A drain run tight against a house intercepts water before it reaches the wall, which means it has to be deep enough to sit below the path the water is taking and pitched to somewhere the water may go. Before any of that, check the downspouts and the slope, because those two account for a large share of water against a wall.

The storm a drain here is sized against

A storm with a one-in-ten chance of falling on Ogden in any year drops 2.32 inches in twenty-four hours, and the one-in-a-hundred-year storm drops 3.28. Those are the largest design depths in this part of the county, and they are still modest numbers. The problem here is not the volume of rain. It is that the ground cannot take even a modest amount of it, so the water travels sideways until it meets a wall. Ask which of those two storms a proposed drain was sized for.

The reasoning behind that

Water arriving at a wall comes from the roof, from the surface, or from the ground. Each has a different fix, and only the third is a drainage job in the sense a contractor means.

Roof water is a downspout problem. An outlet discharging at the wall should discharge at least six feet away, and ten is better. That is an afternoon and a length of pipe.

Surface water is a grading problem. The first ten feet of ground should fall away from the house, roughly six inches over that distance. Where it falls toward the house, it is delivering water to the wall by design.

Ground water is what is left, and it is the case a drain against the house is for. It is intercepted below the level it is moving at, carried in stone and pipe, and taken to an outfall. Doing that without correcting the first two means paying to move water that did not need to arrive.

More on this: Exterior French Drain and Waterproofing in Ogden, UT.

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