French Drain And Your Home Safety!

What Is A French Drain?

You will want to learn about french drain if it is a raining day outside and you are inside wondering where all that water are going to drain to. If there is such a drain around the home, it could possibly be located on the back or on the front door of it.

A French drain is designed and installed on lower spots around the house, commonly found at the bottom of stairs. The drain main purpose is to collect and re-direct water away from the building.

If the drain is maintained and works properly, it will likely prevent the basement from a possible flood during a heavy storm.

And that’s why such a drain is so important and needed, especially if the home was built on an area considered to be a high water table one.

Most external residential drains are not connected with the home plumbing system, however, once on a while you will find one that was connected with it. This kind of drain usually takes the whole square on the bottom of the stairs; however, the hole only goes around 4 feet deep which means that a the drain pipe won’t be longer than 4 feet.

How French drain work?

A home external drain can also be called a storm drain because it collects water from storms as well. But, a regular storm drain cannot be called French drain because they differ from each other in how the plumbing is designed and built.

The drain outside your home is a simpler system and it is mostly installed in residential places. A storm drain is a very complex system and, they are installed in public and commercial places.

A residential external drain does not connect to any plumbing drainage system; the drain connects to a very short pipe into the ground and, that’s where the water goes when rains.

Storm drain is considered to be an advanced engineering system and, just like a sewer system, a storm drain system is a long and continuous system. The water collected from storms travel long ways through the piping system until drains into a river, lake or a treatment center.

French Drain & Home Plumbing System:

If you are living on a very old home and you don’t know anything about the history of the house, you won’t know it for sure.

Most of the time, people will only find out if the outside drain is connected to their home sewer system when the sewer is clogged. Why?

If the sewer is backing out, all the drains located in the lowest floor of the house will likely be affected as well. So, if the outside drain is connected to the internal plumbing system, the outside drain will also be backing up with sewage.

Unfortunately, this is the best way to know for sure is if you have an external drain connected to the sewer system or if a secondary line that is directly connected to it also backs up.

In fact, that was how I came to find out on several occasions while working at my customers’ homes.

About the bad and the good of having such a drain connected with the home drain plumbing system will be on the section unclogging drains.

Building and unclogging a French drain

About unclogging the outside drain, click here to be directed to the page.

I hope you have enjoyed this article, send us comments and feedback. Thank you!

Home Drains Unclog Drains