Per-foot pricing works for a straight run through open lawn and stops working for everything else. What moves the number is whether the ground takes water at all, and whether there is a legal, downhill place to send it. Both are properties of the site, not of the length.

How much of the ground here sheds rather than drains

The soil survey does not rate the shed-versus-drain split under Ogden — most of the city is mapped as built-up ground, which the survey does not classify that way. What it does give is a hydrologic group of D and a slowest infiltration rate of 0.4 inches an hour, and both point the same direction: this ground does not take water quickly. Price the destination, not the length, and treat any soakaway proposal as something to be tested rather than assumed.

The reasoning behind that

Yard drainage is priced per foot when the work is uniform: same depth, same soil, same surface, one outfall. Real yards are rarely uniform. A run that crosses a driveway, passes a mature tree, or changes depth to keep fall is three different rates in one length.

The bigger variable is the destination. Water has to arrive somewhere. On a sloping lot that somewhere is often free. On a flat lot it is a dry well sized to hold a storm, and the sizing is set by how fast the surrounding ground can absorb what is put into it.

A quote worth comparing states the depth, the pipe, the stone, the fabric and the outfall separately. Two per-foot numbers from two firms are not comparable unless those five match.

More on this: Yard and Lawn Drainage in Ogden, UT.

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