Drainage Contractor in the Pioneer Valley
How to tell you have a drainage problem
Nobody calls us wanting a curtain drain. They call because something is wrong with the yard and they can't name it.
A wet yard usually shows up in one of three ways.
It feels spongy underfoot. You walk across it a day or two after rain, and the ground gives. That's water sitting in the root zone with nowhere to go.
Grass grows a lot taller in one strip. A band of lawn that's greener and faster than everything around it usually marks the path water is taking underground.
Or it goes the other direction. There's so much water the grass drowns, and you get a dead patch that reseeding never fixes, because the problem was never the seed.
Other things we get called for: water in the basement after heavy rain, mulch that washes out of the beds every spring, a patio or walkway that's started to heave or sink at one end, a retaining wall bellying out, and a driveway that ices over in the same spot every winter.
All of those are the same problem. Water is going somewhere you didn't plan for.
Why french drains stop working
A typical wall for us is three to four feet. When the grade asks for more, we usually tier it into two shorter walls instead of building one tall one. Most people don't want a five-foot drop in the middle of the yard, and they don't want a railing either.
Drainage ports. Done right, the block is cut to fit around the pipe, and there's a grate on the end so animals can't get in and build a nest. Done wrong, somebody leaves a block out and shoves a pipe through the hole. Larry was on a property recently and asked who built the wall. The homeowner said he wasn't the first person to point it out.
Rocking the edge. The exposed end of a block wall is a saw cut unless somebody finishes it. Rocking that edge takes extra time, and it's the difference between a wall and a wall that somebody built on purpose.
The tallest we've built is twelve feet, in Goshen stone.
What we install
Which one you need depends on where the water is coming from, where it can go, and what the grade will allow. Usually it's two of these together rather than one.
French drains
A trench, stone, perforated pipe, and filter fabric around all of it. Used to intercept water moving through the ground and carry it somewhere it can leave. The most common thing we install and the most commonly botched.
Curtain drains
The same construction, placed uphill of what you're protecting rather than under the wet spot. If water is arriving at your house from a slope above it, a curtain drain catches it before it gets there. Cheaper than dealing with it after it arrives.
Dry wells
A buried chamber that takes a volume of water and lets it soak away slowly. Useful when there's nowhere downhill to send water, which in a valley is more often than you'd think.
Catch basins and pipe
A grate at the low point, pipe running from it to an outlet. This is the answer when water is pooling on the surface rather than moving through the soil. Basins need cleaning out once in a while and we'll show you how rather than selling you a service plan.
Downspout extensions
The cheapest fix on this list and often the whole answer. Roof water dumped at the foundation is the single most common cause of a wet basement we see.
Swales and regrading
A swale is a depression, or a small ditch in the lawn, shaped to create enough pitch to carry water away from the house. Regrading is the bigger version, where we reshape the ground itself. Both are the least visible fixes and often the most effective, because they solve the problem with shape instead of hardware.
Foundation drainage and sump discharge lines
Drainage at the footing, and getting sump output far enough from the house that it isn't just running back in. We've seen discharge lines emptying four feet from the foundation they were installed to protect.
We also do small-scale erosion control, on beds and slopes that wash out. Not highway or quarry scale.
How we work out what you need
Sometimes the answer is forty dollars
A lot of the basement calls we get come down to a downspout.
Roof water lands at the base of the wall, soaks straight down beside the foundation, and finds its way in. Get that water four or five feet away from the house and it makes a huge difference. Often it's the entire fix.
You do not need us for that. Call and describe what's happening and we'll tell you whether to try the cheap thing first. If it works, good. If it doesn't, you've ruled something out and we know more than we did.
We're not going to sell you a french drain for a gutter problem.
Most hardscape failures are drainage failures
A patio that heaves. A wall that bellies out. A walkway that drops at one end. Underneath all three is usually water that had nowhere to go, and freeze-thaw doing the rest over a few winters.
So when we build hardscape, drainage is part of the build rather than an upsell. Every retaining wall gets drainage and landscape cloth behind it. Every patio gets pitched to move water off it.
And when we're called to fix somebody else's patio, we're generally fixing the water first and the stone second.
Questions we get about drainage
Northampton, Hadley, Amherst, Williamsburg, Deerfield, South Deerfield, Easthampton, Belchertown, Conway, and Goshen. The shop is at 83 State Road in Whately.
The Connecticut River valley floor holds water differently from the hillsides around it, and both are represented in the towns we work in. Flat ground near the river tends to have a high water table and nowhere obvious to send water, which is where dry wells earn their keep. The slopes west of Northampton and up through Williamsburg and Goshen have the opposite problem, which is water arriving fast from above.
Different problems, different fixes. If you tell us the town, we can usually guess which one you've got before we arrive.
Most jobs run $3,500 to $10,000.
The floor is $3,500 unless we're already on your property for something else, and the reason is arithmetic rather than policy. Any day the excavator is on site, that's $2,500 before anybody has dug anything.
What moves the number:
- How far the water has to travel to somewhere it can actually go. This is usually the biggest single factor.
- Access. Whether a machine can get to the work or it's all being done by hand.
- What's in the ground. Ledge changes everything. So do utilities, septic, and an irrigation system nobody mapped.
- Whether we're putting the yard back. A trench across a lawn is one thing. A trench across a patio is another.
Drainage is generally faster and more predictable than hardscape. Most jobs take a few days.
We don't do wetlands work, and we don't handle Conservation Commission permitting. If your project touches a wetland or a buffer zone, that's a different process with a different set of people, and we'll tell you who to call rather than pretending otherwise.
We don't do highway or quarry-scale erosion control. Beds and slopes on a residential property, yes.
We're not basement waterproofing contractors either. We solve water outside the house so it never reaches the wall. If the water is already coming through a foundation crack, that's an interior repair and somebody else's trade.
Almost always no filter fabric. Stone in a trench with bare soil against it fills in from the sides over a year or two, the voids close up, and the drain quits. The fabric costs very little at install and digging it back up costs what the job cost.
Construction is the same. Position is different. A French drain sits under or beside the wet area. A curtain drain sits uphill and intercepts water before it arrives. If your water is coming from a slope above the house, the curtain drain is usually the cheaper answer.
We fix it from outside, by keeping water away from the foundation in the first place. Grading, downspouts, curtain drains, footing drainage. If water is already coming through a crack in the wall, that's an interior waterproofing repair and a different trade.
Sometimes. Sometimes the fix is shape rather than pipe, meaning a swale or a regrade to give the water somewhere to run. We'd rather move the ground than bury hardware when the ground will do the job.
Usually not on a straightforward residential job, but it depends on the town and on whether the work is near a wetland or a buffer zone. If it's near either, that's Conservation Commission territory, which we don't handle, and we'll say so early rather than late.