A drain run tight against a house intercepts water before it reaches the wall, which means it has to be deep enough to sit below the path the water is taking and pitched to somewhere the water may go. Before any of that, check the downspouts and the slope, because those two account for a large share of water against a wall.

The storm a drain here is sized against

A one-in-ten-year storm drops 2.13 inches on Clinton in twenty-four hours, and the ground here moves water down at up to 13 inches an hour at its fastest. Put those side by side and the arithmetic is encouraging: this ground can, in principle, take the rain that falls on it. A wall getting wet in a city with those two numbers is almost always a routing problem rather than a capacity one — a downspout, a patio pitched the wrong way, a strip of ground that falls toward the house.

The reasoning behind that

Water arriving at a wall comes from the roof, from the surface, or from the ground. Each has a different fix, and only the third is a drainage job in the sense a contractor means.

Roof water is a downspout problem. An outlet discharging at the wall should discharge at least six feet away, and ten is better. That is an afternoon and a length of pipe.

Surface water is a grading problem. The first ten feet of ground should fall away from the house, roughly six inches over that distance. Where it falls toward the house, it is delivering water to the wall by design.

Ground water is what is left, and it is the case a drain against the house is for. It is intercepted below the level it is moving at, carried in stone and pipe, and taken to an outfall. Doing that without correcting the first two means paying to move water that did not need to arrive.

More on this: Exterior French Drain and Waterproofing in Clinton, UT.

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