Yard Drainage & French Drains in Redmond, WA

Because the ground removes two of the three things a drain depends on. A French drain works by collecting water and carrying it on a consistent fall to somewhere it can discharge. Valley-floor ground is flat, which limits the fall available along the run, and it sits close to a high water table, which limits how deep you can usefully trench before reaching saturated soil. Neither makes drainage impossible, but both mean the discharge point has to be established before any design. This is one of the few places in our area where we will occasionally say a drain is the wrong answer and regrading is the right one.

By the catchment rather than by the symptom. On a half-acre upland lot, the wet corner you can see is receiving surface and shallow subsurface water from everything above it, not just from the ground immediately around it. A system sized for the visible puddle is undersized by a wide margin and shows it during the first sustained wet week, usually by water finding its own route around the end of the run. We work out where water enters the property, where it concentrates and how much of the lot is feeding each point before deciding on pipe size, run length and outfall capacity.

Sometimes, and it is worth being honest about when it is not. If the garden holds water for a couple of days after an unusually heavy event and clears on its own, that is normal ground behaviour rather than a drainage fault, and a full system is money spent on a rare inconvenience. What justifies a drain is persistence: standing water for days after ordinary rain, ground that stays saturated through the winter, or water reaching the building. Where it is genuinely marginal, regrading and a downspout tie-in frequently deal with it for a fraction of the cost, and we will recommend that instead.

Rarely to the drainage itself, since most of it is buried and invisible once the surface is reinstated. Where a question does arise is the discharge — a visible outfall, a channel drain across a driveway, or a catch basin grate in a front garden can all fall within an association's remit in Redmond Ridge and the newer developments. It is worth establishing at the start rather than after installation. We produce the layout in a form suitable for a submission where review applies, and in most cases it is a formality.