Full transcript of “Truth about Geofabric Wrapped French Drains - Watch Before You Install a French Drain”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:01 hey good morning Chuck here with apple drains this video is actually two videos in one and it's a little long and the first video is about fabric the truth about fabric I made this video a few years ago and I swore by it but I have recently found a fabric that works so good that I made another video and I put these two together so this is for all the new subscribers the old subscribers and anyone that wants to see it take a look I think you'll be surprised when I know that you'll enjoy the video hey good morning Chuck here with apple drains you know I think I need to show you guys the truth about geofabric there's so much hype about this stuff and the French drain and all these
0:47 things so I'll try to put it all together for you and just show you some facts some Truth uh take it for what it's worth but I think that you'll find it very interesting so there's lots of kind of fabrics we all know this um this is what people are calling the 4 o fabric for your Geo Fabric and it's the same material that is used on the NDS quick drain it works great it keeps out the sand because here in Florida we have a lot of sand and yes it does help keep out some of the the debris if you put it in clay but we all know this it takes water directly right we all know that you see the water coming down here comes down
1:33 great but what is it worth you know I talked about I'm not a big believer you know I've talked about this a lot I'm not a big believer in Fabrics in clay soil and I'm going to put some clay on here and you guys can take a look and again take it for what it's worth but I'll put the GoPro down here and we'll see how much water actually gets through and we'll see how much sediment gets through in the clay I mean let's just take a look okay so put some clay on the top nothing special the same dirt that's in your backyard if you live up north and this Clay is going to be it's always going to be the worst dirt worst soil in
2:21 your yard if water's been laying there and you've got a low spot so I've got the GoPro running if you can see it down the bottom so we can just watch inside and yes you're going to see water come around the outside here of course but let's just take a look I'm going to simulate a rainstorm and if you look carefully you can see that water it's going it's going through the fabric but it also still sits here right I mean it's it's draining but it's very very slow remember how French strain works there
3:08 is perforated pipe surrounded by an aggregate which is rock or the newer stuff here which is the Styrofoam peanuts and that works really good but you can see if this is the bottom of the trench right water doesn't really come through if it's the sze of the trench it doesn't really get into the system does it I mean we could run this for hours and hours and really simulate you know Water Rising up but I mean you can see down inside the GoPro is picking that up it's just drops of water that get through there it's it's nothing it's truly nothing so these are facts that you need to understand about what people are calling
3:56 the 4 o fabric it's really slow okay so let's go back let me sit down does that have anything to do with a French drain no your French drain is going to work no matter what you do as water rises up it will find a way into that gravel perforated pipe and the pipe will carry it away it's just that simple whether you put fabric around it or not does the rock get packed with sediment of course but it doesn't matter it still pack passes through the fabric made no difference at all um am I a believer in fabric no down here in Florida yes I I know that we need Fabric and I know that's very controversial you know how
4:42 can I say I don't believe in it yet I do but it's totally different soils so here in the sand you can see the sand back here behind the shop um yeah there's that that particle is so fine that it does try to get into the system I'm not worried about the peanuts they're they're going to stay open for years and years and years the gravel would definitely get packed up but the pipe is what we're concerned about so people have really knocked a lot of my stuff saying oh you need to put fabric around it but you know what all of my drains I've put in over the past 30 plus years they still work and they work great otherwise we wouldn't be in business right let's do another test real quick so there's lots of kinds of fabrics um here is a I'm sorry this is a
5:30 8 O what people are calling 8 O um geotextile Fabric and it's the same material that you'll find that's wrapped around this pipe you've probably seen this in Home Depot or Lowe's Ace Hardware whatever um the 100 foot roll they've already got this pipe this fabric wrapped around the pipe and there are good applications for this while we have this out here let's talk a little bit about the holes in the pipe this is slotted pipe can you see those holes in there hopefully you can see them there are four slots all the way around each one of these ribs okay and it allows plenty of water to get through there they're quite large but what's interesting is let's take a look at another piece of
6:15 pipe here's another manufacturer of that same same idea this is the 4 o fabric what people are calling 4 oz Fabric and this one has holes at the bottom of the pipe okay two holes and they're spaced out evenly across you all the way through the pipe remember if you use this pipe to put these holes pointing downward into the bottom of your trench especially if you've got gravel underneath of this water floods up into your system the reason that there's different types of pipe is because you the homeowner and other people they get confused about it see those holes they Point down so the manufacturers went ahead and just made slices all the way around there's lots of different types of this material
7:01 they're all the same Crush they're basically rated at 3,000 lb Crush what I was going to show you was that these holes that are slots slotted pipe versus these holes it's actually the same volume of water from these holes as all the slots the difference is when this is pointing down into the trench it picks up water much faster water has to rise much higher on the slotted pipe before it begins to flow so interesting stuff but remember there's lots of different types of fabric this is what people are calling the 8 O fabric I don't call it that um it's basically geotextile and you can actually find this at Walmart it's not an expensive material
7:48 that stuff this piece is just a piece of landscaping fabric this is what you the homeowner normally pick up and and using as geofabric let's see how well this actually works works this works extremely well let me show you okay same kind of thing remember we had the clay and you can see there's still water sitting in there but got a old piece of landscaping fabric it's got a couple holes in it but you know so what this is what you the homeowner normally pick up and wrap your drains in let me just show you and you can see that it takes water extremely well and we could run that water for hours and hours and you already know the
8:34 result it takes water so remember the first the first little experiment where we put the clay on top of a really good Fabric and how little water actually got through that system so does it really matter if you use this or this does it really matter you're going to I mean the answer is no but let's put some clay on here and find out okay same thing and we already know the the result but let's just take a look actually it looks like this is taking water faster but let's just run some water on here for a second so you know I'm looking down inside and yeah it's just dripping down through there and you can see water still sits here it's still the
9:26 same let's pull this guy over here so you can see both at the same time so let's do this again and you can see they're they're almost identical as far as water passing through the clay down into the fabric we've got one of the best Fabrics available and it's about the same in fact you can see it's actually draining better but it's probably just there's more Clay on who knows but either way neither of these things work um do they help help protect the stone of course they do but what's more important is that they help protect the pipe and that's why manufactures have come up with this type of material that has the fabric wrapped around the pipe so this
10:13 has this applications I'll show you that in a second but I really wanted you to see the difference between a woven Fabric and a non-woven fabric am I a believer in either of these no but if you're if you live up north I would take either one of these and put it across the top of your gravel and then put some dirt and then put your sod up there so the sod can grow the reason I would put it across the top of your gravel is just because sediment does try to drop down through it and why not go ahead and protect it so it goes down let me give you some history to give you a little history about gravel perforated pipes you know septic tanks have been used for many many years and the invent of gravel perforated pipe what people call a
10:58 French drain it actually works the opposite direction um in a in a leech bed or what we call a drain field you know water from the tank comes out and it goes down through the gravel okay instead of being picked up it's actually discharging through the gravel years ago they actually covered the drain field the top of the drain field with tar paper before that they used newspaper and it worked and some of it still working today they used a lot of newspaper but tar paper you know the roofing material it works great to cover that septic drain field so let's talk a little bit about pipe and the fittings and what what people are showing you out there um let's start with with PVC okay this is
11:44 sdr35 this is not schedule 40 you can see this is called a thin walled pipe and even though it's green it's a little thicker than thin wall but it's still thin walled pipe this is a schedle 40 cup and I see a lot of videos out there where they're telling you that they're they exclusively use PVC Schedule 40 and they're not you know they're telling you something that's not true this coupling you can see how much play there is it's this is not this is not what they're using they're using thin walled PBC here's a thin walled fitting and again take a look here's a coupling this coupling is designed to go over the pipe it actually goes over the entire coupling on the
12:31 thin wall so there's big difference there here's a piece of whoops here's a piece of thin wall um PVC this one's actually a really neat pipe it's got the smooth inner core and then it's got a layer of PVC around it but it's still thin wall but take a look this is schedule 40 PVC 4 in and you can see it slides all the way through there so these people that are telling you that they use SK 40 PVC they're not and it's just something that I think you should know um let's move on I saw another video where they talked almost entirely about using this perfect PVC tape to tape up a French drain remember the French drain has holes in it here's a regular coupling that you
13:18 could buy that that snaps on okay and you could snap on another piece and join these two pieces together just like that and whether or not you tape this with a great PVC tape that's waterproof or not well it has holes in it so I mean this video talked exclusively about using this PVC tape for what I have no idea I think one of the neatest things I've shown you guys is how to join pipe together and if you take a piece of pipe cut it in half and then slice we need about six about 6 in or more you slice it in
14:07 half you're going to take this and you're going to squeeze it together really tight really tight then you can slide it in one side of the pipe and it's going to expand it's going to expand in side of here and be very secure very tight you can do the same thing on this side again squeeze it hard and put it together then you just twist and push until it snaps all the way together this is this is so secure sorry this is so secure you can't pull it apart coupling works good but that's even
14:52 better and if you look inside I don't know if you can see it or not but you can't really you can't even see the coupling I mean it's it's so it's so perfect inside there and that's probably the best way to join any type of corrugated pipe I mean it's super strong doesn't cost you a dime you know these are about three bucks and yeah they work really good we use them too but in a pinch or if you really want a secure coupling that's the best way to do it okay this is the four 4 oz material as you can see but what I want to show you is you can see the mud that got through here it didn't make a whole lot of difference that little fine sediment
15:38 is what's going to pack up your rocks or yeah that's what's going to pack up your stone not this great big stuff up here that doesn't get into your stone it's this fine material that gets into your stone and yeah that will slow down the system will it still drain of course but it slows it down and of course you know nothing lasts forever you do need to maintenance it same thing over here if you look carefully you can see there's a lot of sediment that got through that sediment is what pack is what blocks your stone this is just landscape fabric it's a woven material same stuff so again there's lots of ways that you could install a French drain you could rent a mini excavator spend $55 $600 you could rent a trencher for $100
16:26 or you could use a shovel none of that makes any difference um basically you can do this and we've got your back if you have a problem I've got Live help we're really busy on the Live help but um if you have a problem sign up online I'll get to you we can answer your question within minutes I can tell you and answer any question that you have about installing any drain not just a French drain but that's all available and this is all good stuff and I think all the videos out there although some of them are very extreme they're all good things and they all believe in what they're telling you and that is that French drains they collect subsurface water as water rises up it enters that system and
17:11 is carried away whether you use fabric whether you don't your system is going to last French strain won't last forever but it will last a long time so and I've showed you a video about how to correct that forever French strain so you're all set you know I've posted pieces of this video before but it is so important if you're going to do a French drain and you're going to wrap it with fabric please watch this video again this is the only fabric that I've ever found that actually works in this video we will put together two different systems One is using perforated corrugated pipe and the other is using perforated PVC we will also add a GoPro down in the pipe so you can see how the system actually
17:58 works let's start with the corrugated pipe we're going to be using 4 in corrugated pipe it's perforated and it's slotted that means it has holes all the way around the pipe so you dig that trench and you lay out your fabric we need to add a base of stone this is very important this goes under the pipe next we'll lay the pipe and then we'll go ahead and cover all of that with more Stone more gravel the gravel is important also try to use 3/4 inch to inch and a half Stone the best stone is number 67 and that is crushed washed gravel next we go ahead and lay the fabric back across the gravel cut it trim it and then pin it so
18:43 it stays secure then finally we'll go ahead and add our side if you cut side off we're going to put the sod back on the top and we're ready to go ahead and test this French drain Okay so we've laid the sod back and I left a piece of it exposed down here so you can see it I also have a light inside that slotted corrugated pipe so it's perforated has slots all the way around it and I put a light inside there so let's go ahead and see what happens when we add the rainfall
19:28 during a rainfall event water rises in your trench and it comes through at the bottom of the pipe that's why there's base of gravel underneath as the groundwater Rises it comes through the voids of the gravel floods up into the pipe and the pipe carries this away this is called a French drain this is corrugated pipe and it's slotted that means that there's holes cut all the way around the pipe if you're going to wrap your French drain with a geofabric I strongly suggest suest that you try this Stay Green it's available at Lowe's Home Depot Menards Ace almost any hardware store you might watch a lot of videos talking about 4 oz 8 oz double punched all these things well that's very expensive fabric you know I was never a
20:15 believer in fabric until I found the Stay Green I always found that the fabric actually slowed down the inflow of water into your system and I have several videos showing you how slow the French drain works using this double punched 4 oz or 6 8 oz fabric now let's try the same thing with PVC
21:05 let's build this PVC drain a quick note the duct tape on top of the PVC is there to hold the lights allowing us to see inside the pipe so we dig the trench We Lay the fabric across the trench and pin it so that it stays down nice and tight in the trench the next thing we do is we add a base of gravel this is the most important part of this system is the base of gravel that allows that water to flood up into the pipe and the pipe will carry it away when you're running PVC pipe for your French drain you'll notice that there's holes on the bottom make
21:51 sure these holes Point down into that base of gravel so we've got perforated pipe holes Point down into the trench I've got my light set up can you see I got my battery and the lights are set up inside we're going to go ahead and cover this up with gravel now we cover the pipe with gravel fold the fabric back over the top and pin it finally we will add the side
22:42 hey this is Chuck with apple drains reminding you that if you believe you can do something I guarantee you can do it have a great [Music] day I've had comments about me using my handy dandy Black & Decker and I just have to mention it really quick you know what difference does that make whether I have a Roby or you know whatever other kinds of uh battery operated drills what difference does that make let's move on don't forget about Live help video
23:27 consultation via Skype or FaceTime and we're also available for Nationwide time and travel we can come to your job site help you with all your project oversee consult and install we can even come to [Music] Michigan [Music]
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