Center Front Drain Repair

I suppose with any project you've got to start somewhere. Back in the spring of 2020, I blogged about the drain lines I installed to capture water from a side downspout in the kitchen herb garden area, that also includes two new drains to catch some of the driveway run-off, and an improved drainline through The Grove that ties into the already-existing downspout pipes running under the yard up to the front retaining wall.

Given all that I wanted to connect up, it made sense to me to start at the low end, where all the water I wanted to channel needed to exit. Let me explain.

In about the middle of the front retaining wall, just to the right of where the original driveway was, is a drain opening onto the sidewalk. In my digging down behind the wall, I see where there's old collapsed clay pipe that ended up clogged and broken in non-use.

I'm guessing that when the driveway was relocated and the parking area put in, along with the retaining wall and fill-in work that accompanied all that, an attempt was made to tie the southside drainspouts in so that the water would be channeled down and out at that location, using 4-inch PVC pipe instead of the original tile pipes.

An opening was left topside to allow surface water along the front retaining wall to escape as well. One clear problem with its design was that the gutter downspout line hit the vertical plastic corrugated downline (up against the retaining wall) at pretty much a 90-degree angle.

Over the last few years, I've noticed that the retaining wall is getting a lot of over-wash and through-wash, resulting in cracking and a bit of bulging. It's one of the green yard task slips that I included in the quarantine task jar during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I went ahead and tackled it without that task slip actually getting drawn.

So two Y-connections were installed: one into a new PVC vertical pipe so that the end of the line angles down towards the exit at the bottom; the other is at the midway point of the yard portion so that I was able to connect in the line coming through The Grove.

This angle makes much more sense than that old straight-on blaster.

Haven't I mentioned that I get ideas in my head and then just have to go with them, even if they are goofy or impractical? Another yard project of 2020 was the irrigation system, hastened along in part because it made sense to plan and lay water lines as long as I was digging drainpipe trenches. To winterize the system, I wanted to be able to drain it...so as long as I was at it, I added in a connector for the ¾-inch PVC of the sprinkler system. But to get it to work I had to do about a 12-piece assembly for that entire vertical drain line at the front wall! Pictured above is the assembled portion needed to tie in the irrigation line.

I also installed a valve at that end of the irrigation drain as a back-up or fail-safe...but it was a bit low (as shown in the picture below), and I've already reworked the protective housing around it (see the bottom of this blog post for more). Still, for a first-timer blundering his way through it all, I'm pretty pleased with how much this improves the drain situation, even if it still has shortcomings.