WATER PROBLEM SOLVED!!!

This was a fun one!!!

Rainwater was getting in under the back door of a restaurant.  Turns out that the building’s slab was about even with the top of the curb to the drive thru lane which was only about 10′ away.  So water was not able to drain properly away from the building.

To make matters worse, much worse actually, the only downspout for the approximately 6,000 SF roof, dumped out right beside the door.

Clearly there hadn’t enough discussion between the engineer and architect.  

So not only could the small area around the door not drain well, it receives ALL of the water coming off the roof.

There was a yard drain installed in the rock bed nearby, but it was a tiny plastic box with a small grate over it; it only took about three leaves to clog it up.  

The ideal solution, the “do it right the first time and never have to think about it again” solution, was to remove sidewalk, and replace it with a ramp through the curb of the drive thru lane that would go straight from the slab down to the asphalt.

This was a bigger job than the owner wanted to do, and would require closing the drive thru during construction, costing even more in lost revenue than the cost of the work.

So they needed a better solution.

After thinking the situation through, we came up with a plan for what you see in the picture.

We reasoned that if we could get the water from the roof onto the asphalt without it having run across the concrete, we would reduce a monthly occurrence to something that happened maybe every few years.  

But there wasn’t a simple way to catch the water from the roof drain. If we attached a pipe directly to the roof drain outlet, we risked backing water up onto the roof which could cause a collapse; one option was off the table.

The best approach would be to catch the water in something that was open and could not cause a backup.  We considered a bucket, but the arc of the water stream coming out of the drain over shoot it in intense rains, and fall short in lighter ones.  

Thus, we had to have something that was shaped to catch a dribble or a gusher.

That lead us to the idea of a water trough intended for livestock.  When place perpendicular to the wall, it was long enough to catch whatever flow there was.

Next, we had to get the water out of the trough and over the curb.  So we cut a hole in the side of the trough and installed a toilet flange and gasket to the inside and bolted it in.  

Then we installed a piece of 3” PVC drain pipe with an elbow on the end to drop the water into the curb instead of letting it shoot out at customers’ cars.

Finally, we drilled a couple small weep holes in side of the trough, just above the trough’s bottom, and a couple more in the bottom so that it would completely empty after the rain stopped.

It worked! The trough catches water coming out of the outlet, whether a gush or a trickle, and releases it directly into the adjacent curb. After the rain stops, the remaining water slowly bleeds out.

We haven’t gotten a single call about water intrusion since installing it.

The investigation, designing the solution, and the construction of the apparatus cost a fraction of what the new concrete ramp would have.  Better yet, the drive thru did not have to close at all, saving thousands of dollars in revenue!

Have a tricky problem that you need help with?  Call us!!!