Re: Rainwater Management: Gutters & Downspouts
Your option 2 is precisely what the previous owner (and builder) of my house did for our neighbor’s house. He was a brilliant engineer and did the site, drainage, and buried utility work for the whole neighborhood. So yeah, that’s what I’d recommend.
Don’t oversize, stick with 4” pipe, because with gentle pitch you still need some velocity in the pipes to keep them clean. I’m amazed whenever I inspect our cisterns and pipes how clean they are. We have a leopard frog resident in one, maybe that’s my caretaker. I prefer ABS because PVC is poison to the people who make it.
Except that cistern is in my yard, on the uphill side of my foundation.
My long story is that the outlet from that cistern was severed by the morons the previous owner hired to remove the buried oil tank so he could sell us the house 15 years ago (in November). That January the basement starts leaking and I discover the cistern is overflowing and saturating the ground uphill of the foundation. So with temps in the teens I have to half submerge myself into that water to get an inflatable plug into the inlet.
Come spring I hand excavate the outlet pipe, discover the missing section that takes about 15 minutes to fix (4” ABS and two Fernco couplings). And then discover that the system actually serves the neighbor’s house and crosses property lines, that there was a “gentlemen’s agreement” about installation and maintenance costs, and that the present neighbor knows nothing of it either and is not a gentleman.
If I ever meet the morons who excavated that tank, and decided to bury a broken pipe rather than tell a 93-year-old man they broke it, I will give them a good what-for.
Trod Harland, Pickle Expediter
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin
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