Joe Sherinski: As a landscaper, one of the most frequent problems I’m asked to help solve involves water. And right here we have all the signs for a severe water problem. Water flows down this steps from above, comes off the side and winds up in this bed. And even though we have a dream tile here which carries off the downspout water, no water coming up to steps can get it to it. As a result we see this, dirt and silt here at the seal of this door and when we go inside one step inside the rooms says mold and mildew live here.
The water flows right in, what we need to do is get that water into that pipe and while we’re in the process of doing that, we’re going to install a rain barrel and catch that water, a great resource and water our house plants with it. Water is a blessing and a curse. Our first step, take this soil out so we can build the catch basin. I can tell you that I’d rather work in dry soil but it seems nobody calls me when it’s dry to solve water problems. What we’ve done is remove the soil, and what were going to do is cut-off this drain tile and splice onto it with the tee the slotted dream tile.
This has slots all the way around the pipe so water can enter it. We’re going to cover that then with this weed barrier fabric, the water are soaked through the fabric enter the pipe, go out the end of the tube and all of this area will become a catch basin. The next thing we have to do is get this existing drain tile out and cut it off back here so we can put our tee on it. Now once we cover the entire soil surface with the weed barrier, what we’ll do is put our dream tile in place, that may take a little force and then will take our slatted tile and run it all the way around. We’ve got this lower all the way around the outside so that any water they comes in here enters the slotted tile and goes out through the drain under the walkway.
There, that’s pretty goo; a little weight will keep it down there. In fact, were going to put a little way down that pipe with a nice big rock. And on that we’ll be putting a rain barrel. When you install a rain barrel, it must be perfectly level. Needs to go down a little here and down a little here, it’s softer under there or maybe I will just stomp in into place. And that’s pretty good, and that’s a little high here but I think when we putting our gravel it will be fine
Next the rain barrel, now it used to be that everybody had a rain barrel. It was there source of drinking water. Today, we use rain barrels primarily to collect rain to water our plants and why not? Rain is pure distilled water and plants thrive on it. This particular rain barrel is really a nice one I got it on the internet and I’m sure you can find them on stores. It has screen up here to keep dirt from the roof from getting in and from keeping mosquitoes out. It has a spigot so we can just open it up, draw some water off it and just stop it up and it has an overflow tube from up here which we’re going to connect in into our drain system so that when it does fill up, it doesn’t just flow over the sites. But in this particular case even if it did flow over the sides. But in this particular case, even if it did flow in the sides, we’ve already planned for it.
On next step, is to cut-off the downspout with a hacksaw so that we can use one of these elbows to bring an addition to the downspout over here to fill the rain barrel. This next step involves attaching the elbow permanently to the down spot and to do that we used pop rivets, this is a pop rivet and this is a pop rivet gun. Very limited applications but when you need one, there is nothing else that it substitutes for it. This will expand inside the two holes that I drilled in the two pipes as I tighten the handle and then it breaks off leaving a nice rivet in there and it’s permanently attached.
Next we take our section of downspout, put it on there. Now, the rain comes downspout through the filter into the barrel. All we have to do now is spread some gravel to make this look nice. By the way you’ve got to use gravel to cover up your slotted drain tile. The water has to flow quickly through the gravel, through the slats and into the pipe. If you use soil or dirt it will clog up the tile. Now, I would call this a great example of making lemonade when God deals your lemons. What we’ve done here is solve the drainage problem. We’re going to collect some terrific water to water our house plants with and through the magic of television it’s raining on the roof but not up here. If you need more information about rain barrels, drainage problems or a hostof other things, go to MichaelHoligan.com.
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