French drains, dug to a real fall.
A French drain only works if the trench has pitch, the stone stays clean and the water has somewhere to go. Bruce scopes every job himself, and the crew builds it to last.
A French drain is not always the answer
It is the right fix when water is moving through the ground or collecting somewhere it cannot escape. It is the wrong fix when the real problem is a downspout, a grade that falls the wrong way, or a low spot that just needs filling. Plenty of drains get installed where regrading would have solved it for less.
That is what the first visit is for.
Water sits in one part of the yard
A low area that stays soft for days after everyone else's ground has dried out.
Water is coming from uphill
A slope, a road or a neighbour's property feeding water across yours. A drain intercepts it.
Clay is holding it up
Common across NEPA. Water cannot soak down, so it has to be carried out instead.
Water is reaching the house
An exterior drain along the outside of the foundation, set below the problem and piped away.
Fabric, stone, pipe, cleanout
Find the outlet first
A drain that ends nowhere is a trench full of water. We work out where it discharges before we start digging.
Dig to a real fall
Continuous pitch the whole run. A shallow scratch with no grade silts up and stops working in two winters.
Fabric, washed stone, perforated pipe
Filter fabric wrapped around clean washed stone. That is what keeps soil out of the stone and keeps the drain alive.
Cleanout, backfill, seed
A riser you can actually flush years from now, then the yard put back the way we found it.
Why some French drains stop working
A French drain that fails early almost always failed for the same handful of reasons — and every one of them is invisible the moment the trench is backfilled. You cannot inspect it later. You can only get it right the first time.
The cheap version
- Trench cut shallow, with no real fall
- Pipe laid straight into bare dirt
- No filter fabric, so soil packs the stone solid
- No cleanout, so nothing can be flushed or checked
- Outlet never confirmed — the water has nowhere to go
How we build it
- Continuous pitch the entire run
- Perforated pipe bedded in clean washed stone
- Filter fabric wrapped around the stone
- Cleanout riser set so the line can be jetted
- Outlet located and opened before the first shovel
None of that costs much on the day. All of it costs a lot to add afterwards, because adding it means digging the same trench a second time.
What we do not do
RBR is an exterior drainage and excavation contractor. We do not install interior drain tile, sump pumps or crawlspace systems, and we do not do structural foundation repair.
What we do is fix the reason water is showing up in the first place. If it turns out you need interior work, we will say so on the estimate instead of selling you a trench.
The same crew sets water mains under township roads and rebuilds bridge culverts. A residential French drain is a small job for us — which is why it gets done right the first time.