Dan0741 wrote:RogerS wrote:You're lucky with your soil, Dan. If it was clay (like ours) then there is only one sure way of getting rid of excess water. An open ditch.
Its got some clay in it! Hoping its good enough -winter will let me know!
Well, fingers crossed for you. I am not a fan of French drains because in my experience, sure the membrane stops soil finings entering the pipework or gravel but you end up with the finings sitting on top of the membrane thus creating a pretty good impermeable membrane! Then later on, the stone/gravel gets filled up/silted up and so the French drain stops working.
Like you we have runoff onto our property from this farm track. And this farm track gets runoff from the hill behind and so when the monsoons came we soon knew all about it.
So while I was having some hard landscaping done I got a very large 15" or so diameter pipe laid which feeds into a proper 6" yellow land drain pipe that takes the water away to the stream further down the hill. Along the fence line we have an open ditch that feeds the large pipe.The guy doing the work recommended putting down that soppy membrane and even put some over the end of the pipe at the ditch.
A few months later, we had the monsoon to end all monsoons and I went outside to find the back awash with 3-6" of water, a cascade coming down the bank, mole holes spouting water 3 ft in the air. Why? That soppy membrane was stopping the water flow. I ripped it all away, there was an almighty sound of rushing water as the ditch emptied itself in seconds.
Sorry..slight hijack there !