Trenching for sump pump discharge pipe
I need to dig a trench to bury a 125' long pipe for a sump pump disharge. The trench will folow the natural slope away from the house down by the lake that I live on. It won't drain into the lake, but into a wetland area between the house and lake. The wetland area is not that wet, and I use it as part of my yard, so I don't want the water to pool up at the end of the pipe. My question is what size and type of pipe should I use? I was thinking of 3 perforated PVC wrapped in fabric. Does this sound adequate, or does somebody have a better idea? Also, will I have to put gravel in the trench under the pipe? Any help is greatly appreciated! 125' seems like a long way to go with PVC - since PVC pipes are rigid, you'll have to spend time joining multiple pipes, which can be a pain. Plus, it can get rather costly for that amount of PVC, not to mention enough fabric to wrap all that pipe. For drainage applications, corrugated high-density polyethylene (HDPE) black plastic pipe seems more typical - it's cheap, you can get it in long 100' rolls so you only have to do one join over 125', and is fairly durable. You can see an example here: http://************/2mxbpw , which shows that a 100' roll is only $46. You may opt to use shorter lengths of pipe, though, and connect them with a cleanout (T connector with a cap on top) so that you can snake out the pipe if it gets clogged for any reason. As for size, you'll note that the above example is 4, which seems to be the most common size for corrugated HDPE drainage pipe. Someone else will have to explain why one would want perforated vs. non-perforated pipe... I understand having perforated pipe at the bottom of a French drain, because you want the water to trickle in to the pipe from the top, but I'm less clear about having perforated pipe when you just want to direct the discharge of a sump pump to a remote location. In my particular case, I just used solid, non-perforated drainage pipe for my sump pump discharge. My reasoning was so that roots theoretically won't grow into perforations on the pipe and clog it up. Oh, p.s. it's not recommended to use HDPE pipe below a certain soil depth - something like 1.2 meters - because it'll get crushed. Hope this is helpful... billin, Thanks for your input. I thought about the flexible pipe, as I won't be burying it that deep, so as to be crushed. My thinking about the perforations was that I was hoping that some of the water would go through the perfs, so as to not completely dishcharge at the end of the run, and hopefully not pooling so bad there. That's kinda why I thought putting gravel under the pipe would help to do that. Cleanouts are a great idea. Didn't even think of that. My sump pit drains into perforated flex pipe. I don't know enough as to why or what's better, but somebody thought this was the best way. There's no gravel around it, as far as I know, but that would obviously allow a faster rate of absorption of the water from the pipe than seeping through dirt. There is a way to keep the water from getting into the lowland around the lake . . . don't run it down there that far. One hundred and fifty feet is a long way, so it is not as though space is tight. Installing a drywell at the end of the line would do the trick. Or you could put a dry well nearer the house with an overflow to a perfed pipe to a second drywell at the end. If you have the space, you could S curve it over the dry land back and forth, giving it a chance to be gone before the end of the line. Letting the gray water near the lake, in my opinion, is a stinko idea. The low land water seeps into the lake and vice versa. I have many of the corrogated drainage pipe collapse. I would avoid it if you could. Go with your original idea of PVC. If for some reason you need to snake the line in the future the pvc will be much safer. The snakes can grab to soft stuff and twist it up. I've had a very similar situation but at the time, never even thought of using corrugated pipe. I used PVC. I hired a trenching company to dig a trench running from my house at the sump pump exit point to the roadside ditch 75' away. There is a natural slope to the terrain and the underground PVD for drainage purposes. Digging the trench cost about $100. I lined up the 3 PVC pipes, 10 of them plus another shorter one and joined them with PVC connectors and the standard cleaner and PVC cement. Once they were all joined, I simply rolled it into the ditch and attached the necessary vertical elbow at the end where I feed the sump water in. Then I just shoved the dirt over the pipe. I also drilled many 1/2 holes into the last 20' of the PVC which in hindsight, I wish I hadn't done. I did it only the last 20' so that the discharged water was far enough away from the house and with the idea that I wouldn't be placing all the discharged water in the ditch which would become a hindrance when mowing the lawn. Now as it turns out, all of the dirt that surrounds that pipe gets saturated because of the large amounts of water I discharge and the grass grows much faster, but only along that over- irrigated 20' x 2' stretch. Looks a little strange. Compounding the problem is the fact that I apparently have an underground spring that runs into my foundation. 3/4 HP pumps have been operating almost non-stop for the better part of the last 8 weeks. Bummer! I'm doing something very similar to Herm's idea of trenching. I bought about 80' of pvc pipe and connectors. I also am picking up a walk-behind trencher this week to dig my trench. My yard is all clay (cannot wait till next month when we get seed finally planted). Anyways, I was wondering how easy and fast the walk-behind trenchers work? The trencher goes up to 3' deep so I'm wondering if I should add my own grade or go with the slope of the land which is very well since my house was built up 4'. The drainage will go into a creek and my sump very rarely runs. (Ran only twice in a hour time span during a very heavy rain storm the other day). Also, I plan on putting a Tee Valve at the house in case the pipe ever does freeze and does back up, but again, my sump very rarely ran in the winter. I could pretty much count the times on my fingers.
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