How to fix an outdoor drain?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Our house has an outdoor stairway leading to a basement door. The bottom of the stairway is 4 or so inches below the door’s bottom, and has a drain in it.

Unfortunately, in heavy rain the drain has trouble keeping up with the rainfall - even if we’re careful to remove leaf litter from it. We’ve put mesh over it but that just keeps out the bigger leaves.

Tonight, as has happened several times lately, it’s draining slowly enough that the water is well above the bottom of the door - and leaking into the basement.

I don’t even know whom to call, or what search terms to use. Someone I know spent a small fortune having a larger drain put in, but I don’t know whether the drain goes into the sewer, or into the sump (more on that below); anyone know what these typically do?

Sump: Pumps out to a pipe that dumps just outside the house, and goes into a pile that goes down through a hole in the brick patio. It seems to drain (though where???) but in an especially heavy rain the sump can pump faster than the drain pipe handles it.

Bear in mind (hah, typed “beer” first), we were pretty badly burned by basement drainage “experts” 12 years ago when 4 different people presented 4 different options to solve an apparent wet-basement issue we had. All swore their solution would work and the others were idiots. All were WRONG (the problem turned out to be leakage from a neighbor’s air-conditioning unit).

So - where do I go? What do I look for?

2

it may just be its own sump. a pipe in a bed of rocks, from there it might go into the ground and some might make it to your house sump pump.

over time the pipe and near it might have dirt and detritus and not drain well.

3

Well, right off that bat you can figure out if drains to the sump by running a hose to it on a dry day and seeing if the crock fills with water.

If Holmes on Holmes has taught me anything it’s that the type of drain you’re talking about is usually a mess to fix since it’s either improperly installed, has a broken underground pipe or connected to clogged up drain tile. All of which mean excavating. The first step would be getting a plumber in to scope it out and find out what’s going on. Maybe you’re lucky and there’s just a bunch of leave or roots or a ball in there that can be cleaned out.

You don’t need ‘basement drainage experts’ for this. You just need a good plumber with a scope. As for finding that, I’ll leave it up to you, but that’s what you need.

Personally, my first step would be running a hose to the outside drain to see if it empties to the crock. IMO, that’ll make life way easier. In fact, it’ll be even easier if it just goes right to it and doesn’t go through the drain tile first and even easier yet if the crock is physically near the outside drain.
Start with that, report back. Pay attention to how long it takes. Run the water as fast as the drain will take it (and does it back up, it shouldn’t, even at full blast). A minute to get to the crock? A few seconds? 5 Mintues…never? If it never makes it, you might eventually be able to hear it at your nearest street sewer or manhole.

4

Are you able to take the drain cover off and attempt to clean out the pipe? It could be half clogged with dead leaves. Maybe go at it with a drain auger, if it can be done without just pushing the leaves farther in.

Have you done what you can to the slope of the ground near it to have the water flow away from the stairs?

Can you put any kind of roof or awning over it, so that the rain goes into the lawn around it, instead of directly into the stairwell?

5

Hahaha “Holmes on Holmes” was my first thought when I read the thread title. My next thought was “ooooh…you don’t fix it very easily…” :o

6

Of course, calling in the Mike Holmes crew because your basement drain isn’t draining fast enough would somehow turn into rewiring your house and putting a new kitchen in, all of which would end up costing $150,000 for what should have been a $3000 project.

7

First find out what you are looking at. Does it have a pipe? Does it just sit over a pile of gravel?

If there is a pipe, find the vent - is there a sink in the basement? Washer drain? The drain may be tied into the sink’s drain - in which case, find the vent, or buy an AAV (air admittance valve) vent - you can just put it anywhere above the highest desired water level - it is an adequate vent all by itself.

I was going to finish the garage, so I pulled the old sink and squirted urethane foam into the old drain pipe. The floor drain, it turned out, had a pipe which tied into the that line as a vent - it no longer drained.

If your drain ties into the house sewer, the problem is in the pipe between them - unless one or more upstairs drain is slow, in which case the vent is probably blocked.
DIY types: if you have a repeated problem with a vent (common in very old kitchen sinks (grease build-up)), you may wish to open the wall, carefully cut off and remove the pipe and slap an AAV using a no-hub connector.

I don’t know if municipal codes allow them, but they have been on the market for at least 10 years. They saved me a ton of trouble when I put in a bath in the basement.

8

Those valves can only be used in very specific situations (typically involving kitchen islands) and if the OP just randomly stuck one in and got caught with it (say, during a home inspection) they’d get in trouble for doing plumbing work without a permit…and rightly so because they probably used it incorrectly.
Using one as a band-aid would probably make this problem a lot worse since it’s probably not a venting issue.

Also, why would you close off a drain pipe with foam instead of just getting a cap and cementing it shut.

And hiding that valve in a wall…terrible advice and is just about guaranteed to cause problems down the road that are going to confuse the hell out of a future homeowner and plumber (when the valve goes bad and no one can figure out why the system isn’t draining anymore because they don’t know the valve exists). Same reason you can’t bury an electrical junction box behind drywall.

My advice…don’t take plumbing tips from usedtobe. No offense, but you clearly didn’t usedtobe a plumber.

9

Isn’t the show called “Holmes on Homes?” You know, because he works on homes and all? :slight_smile:

10

It is, that’s what I meant.

11

Fixing the drain line might be difficult, involve excavating, etc.
So may I suggest something a little different?
Could you build a small roof (or just a canvas awning) over the basement door ? That could deflect enough of the rainfall away from the drain.

12

adding roof or other diversion is a good idea.

drain should be fixed anyway as a last defense.

13

A quick status update: We had a drain specialist come out today to check things out. They looked at the basement-stairway drain and concurred that it runs to the sump - the time I tried testing that, I guess we didn’t run the water long enough, but today we could tell that the sump went off a minute or two after we ran water down the drain.

Removing the drain cover proved to be impossible. They were concerned they’d break it or the pipes it was attached to; they suggested that enlarging the entire drain was most likely unnecessary (I agree; it works well enough when it’s not clogged with tiny bits of leaf litter). They did NOT suggest putting in a domed drain cover such as one of these, but I really think this is the way to go. At least part of the mesh would be above the usual water line, and a dome shape might reduce the likelihood of it being completely covered in tiny leaf litter.

The problem is, of course, if we can’t get the existing cover off, I don’t know how we’d attach such a thing - short of just setting it on top and caulking around the rim!! They thought that we’d need to jackhammer to get the existing drain cover off - and that sounds like overkill.

A roof would certainly improve the problem of the drain backing up, but that would be a fairly large expense, our back yard is small enough and that would make it even smaller-seeming, and there’s the HOA to consider.

The sump is another thing. New sump pump, loud as hell - and the pipe comes out of the back of the house and drops water into a pipe set into the brick patio. A slight gap (inch or so) probably allows a bit of stuff to get in there (clog risk) and the two pipes weren’t perfectly aligned any more either. There are small pipes cut into the curb at the front of the house, and we believed these were connected to the sump pipe. They ran water into the sump, saw that it was indeed draining slowly (as I had observed as well), and we walked to the front and saw a little moisture in each curb pipe so we figured there was a clog.

So they ran their cleanout jets through - and found out that both pipes went to our NEIGHBORS. They did further checking and found that our sump pipe goes about 10 feet away from the house…

and STOPS.

It quite literally is an open pipe, buried in the ground. No drainage to the storm drains whatsoever. It’s quite likely that this is why we can’t grow grass in parts of our backyard. I can’t imagine this would comply with current building codes.

So the question is now, how expensive will it be to trench out a path to run the pipe to the front of the house (ideally including a curb cutout similar to the neighbors’), and would it be cheaper to just have a landscaper install a water feature at the sump outlet?

14

some locations don’t allow letting a sump pump drain into the gutter/storm sewer. in those places the discharge goes into a long light-weight hose (same diameter as the pipe) onto the lawn 20 feet from the house.

move the hose when you mow.

with any type of long hose or pipe discharge from a sump pump be sure to make sure you have a check valve on the rising pipe in your basement.

15

It probably is allowed here since my neighbors on both sides have this setup.

Fortunately (or not!) the pipe is buried so it’s not in the way of lawn mowers; our last house had the sump routed away from the house by a flexible aboveground pipe as you’ve described.

What’s a check valve?

If it’s designed to keep water from flowing in from the outside: our sump goes up 10 feet, out horizontally about 8 inches above the ground, then down into a pipe into the ground. For water to flow up it, the whole house would need to be in 8+ inch deep water and we’d have lots of problems indeed.

16

If you look at the pipe coming off your sump pump, at some point between the pump and where it exits (usually just a foot or three away from the pump) you should see a thing with an arrow pointing up. That’s the check valve.
Like this or this.

It makes sure that when the crock empties and the pump turns off, all the water that’s above the pump and still in the pipe doesn’t drain back down into the crock.

17

my point was that letting it go on the lawn surface works just fine.

some places allowed gutter discharge then disallowed it, people then discharged onto lawns.

even if you have poor drainage getting spread out 15 or 20 feet away from the house is good enough.

18

so you can get good sump discharge immediately and figure what to do long term.

19

If you want to lay a pipe to the street:
Is there a path wide enough to drive a large pick-up (not the usual things seen on the road) from point A to the street?
There is now “trench-less” hose laying - a truck with a plow blade on the front lowers the blade and plows a trench, a reel on the back lays the hose, and (something I don’t remember) closes the trench.
As long as there is no pavement or super-special plantings, it might be a solution for you.