Hello,
My house was built in 1920 and has a wet crawl space and basement. It's a split level house on an upslope lot. The front of the house, under the porch, is collecting water at the lowest point which water is seeping from the sides of the house and from the rear. I would like to install footing drains along the side and rear of the house. The problem is that the foundation footing at the rear of the house is 8-9 ft higher than the footing at the front of the house. I had a few contractors tell me the drain has to be as low or lower as the lowest point of the basement to keep water out. Is this true? If that's true wouldn't I need to dig a trench 8-9 feet away from the rear of the house to keep the integrity of the foundation? Wouldn't the drain be ineffective at that distance from the footing?
Thanks.

Here again, why not diagnose the problem before selecting a solution? Why is water entering your crawl space and basement, and where is it entering? Those queations need to be answered before a solution can be selected. What is the source of the water? How much water is in your foundation? Is it constant, or intermittent? What happens in a heavy rain? Does it get worse? Lots of questions to be answered before we go digging.

The problem is I'm getting runoff and subsurface water seeping from under the foundation footing and into the basement. It's entering from the rear and sides of the house.Both my neighbor's lot sits higher than mine and the rear faces a slope. The front of the basement gets muddy during light rains and pools with water during very heavy rain.

At the rear of the crawlspace the top of the dirt is dry but you can see a wet layer of mud 2-3 few feet below the top dirt, where they cut into the land for the pluming and furnace vents.

How so you know the water is "seepingfrom under the foundation footing"?

There is a puddle of water/mud at the inside base of the foundation along the side of the house. There is also water coming up from the cracks of the garage cement floor a few feet from where the foundation and the garage floor meets.

I also saw a stream of water coming up from the bottom of the foundation, but that only happens when it is really raining hard.

Where you see water entering frequently is not where it is actually entering. Water coming through a crack in the wall will often appear at the base of the wall, and if your wall is concrete block, the little geyser could be caused by a column of water contained within the wall. Or it could be as you suspect. A simple test with a garden hose will probably reveal all.

Thanks for your suggestion, but my problem is not trying to find the source of the water but to verify what the contractors are saying is true, since at least two have contradicting solutions about how far the trench needs to be and how deep the trench needs to be. The area in question is the rear of the house where the foundation footing sits 8-9 ft higher than the lowest point of the basement in the front of the house. The original question is does the trench at the rear of the house have to be lower than the lowest point of the basement?

Sorry, but I'm not going to discuss solutions when the problem isn't defined. A trench is a shot in the dark, because no one knows what the problem is. It is nothing more than a guess, and not even an educated guess.

I had 6 foundation "experts" come out to look at the issue and all of them suggested a footing drain would resolve the issue of the subsurface water and placing tiles for the surface runoff. The divergence is on the issue of where and how deep the drain should be at the rear.

How accurate the "experts" are about the source of the water is to be determined as I have yet to find a way to figure that out with just a hose test, as water seems to be coming from the top of the foundation as well as the base. I'm not sure how to determine the exact cause unless I unearth the foundation from the inside and break up the concrete on the outside.