Internal french drain question...

[Eric 951]

Checking with the brain trust here for some advice. I have a rental house in a congested area of town, which has been getting water in the basement--cleaned/repaired the gutters and downspouts, which helped. We ran an external french drain along the house, which aslo helped, but we were still getting water in the basement--decided the easiest fix was an internal drain.
We dug up an 8" deep x 1' trench along the wall where we were getting the water--after some heavy rains, the trench filled up, with no water on the floor itself, which indicates to us that this will correct the problem of water on the floor, but not of water getting in--which may be impossible due to the congested nature of the neighborhood and the topography of where the house is located(we suspect some of the neighbors' downpouts/roofs are funneling some water to the problem area, but that is neither here nor there.)

So, we are going to gravel the bottom of the trench, put in a drain and run it to a sump pump/bucket to pump out, gravel over the top--check for water, and if this works, cement over the drain leaving a 2-3" gap between the drain and wall for water to run into.

My question is, should we run the standard black flexpipe and if so, should it be the type with the perfroations/slits or without?

Any help appreciated.

[vash]

eric, we do this.

trench. line trench with filter fabric..sides& bottom. rigid preforated pipe, back fill with 1" gravel. wrap the fabric around, essentially making a "burrito"...then you can backfill. my co-worker did this under his house, into a sump hole, with a pump. he pumps it out into the yard. we do this as temp drains..so i know very little about long term.

[john70t]

wetbasements.com -- Weeping Tile
This might get you in the right direction. I don't know if you can plumb a sump into main/storm drain.
The best thing is to catch it outside the foundation. Perhaps a letter to the uphill neighbor will solve the problem.

[stomachmonkey]

Had a water issue in a small storage basement, roughly 30x10.

There were several contributing factors but a big one was poor soil and drainage too close to the house.

3 sides of the ground surrounding the basement were covered with concrete, driveway, patio etc.

The side that had soil on the other side of the wall had obvious issues.

Ground was properly graded for run off but the soil still soaked up water like a sponge which caused a roughly 36" compression issue starting at floor level and above. Looking at the wall you could see where pressure was forcing water thru the cinder blocks. Obvious the builder did not use a moisture barrier on the outside of the wall. Access on that side was limited so digging out to install one was not an option.

Eventually it created a pencil sized hole in the mortar couple of inches above the floor. You'd be shocked how fast a hole that small can turn into inches of water.

Was also getting water pushing up thru pinholes in the floor.

So 1st step was extending drain spouts as far from the house as possible. I trenched and extended with flexible PVC drain pipe about 9 feet away from the side of house.

Covered the ground entire length of wall and out away from house about 5 ft with heavy gauge plastic then covered with gravel.

Hydraulic cement for the pinholes in floor and mortar.

No more water.