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Birmingham, AL French Drains

French Drains in Birmingham, AL
Buying a home can be a wonderful investment that gives you a place of your own, consistent monthly payments, tax benefits, and more privacy when compared to an apartment. However, costly repairs can develop over time if your home isn’t well maintained. One of the more frustrating problems to deal with involves flooding in your home’s basement.

Even if a small amount of water gets into your basement, it’s possible for mildew and mold to develop, which can worsen the indoor air quality throughout your home and create strong odors that can be difficult to get rid of. This issue is particularly common when the weather is humid. You can mitigate these problems entirely by adding a basement drainage system to your home. This article serves as a guide to French drainage systems and what they can do for your home. 
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What are French Drains?
When you search for the ideal drainage system to add to your home, there are two separate types of French drains that you can select from, which include exterior French drains and indoor French drains. An exterior French drain is positioned just outside of your basement and is designed to make sure that your lawn doesn’t become soggy and that your basement doesn’t become flooded.

Without a proper yard drain, any rainfall will accumulate on the yard. If it happens to rain constantly for a couple of days, the water would continue accumulating until flooding occurred in and around your home. When the right drainage system is placed in your yard, you no longer need to worry about flooding. Any excess water will be siphoned into the drain to flow to a nearby creek or similar body of water.

As for indoor French drains, these drains are created with perforated piping and a trench. The water will flow to a specific area where it can accumulate without causing flooding. Eventually, the water will be pumped out. These drains are typically positioned around the basement perimeter and are usually lower than the basement floor. How Do French Drains Work?

If you’re thinking about buying an interior or exterior French drain, it’s important that you understand how these drains work and what materials will be needed to properly install one of these systems. Water invariably flows to the lowest point it can access. If certain spots in your yard have dips in them, rainfall will accumulate in these spots. Because of how water naturally flows, adding a French drainage system to your home will almost certainly keep your basement from becoming flooded and your yard from becoming overly soggy.

Even though French drains can be constructed in many different ways, they all have the same functions. These drains provide your yard with a basic path that water can flow into. The sunken channel that’s created with one of these drains can be filled with gravel, which facilitates better drainage from any surrounding soils. By effectively removing water from surrounding soils, French drains limit the amount of static water pressure that can be placed on your basement walls. By lessening this water pressure, seepage and leaks are kept to a minimum.

In order for a basement drainage system to function properly, the pipe and trench must pull water away from the saturated trench so that it can flow to some kind of appropriate discharge point. The most common discharge points for a residential property include:

• A nearby street
• Drainage fields
• Drainage ditches
• Dry wells