when it backs up I can see it's not just the 3" exit that's causing the backup because the whole 4" pipe fills up.
With a hose running in the pipe we can't find water coming out anywhere out in the yard. When it rains HARD the drain backs up full and eventually ends up flooding the basement via a storm drain plumbed into the same drainage run. We have a 5k GPH pump sitting in the trench now to try to prevent that, but I really need to figure the drain itself out because obviously a pump does no good if the power's out or the float sticks and you're not paying attention.
I'm kind of skeptical that the property has enough drop to it for the drain to come to daylight so the drain may end in a dry well. So if there's a downpour, the well is filling up from the ground water so the pipe cannot drain and it backs up. But I haven't used a transit to check the lay of the land, so it could just be it takes a heckuva lot of water to fill the pipe before it backs up. I left a hose running in it for 30 minutes, and according to my math that should've been plenty to fill a 4" pipe up 100 feet long, which is about the distance to the road, but there was no water backing up at all. Of course a storm will dump that much water in minutes so maybe that's the difference.
I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to find the end of the drain to try and figure out what could be wrong, and probably to snake it from that end. Would a plumber have anything that they could find the end with? I guess I could try dowsing it, but the water and sewer run near the problem pipe so even if a dowser could find water, it might not be the right pipe anyway. Any advice is appreciated.
I've got a trench across the front of a driveway that won't drain. It's about 20 feet wide, 12" deep, and 9" wide. We dug it up (6' deep!) and straightened it up some at the house, but we can't find the other end of it. It has a small 3" drain exit, and that goes into a 4" pipe along with a downspout. There's a standpipe on the drain, so when it backs up I can see it's not just the 3" exit that's causing the backup because the whole 4" pipe fills up.
With a hose running in the pipe we can't find water coming out anywhere out in the yard. When it rains HARD the drain backs up full and eventually ends up flooding the basement via a storm drain plumbed into the same drainage run. We have a 5k GPH pump sitting in the trench now to try to prevent that, but I really need to figure the drain itself out because obviously a pump does no good if the power's out or the float sticks and you're not paying attention.
I'm kind of skeptical that the property has enough drop to it for the drain to come to daylight so the drain may end in a dry well. So if there's a downpour, the well is filling up from the ground water so the pipe cannot drain and it backs up. But I haven't used a transit to check the lay of the land, so it could just be it takes a heckuva lot of water to fill the pipe before it backs up. I left a hose running in it for 30 minutes, and according to my math that should've been plenty to fill a 4" pipe up 100 feet long, which is about the distance to the road, but there was no water backing up at all. Of course a storm will dump that much water in minutes so maybe that's the difference.
I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to find the end of the drain to try and figure out what could be wrong, and probably to snake it from that end. Would a plumber have anything that they could find the end with? I guess I could try dowsing it, but the water and sewer run near the problem pipe so even if a dowser could find water, it might not be the right pipe anyway. Any advice is appreciated.