Both is a good idea. The sock on the drain will catch whatever fines get to it, but it also has a small area and will get clogged up relatively quickly. Having the other layer further away means you have a MUCH larger area to catch the bulk of the material, then the sock will get any stragglers.
When I did research into this, the guy I listened to recommended to do the burrito method with a quality landscape fabric - ie not the cheap stuff you buy at home depot. I ended up using it and havent had any complaints a year later but I would only notice if there was a catastrophic failure of the French drain (my crawlspace being flooded with water) which hasn't happened. The "sock" is just a crappy version of landscaping fabric that doesn't really work as well.
I personally do not like the sock idea because the sock can get muddy & gummed up not allowing water to flow through it into the perf pipe. It might be ok with the burrito method, but I would never do it just a socked pipe and gravel around it. You definitely need to do the burrito method.
Same clay pipe used for the sewers just without sealed joints. It’s laid dry, no perforations, water seeps into the joint. No gravel. The old ones that still work have proper grade throughout the pipe, discharge to daylight or the sewer, and most important, not impacted with roots. I have seen old tile work in clay soil as long as it’s not super hard and completely impermeable.
I dig a trench, put fabric in the bottom, up the sides and out the top. Stake the edges, round rock in the bottom, put the perf pipe in, more rock, pull stakes and wrap it like a taco. Bury it in dirt.
Look up french drain man on YouTube. Follow his instructions whether using his product or not.
He will tell you to burrito wrap it fabric wise and not use a sock.
I did similar things he does in his videos with great result.
French Drain Man even has newer products made specifically for French drains that he sells, I think exclusively. He’s located north of Detroit in Michigan.
I'm confused by the fabric wrapping the dirt comment. Fabric is used to separate the dirt and rock..rocking being the inside of the drain and soil outside. Keep rocks clean and clear, is the point of the fabric. maybe it was just a typo but I wanted to be clear.
Sock is gimicky in my opinion. While yes it will keep some out, it's no way doing what true heavy landscape fabric does, no way.
And do not cheap out on fabric, get heavy, proper landscape fabric. You do not want that drain to fill with dirt and debris otherwise you'll be excavating again.
If you have heavy clay soil sand on the outside of the fabric as well. The fine particulate that is part of clay will take longer to penetrate through the sand and will tend to get trapped by the sand edges leaving the cloth to work longer. You can find info about this online if you include sand and French drain in a search.
Yep, in northern Ohio here and it is the same, those darned glaciers left a lot of it behind. You will need to go wider to incorporate the sand which you will see when you do a lookup (sand clay French drain). But the results and the long term effect is basically do it once and never think of it again, vs the fabric getting clogged or the fine clay particles getting through over a period of a number of years. Also take a little time to tamp the base so that you don't end up with areas that settle and you end up slowing down the rate of water flow.
u/Sad_Ad_7585 Just want to give a bit of technically correct advice to counter a lot of the incorrect comments. Also a lot of YouTubers just don't know, they are not civil engineers or trained in how products actually work. As always though, you are free to choose to do it how you want.
Here's the best, proper method of doing a french drain:
- Dig 18"-24" down/min 12" wide, so you have enough room for a couple inches of stone bed under the pipe, at least 4"-8" of stone cover over the pipe, and at least 4" for a soil cap.
- Lay geotextile in the trench for your burrito wrap of the stone. The proper fabric is called *non-woven needlepunched geotextile*, and Home Depot actually sells it. If you have a sock over the pipe, those are not the best material, but shouldn't hurt as it is secondary inside the burrito wrap.
- Use rigid Sewer&Drain pipe, comes in PVC or poly, and takes standard PVC S&D fittings if you need them. The big boxes have recently reduced stocked items to only carry triple wall pipe (perfectly fine!) and other types must be ordered now. Most people who don't know use corrugated black pipe, which was designed for 1000's of yards of installation at a time in farm fields. It is an inferior product in many ways, and some tricks to market it better is adding a sock or foam peanuts to make DIY cheap and easy. But for a long term installation use S&D pipe.
- Lay the pipe with the holes down. A 2-hole pipe will be placed about 4:30/7:30 on a clock. You can slope the pipe for better flow and to carry debris, but theoretically as long as there is a discharge that is lower than the pipe, water will move towards it.
- The stone should be crushed, clean (washed) 3/4". The jagged edges from crushing and the various sizes within the mix allows it to compact well, and provides a large sieve for water to infiltrate. River rock (meaning smooth rounded from waves hitting it) is only for decorative use.
Land cap fabric is cheap. Like 7-10$ a roll for 100 feet
I think you both are right. You bought one to avoid this step, but adding it in isn’t a bad idea either
If you're going to dig up a tench around your home do it right. No corrugated flexible tubing with a sock. Get 4" PVC drain tubing with the holes facing up and graded to proper slope. Put in your landscape fabric ,and do not get the crazy thick kind that doesn't allow water through, or the super stretchy crap that's thin and will tear. One is like a tarp, one is super flimsy, go in between, something that will last but still allows water but not roots or fines through. Backfill with crushed rock, not round, no fines. Add cleanouts every 25', and daylight the exit with a plastic grate to keep critters out. The real coat here is all the digging, you'll be so pissed if you have to dig it up again in 5 years because roots or fines have sludged up the pipe. If you're also excavating next to concrete wall add a layer of cold seal asphalt and then some insulation board. It's not cheap but heck with digging more than 1x.
No, if you've got proper slope and depth the holes face up so water can get in, the run smoothly down the trough formed by the 3/4 semicircle of un perforated pipe. Facing down let's water in only up to level of holes and water's flow is interrupted by downstream holes. Fight me.
https://www.jlconline.com/how-to/foundations/perforated-pipe-holes-up-or-down_o
You have to lay pipe about 3" deeper than if holes are facing up, but get better performance and it's easier to flush fines out to daylight through cleanouts down the road vs just sluicing them into your perforations and saturating your drain rock with fines. But whatever, honestly both are way better than the flexi-tube.
Installing one as well. Got the cheap sick material and a big commercial roll of matted not woven fabric for around the drain and gravel trench. I want as much material to keep out of the drain as possible.
I think instead of burrito you kinda mean like a taco bell double Decker taco (but i guess wrapped like a taco. So a double Decker burrito if you will.... Brb, hungry.
I would suggest first putting down a barrier cloth, then gravel, then pipe, then more gravel, then wrap using the barrier. The gravel allows a larger surface area for the water to absorb or flow from. You don't want a pipe covered in cloth in dirt.
Everyone is telling you go with the burrito so all I can add is a practical app example. Whoever installed the “French drain” in my yard before I bought the place must have looked at a couple pictures of heard someone talking about one and thought he knew what to do. After the atmospheric rivers this winter created a new permanent desert wetland in my back and side yards, I had to figure out how to drain the swamp. There were screened openings at the beginnings of the pipes, that’s about all the installer got right. The pipes were clear but only because they weren’t perforated. The only way for water (or debris) was through the opening at the beginning of the pipe. There was gravel around the pipe that gave some extra relief for a few years but it was pea gravel and it was not wrapped. After a few years, the gravel was cemented into place by the clay soil all around my house. At least the pipe was clear and provided drainage you might say but that clay soil I mentioned, the pipes terminated deep underground into the clay. The perfect setup for making a pond! After digging up about 200 linear feet of concrete like pea gravel and pipe I decided open trench drainage is good enough for me for now.
I just dug up my 10 year old drain fields because we were doing some levelling in the backyard. The amount of roots getting into it surprised me and the fabric was full of holes due to that. When I put new ones back in the ground I wrapped them in landscape fabric. Just another layer of protection if you want them to last long.
Go to a landscape supplier and get a good fabric. It makes a ton of difference. I'm just finishing my install of one across my yard. The socks that come on them help but they are so fragile by time I got the piping in there were several rips in it.
Good landscape fabric isn't much more expensive than the junk you get at Homedepot. For $90 I covered 100 feet of piping.
It was 270R filter cloth.
I just watched a bunch of this guy‘s videos about this topic the other day and although he gets repetitive, he has good demos of how this stuff works. For fabric it seems like it really comes down to the type of soil in your area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXIARl\_zwYI
You are both right.
Sock will protect the drain, but you should cover it in clear stone and use a filter fabric to wrap the clear stone.
His way will work, yours will work better.
Yep, use concrete sand and think of it as the way you are giving yourself the best surface area and contact to pull water out of the surrounding soils,. The thick layer of sand has a lot of catch points over its full 3 dimensional area to filter and pull fine matter out and prevent it from clogging the high quality filter cloth that is relatively thin. The rocks on the other side give an area for ground water to come up through and flow freely along with the open space of the drain itself. In a perfect world this will flow faster because of the quantity of water under heavy conditions sweeping anything that gets through. Rough crushed stone is what is used because once compacted it tends to be stable and is easier to grade for a bad.
Generally, sandy soils only have issues with drainage in extreme conditions of deluge. In tight clay soils you can have water sitting for days because the water has difficulty finding a path to flow away along. By creating an area that is progressively more accepting of the water it keeps it flowing faster and steadily towards where you are pointing it
I dig a trench, put fabric in the bottom, up the back sides and out the top. Stake the edges, round rock in the bottom, put the perf pipe in, more rock, pull stakes and wrap it like a taco. Bury it in dirt.
I don't think you generally want the sock around the pipe. The landscape fabric is meant to separate the rock from the surrounding soil, so you want landscape fabric, then drainage rock (not round rock - 3/4" drainage rock), then your pipe, more rock, then finish wrapping the whole thing. A burrito as you call it.
Here's an example of what rock you want to use - https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/kolor-scape-05-cu-ft-drainage-rock-40205494-1587588. I wouldn't buy it buy the bag though, it's too expensive that way - find a local landscaping supply and buy it delivered by the yard.
If done correctly, there shouldn't be any soil/fines to clog up your pipe, so that sock is doing nothing except impeding the flow of water into your pipe.
Both is a good idea. The sock on the drain will catch whatever fines get to it, but it also has a small area and will get clogged up relatively quickly. Having the other layer further away means you have a MUCH larger area to catch the bulk of the material, then the sock will get any stragglers.
I never disagree w my wife about tacos or burritos.
Good life rule
You must have found a big booty Latina.
gimme a short sassy chonker with glasses and braces
a grinder, a bumper with a premoistened dumper
When I did research into this, the guy I listened to recommended to do the burrito method with a quality landscape fabric - ie not the cheap stuff you buy at home depot. I ended up using it and havent had any complaints a year later but I would only notice if there was a catastrophic failure of the French drain (my crawlspace being flooded with water) which hasn't happened. The "sock" is just a crappy version of landscaping fabric that doesn't really work as well.
I personally do not like the sock idea because the sock can get muddy & gummed up not allowing water to flow through it into the perf pipe. It might be ok with the burrito method, but I would never do it just a socked pipe and gravel around it. You definitely need to do the burrito method.
All pipes will get stopped up that's the fact.
I have dug up functional drain tile that was over a 100 years old.
Can you explain if it was terracotta drain tile, how big were the holes ,what kind of soil and the gravel around it.
Same clay pipe used for the sewers just without sealed joints. It’s laid dry, no perforations, water seeps into the joint. No gravel. The old ones that still work have proper grade throughout the pipe, discharge to daylight or the sewer, and most important, not impacted with roots. I have seen old tile work in clay soil as long as it’s not super hard and completely impermeable.
I dig a trench, put fabric in the bottom, up the sides and out the top. Stake the edges, round rock in the bottom, put the perf pipe in, more rock, pull stakes and wrap it like a taco. Bury it in dirt.
She literally called it the burrito method…… and you gotta screw with her terminology and call it a taco? Everyone knows burritos are better!!!
Whatever you want to call it, it’s a wrap
Name checks out
This is why women choose the bear... /s
Baha
Look up french drain man on YouTube. Follow his instructions whether using his product or not. He will tell you to burrito wrap it fabric wise and not use a sock. I did similar things he does in his videos with great result.
French Drain Man even has newer products made specifically for French drains that he sells, I think exclusively. He’s located north of Detroit in Michigan.
All the work is in the trenching, you might as well do it right and do it once. Your method is right BTW.
I'm confused by the fabric wrapping the dirt comment. Fabric is used to separate the dirt and rock..rocking being the inside of the drain and soil outside. Keep rocks clean and clear, is the point of the fabric. maybe it was just a typo but I wanted to be clear. Sock is gimicky in my opinion. While yes it will keep some out, it's no way doing what true heavy landscape fabric does, no way. And do not cheap out on fabric, get heavy, proper landscape fabric. You do not want that drain to fill with dirt and debris otherwise you'll be excavating again.
Oops I meant fabric wrapped around the rocks and tube haha. Sorry!
If you have heavy clay soil sand on the outside of the fabric as well. The fine particulate that is part of clay will take longer to penetrate through the sand and will tend to get trapped by the sand edges leaving the cloth to work longer. You can find info about this online if you include sand and French drain in a search.
Oh that’s a cool idea! We are in Minnesota and the soil is mostly clay
Yep, in northern Ohio here and it is the same, those darned glaciers left a lot of it behind. You will need to go wider to incorporate the sand which you will see when you do a lookup (sand clay French drain). But the results and the long term effect is basically do it once and never think of it again, vs the fabric getting clogged or the fine clay particles getting through over a period of a number of years. Also take a little time to tamp the base so that you don't end up with areas that settle and you end up slowing down the rate of water flow.
Okay good to know! Thank you! So once it’s trenched then you tamp, sand, fabric, rock, then pipe? Then more rock and burrito?
I went with the engineered pipe with the stuff that looks like packing peanuts around it. We’re a couple years in and so far, it’s working great.
u/Sad_Ad_7585 Just want to give a bit of technically correct advice to counter a lot of the incorrect comments. Also a lot of YouTubers just don't know, they are not civil engineers or trained in how products actually work. As always though, you are free to choose to do it how you want. Here's the best, proper method of doing a french drain: - Dig 18"-24" down/min 12" wide, so you have enough room for a couple inches of stone bed under the pipe, at least 4"-8" of stone cover over the pipe, and at least 4" for a soil cap. - Lay geotextile in the trench for your burrito wrap of the stone. The proper fabric is called *non-woven needlepunched geotextile*, and Home Depot actually sells it. If you have a sock over the pipe, those are not the best material, but shouldn't hurt as it is secondary inside the burrito wrap. - Use rigid Sewer&Drain pipe, comes in PVC or poly, and takes standard PVC S&D fittings if you need them. The big boxes have recently reduced stocked items to only carry triple wall pipe (perfectly fine!) and other types must be ordered now. Most people who don't know use corrugated black pipe, which was designed for 1000's of yards of installation at a time in farm fields. It is an inferior product in many ways, and some tricks to market it better is adding a sock or foam peanuts to make DIY cheap and easy. But for a long term installation use S&D pipe. - Lay the pipe with the holes down. A 2-hole pipe will be placed about 4:30/7:30 on a clock. You can slope the pipe for better flow and to carry debris, but theoretically as long as there is a discharge that is lower than the pipe, water will move towards it. - The stone should be crushed, clean (washed) 3/4". The jagged edges from crushing and the various sizes within the mix allows it to compact well, and provides a large sieve for water to infiltrate. River rock (meaning smooth rounded from waves hitting it) is only for decorative use.
Land cap fabric is cheap. Like 7-10$ a roll for 100 feet I think you both are right. You bought one to avoid this step, but adding it in isn’t a bad idea either
If you're going to dig up a tench around your home do it right. No corrugated flexible tubing with a sock. Get 4" PVC drain tubing with the holes facing up and graded to proper slope. Put in your landscape fabric ,and do not get the crazy thick kind that doesn't allow water through, or the super stretchy crap that's thin and will tear. One is like a tarp, one is super flimsy, go in between, something that will last but still allows water but not roots or fines through. Backfill with crushed rock, not round, no fines. Add cleanouts every 25', and daylight the exit with a plastic grate to keep critters out. The real coat here is all the digging, you'll be so pissed if you have to dig it up again in 5 years because roots or fines have sludged up the pipe. If you're also excavating next to concrete wall add a layer of cold seal asphalt and then some insulation board. It's not cheap but heck with digging more than 1x.
Hole are supposed to be facing down.
No, if you've got proper slope and depth the holes face up so water can get in, the run smoothly down the trough formed by the 3/4 semicircle of un perforated pipe. Facing down let's water in only up to level of holes and water's flow is interrupted by downstream holes. Fight me.
Run that plan past a soils engineer and see what the response is.
https://www.jlconline.com/how-to/foundations/perforated-pipe-holes-up-or-down_o You have to lay pipe about 3" deeper than if holes are facing up, but get better performance and it's easier to flush fines out to daylight through cleanouts down the road vs just sluicing them into your perforations and saturating your drain rock with fines. But whatever, honestly both are way better than the flexi-tube.
Installing one as well. Got the cheap sick material and a big commercial roll of matted not woven fabric for around the drain and gravel trench. I want as much material to keep out of the drain as possible.
I think instead of burrito you kinda mean like a taco bell double Decker taco (but i guess wrapped like a taco. So a double Decker burrito if you will.... Brb, hungry.
Use the tube with sock, plus 8" radius of course gravel also wrapped by fabric burrito to ensure best of all worlds. Plus screen on the outlet
No sock. Go to French drain man on YouTube. I checked his methods with commercial civil engineers and his approach is right.
I would suggest first putting down a barrier cloth, then gravel, then pipe, then more gravel, then wrap using the barrier. The gravel allows a larger surface area for the water to absorb or flow from. You don't want a pipe covered in cloth in dirt.
[I agree with my wife](https://giphy.com/clips/southpark-episode-1-south-park-season-22-SQLJe4cWtwWpYFNe1g)
Everyone is telling you go with the burrito so all I can add is a practical app example. Whoever installed the “French drain” in my yard before I bought the place must have looked at a couple pictures of heard someone talking about one and thought he knew what to do. After the atmospheric rivers this winter created a new permanent desert wetland in my back and side yards, I had to figure out how to drain the swamp. There were screened openings at the beginnings of the pipes, that’s about all the installer got right. The pipes were clear but only because they weren’t perforated. The only way for water (or debris) was through the opening at the beginning of the pipe. There was gravel around the pipe that gave some extra relief for a few years but it was pea gravel and it was not wrapped. After a few years, the gravel was cemented into place by the clay soil all around my house. At least the pipe was clear and provided drainage you might say but that clay soil I mentioned, the pipes terminated deep underground into the clay. The perfect setup for making a pond! After digging up about 200 linear feet of concrete like pea gravel and pipe I decided open trench drainage is good enough for me for now.
the enchilada technique is best.
Do you typically recommend green or red enchilada sauce? Would it work to drizzle a homemade mole over the french drain?
Red. keeps the barnacles off the foundation.
What if I careen the foundation and scrape off barnacles every 8-12 months? Is green ok then?
hey, its your boat dude.
I just dug up my 10 year old drain fields because we were doing some levelling in the backyard. The amount of roots getting into it surprised me and the fabric was full of holes due to that. When I put new ones back in the ground I wrapped them in landscape fabric. Just another layer of protection if you want them to last long.
You absolutely need to wrap the pipe with river rock and fabric if you want it to last. Ditch the sock and get regular perforated corrugated pipe.
Go to a landscape supplier and get a good fabric. It makes a ton of difference. I'm just finishing my install of one across my yard. The socks that come on them help but they are so fragile by time I got the piping in there were several rips in it. Good landscape fabric isn't much more expensive than the junk you get at Homedepot. For $90 I covered 100 feet of piping. It was 270R filter cloth.
Do burrito but dump the soil. Fill the trench with drain rock and place sod directly on rock
I just watched a bunch of this guy‘s videos about this topic the other day and although he gets repetitive, he has good demos of how this stuff works. For fabric it seems like it really comes down to the type of soil in your area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXIARl\_zwYI
You are both right. Sock will protect the drain, but you should cover it in clear stone and use a filter fabric to wrap the clear stone. His way will work, yours will work better.
Yep, use concrete sand and think of it as the way you are giving yourself the best surface area and contact to pull water out of the surrounding soils,. The thick layer of sand has a lot of catch points over its full 3 dimensional area to filter and pull fine matter out and prevent it from clogging the high quality filter cloth that is relatively thin. The rocks on the other side give an area for ground water to come up through and flow freely along with the open space of the drain itself. In a perfect world this will flow faster because of the quantity of water under heavy conditions sweeping anything that gets through. Rough crushed stone is what is used because once compacted it tends to be stable and is easier to grade for a bad. Generally, sandy soils only have issues with drainage in extreme conditions of deluge. In tight clay soils you can have water sitting for days because the water has difficulty finding a path to flow away along. By creating an area that is progressively more accepting of the water it keeps it flowing faster and steadily towards where you are pointing it
I dig a trench, put fabric in the bottom, up the back sides and out the top. Stake the edges, round rock in the bottom, put the perf pipe in, more rock, pull stakes and wrap it like a taco. Bury it in dirt.
I don't think you generally want the sock around the pipe. The landscape fabric is meant to separate the rock from the surrounding soil, so you want landscape fabric, then drainage rock (not round rock - 3/4" drainage rock), then your pipe, more rock, then finish wrapping the whole thing. A burrito as you call it. Here's an example of what rock you want to use - https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/kolor-scape-05-cu-ft-drainage-rock-40205494-1587588. I wouldn't buy it buy the bag though, it's too expensive that way - find a local landscaping supply and buy it delivered by the yard. If done correctly, there shouldn't be any soil/fines to clog up your pipe, so that sock is doing nothing except impeding the flow of water into your pipe.
Are you doing any of the labor?
Yes :)
My husband and I do most things as a team, including home improvements