standing water / flooding barn ?

a while ago i posted about wanting to fix up my shop. here is my firs problem. it tends to flood a bit along the west wall. it seeps in on the north west corner and runs along the west wall and out the overhead door only comes in about 2ft and a quarter inch deep. it starts with standing water then seeps in. the shop sits 100 ft behind house and the grade is toward the shop. there are gutters on the shop and they are tied to a 4inch tile that runs out to the county tile. so how do i improve the drainage on this side of my shop? any ideas?

thanks

here is a pic

i hope it works

Since it is surface water and on a slope I would put in a swale along the upper side and down hill at one end.

looking at picture grass and dirt is higher than your cement.you need to grade it a little so water will run away from building and not towards it and keep it lower than top of cement.

dig down about a foot a few feet out and build a swale to get the water away.

Do you have a outlet to a drain tile? If so trench a prementer drain tile around the building and backfill with 1 inch clean stone (bedding stone-no dirt). The down side to a swale is the wind always blows in fresh dirt so regrading ia always needed. Also keep trees away from the drain tile. I have done the drain tile backfilled with bedding stone and had good luck. Any questions just ask. Armand

You have 2 options, both contingent on slope/gravity, sounds like you could install a small catch basin and pipe if you can "daylight" it to a lower area, or install a perforated structure with filter fabric and lots of clean stone, if the soils will percolate it fast enough. Hard to figure from the information given, but the other option is the determine the best area to slope it off to.

I certainly can relate and have photos to illustrate how our place has the same problem, but much worse. Its apparent whomever built it was not paying attention, a complete fool or what have you, the place is built too low and no real drainage, has gutters and one catch basin pipe out to the pond, but as the place aged, things can change, get much worse.

Fortunately, one of the natural skills I have always felt I had mastered since a young age was to make water run, starting with a darned hoe, ending with spending part of my construction career as an equipment operator, dewatering sites was always a task to be done.

The minute difference in grade at our place makes it real difficult to create surface drainage, and maintain it, as one rut across something you just graded will stop up the water.

Its fairly easy in most situations to use a loader bucket to grade things so they will drain, takes some experience to have the feel for it, but realtively easy and no pipe needed, just seasonally things can become a mess, long term, one should set up a transit level, shoot some elevations, plot out the site and either install basins and pipe or adjust the surface.

Need to make the dirt a tad higher on the shed side, and some lower on the away-from-shed side.

Then make that bit of a gentle trench lead to someplace lower or into a tile opening to drain down into the tile and away.

Or trench in a tile that has rock above it to allow the water to forget to the tile fast. Then you can leave the ground mostly flat.

Paul

Could you maybe pour a foot high concrete wall around the shop to divert the water?

I found out years ago you need to give the water some where to go. Maybe a small hole in the floor with a sump pump will contain the water just once inside the door before it can get too far.

Hoosierhog,
In 2008 we had 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. That's when I noticed the 40 acre field across the road sent water towards the house. The house was the lowest point. There was 3 inches of water in the basement.

No drain pipes could handle that much water, so I bought a terramite and began to provide a path for the water to drain to the gravel pit adjacent to my back yard. It took a long time to remove almost 4 feet of dirt and make a place for water to run away from the house and pole barn. On clay, water runs off much faster than it soaks in. I tried using drain pipes in a few places and soon learned pipes don't work fast enough.

When we get a hard rain, I have a river system in the yard. The yard was a muddy mess for a long time. Each rain showed me where water stood, the high spots, low spots in the yard.

You can't raise a concrete floor, you need to remove dirt and make the floor the highest point.

I own rental property. In some places, people added gravel to the drives so much so, the drive was a foot above the garage floor. I had to remove the gravel and start over.

Best tool I own besides the terramite is a self leveling rotating laser transit. Gives you a good idea just how much dirt you have to remove.

George

(quoted from post at 10:12:47 02/26/13) a while ago i posted about wanting to fix up my shop. here is my firs problem. it tends to flood a bit along the west wall. it seeps in on the north west corner and runs along the west wall and out the overhead door only comes in about 2ft and a quarter inch deep. it starts with standing water then seeps in. the shop sits 100 ft behind house and the grade is toward the shop. there are gutters on the shop and they are tied to a 4inch tile that runs out to the county tile. so how do i improve the drainage on this side of my shop? any ideas?

thanks

Click to expand...

You need a ditch friend. When it warms up get a tiller and scraper or a hoe or a bulldozer and create someplace for the water to go. If anything is draining towards your building you need to ditch it before it gets there.

Have the same issue at the back door of my barn but it's ledge rock, I have to put in berms.

I agree with the others: create a ditch/swale a foot or 2 away from the barn to direct the water.

BIL was building a pole barn. Happened to be next to a county drain/creek. When they had the poles up, I noticed it was pretty much on grade (property was previously farmland). I mentioned I would have put it up some. He said how much? I said "oh, 2-3 ft". He said "I told those guys I wanted it higher". Anyway, had a huge (100 yr?) rain before they finished it. I went over to watch the swollen creek running through the pole barn washing all the fill sand for the concrete pad into the field. I told him to document how the water was running and how high it got. He ended up building berms to direct the water around the barn.