Trench drain has many residential, commercial, industrial and transportation applications. The most common question I receive from home owners (residential) deal with driveway drainage problems. (I had this question today, so I’m writing about it, now.)

(Q) When a driveway slopes down from the road toward the house, there is the propensity for rain water to flow into the garage and lower house during heavy down pours. How can this be corrected?

(A) Any drain system installed in the driveway will help. However, you need to know how much run-off water to expect on a heavy down pour. A simple 12″x12″ square drain might be adequate. However, watch out for the clogging of small drains by leaves and trash which will put your garage and basement “back in the drink”.

If you are going to install a drain in an existing driveway, I recommend putting in a trench drain. You will need to cut and patch the concrete or asphalt driveway no matter which system you use. There will be more cutting and patching with the trench system. However, with the trench drain system, you will receive far more drainage for the amount of work applied to the project.

Again, the size of the trench drain will depend on the driveway dimensions and anticipated rain fall. For small driveways with light automobile traffic, a 4 inch wide (inside dimension) trench drain with a Class B grate should be adequate. For longer driveways that generate scary amounts of water, use an 8 inch wide trench with a cast iron grate. Make the length of the drain 80% – 100% the width of the drive.

You are going to need to drain the rain water away from the trench drain, as well. To do this, you will have to dig a trench in your yard and place a drain pipe from the drain system to the nearest storm sewer or hillside. Use the flexible perforated 4″ diameter black pipe that is commonly used in french drains. Be sure to place coarse gravel around the drain pipe so that you don’t fill the perforations with dirt. This drain pipe will help keep your yard drier, as well.

Michael

I’m not a historian on drainage systems (though it sounds interesting). I’ve been thinking about the history of trench drain. Where was the first trench drain crafted? What was the application? Was it seen as special for that location? Did it catch on or was it forgotten, only to be re-designed for the first time by someone else in another part of the world?

Let’s look at a couple classic contributions to the current day trench drain:

1) Aquaducts of Rome (initiated 312 BC) – Built of stone, brick and mortar, eleven (11) separate aquaduct systems were put in place that carried drinking water from the areas surrounding Rome into the heart of the city. The aquaducts were an essential tool in making it possible for up to 1 million people to inhabit Rome.

www.dl.ket.org/latin2/mores/aqua/intro.htm

2) Sewers (egouts) of Paris – Paris initiated it’s first sewer system in the 1200′s which consisted of a common trench down the middle of the street. These early “open sewers” contributed to the spread of the Black Plague. By the mid 1800′s, the system had moved underground and is currently in operation today. During this time, metal grates were used to cover the catch basins.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/mapping-paris/Paris_Sewers_Page.html

3) Moats of England (14th and 15th Century) – Moats were mainly for defense purposes, though there was a design element focused on water drainage. At the gate house, the moat resembled more a culvert with a removeable lid (draw bridge). By a stretch of the imagination, you can imagine this to be a large trench drain. But really, it was just a bloody culvert.

http://www.castles.me.uk/castle-moats.htm

The need to control waste water drainage always seems to follow population growth. And problem solvers as we humans are, we work with the materials which are at hand to solve the problems that we have at hand. This first guy that designed and built a trench drain, I can imagine, probably didn’t like water coming in his from door everytime it rained. Maybe he dug a trench in front of the door, lined it with stone and then fitted flag stone or brick on top of the trench to allow water to flow away from the door. Wha – la.

With time, our construction materials have changed. Trench drain products, as we know them in North America and Europe, are a direct result of an evolution of construction materials. Cast-in-place concrete trenches with metal bar grating, once the standard, are less common. Increasingly, the trend is to replace the labor intensive trench drain construction practices with labor saving, lightweight engineered polymer trench forming products. Advances in grating materials have also been responsible for the shift in trench design. Simple cast iron or steel grating is now giving way to a wider assortment of strong lightweight materials with designs to compliment the surrounding architecture.

In countries where labor is less expensive than engineered materials, traditional cast-in-place and precast concrete still dominates. Expensive materials for infrastructure aren’t in the budget of construction projects if the skilled labor can perform the task with a little more “elbow grease”. In my travels to South America and Asia, I have never seen a polymer concrete or fiberglass trench drain system. They probably exist in the expensive hotels and shops (a reason why I never saw them). However, the economy of their construction practices haven’t reach that critical point to where you would see them on a grand scale.

So what am I really trying to say here? The need for drainage systems and the evolution of trench drains as a method of drainage is a function of:

• Local population and infrastructure
• Environmental considerations
• Construction material costs
• Labor costs

We’ll continue to see changes and improvement in drainage products as these factors continue to change. Know your options!!

Michael