Shreveport · NW Louisiana Guide
A French drain is not a surface drain and vice versa. Picking wrong is how you buy the wrong system twice.
A French drain is a subsurface system — a perforated pipe buried in aggregate that collects saturation water from the surrounding soil across its whole length. A surface (or 'yard') drain is a catch basin or channel drain that collects water flowing across the surface at a specific point. They solve different problems. A French drain does not do the job of a catch basin (it can't handle a concentrated 300-gpm discharge from a downspout) and a catch basin does not do the job of a French drain (it doesn't dry out saturated soil in a yard corner).
Your yard is soggy across a broad area, not just at one puddle. Water seems to come up from below as much as run across the top. A slope above you feeds ground water down toward the house or the flat yard. Foundation is wet during and after rains and you can't figure out where the surface water is coming from. Curtain-drain intercept on the uphill side of the house. See French drain installation.
A defined low spot ponds after every rain but the yard around it is basically fine. A downspout discharges into a specific corner that never drains. A driveway sheet-flows toward a garage door. A patio catches its own runoff. In each case, you have a specific, defined water problem at a specific, defined point — that's the catch basin or channel drain case. See catch basins.
Most whole-property drainage jobs in Shreveport end up using both. A French drain along a soggy fence line, catch basins at low pockets, downspouts buried to a shared discharge, all tied to a single trunk pipe out to a legal daylight or dry well. Getting the mix right is what a proper drainage plan is.
'French drain' installed under a driveway sheet-flow low point — corrugated pipe crushed in a year. Catch basin installed at the low point of a saturated yard — soggy 3 weeks after install because it can't dewater the surrounding soil, it can only take surface water. Downspout run to a French drain — overwhelms it in the first big rain because the French drain can't absorb 300+ gpm through its perforations.
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