Hello all! New to the site and have gained much info in what I've read so far.
We are building a ranch modular on a full basement. This week I had the basement dug along withe the footer. The basement was dug in to a hillside so one side of the house would be level with the road to have a garage in the basement. At the end of the house where the garage will be the footer was dropped about 3 foot to get below the frost line. Digging was complete yesterday and I stopped by the site today to check things out. I found in the one drop down corner that there is standing water, about 1" deep in about a 1' x 1' square. We are going to be using 8" certainteed form a drain. Should I be concerned with this?
By the way, there has been no rain here all week, I can only assume the water is coming from underground.
By what you say it sound like there is a layer of rock or different dirt composition that water is traveling above and your deeper trenching has revealed it. 1" deep x 1'x1' square doesn't sound like that much water but you say its been very dry there and that would make me wonder what the flow will be like at other times of the year. That I don't know.
The certainteed form a drain looks like a pretty neat idea. Its a concrete form and footer drain all in one. I guess in many places it would work very well. I'm not so sure I like the product all that well myself because if I were to use it as a footer form the footer will be deeper than the drain (since it is only 8" tall) and I like my footer drains to be either as deep as the bottom of the footer or even a tad deeper than that. I have seen many footer drains installed on top of the footer but I do not like doing that myself.
I have also seen people rely on their footer drains to take care of all the underground water that might wind up against their house but here again I do not like doing that myself. The footers on my last 2 houses were poured at elevations with known water layers like you explain and in both cases I installed an additional drain away from the house upstream of the flow, like in your case thats up the hill. In both cases these second drains I installed at least as deep as the bottom of my footers. Both have so far did the job I expected them to do, ie. give me a dry foundation.
I look at like if there is no water found then a normal footer drain will probably suffice, but when water is found during excavation then more care is probably necessary. If I am going to error then I would like to error on the conservative side.
I am by no means an expert like many here. I have worked construction all my like and at one time in my life I owned 2 back hoes and a bull dozer doing house seats and drains, so I'm not a complete noobe either.
In the second picture the water is standing in the lower left corner. If any of you would rather not post your opinion here feel free to email me @ doubletrouble411@comcast.net
The main part of the foundation appears to be in dry ground and should offer you no surprises. I would backfill with pea gravel up to about the top of the original ground level then fill and slope the backfill dirt away from the foundation wall for good runoff. You appear to have enough room to do this properly.
The area of the deeper footer appears to be below a layer of clay looking soil (zooming your last picture in the area of the step) and it is now deeper than a layer of water (or whatever you want to call it). If you have that much water in dry weather then I would wonder how much water there will be in winter or rainy times. Judging by the elevation of the surrounding lush vegetation I would assume this is a wide spread layer of water. Which direction it is coming from I can not tell but I assume it's running downhill. Its probably traveling on top of the denser clay layer and is trapped by it from going any deeper at any meaningful rate.
Again in my opinion:
Your drain might work fine and your footer may never sink or crack due to it setting on damper ground and you may never have a problem, but I myself would probably worry. To me thats a lot of water and to me its in a bad place. I say that because the deeper wall and footer might act like a dam and trap the water under the house. I don't know.
Like I said before I don't think I would like using this kind of drain system because it is not possible to get it lower than the footer (deeper) which is where I like my footer drains to be. Adding an additional 4" drain system in this deeper area (just outside the footer) might cause the certainteed drain to simply empty itself out making it worse than useless since any water it were to gather upstream would add to the existing water problem in this wet area.
I guess I would watch just how much water I got out of the footer drains, by making sure the end of the drain pipe is visible, and if it turns out to be quite a bit of water then I would consider digging in a perimeter 4" drain outside the house area and stop the water flow there before it got under the house. You know exactly how deep the water is and how much much gravel to place over that pipe to do the job.
Again, this is only my opinion so take it as so. ok
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