Under the beds and lawn
French & landscape drains
French drains work beautifully until the fabric silts up or the gravel bed packs, and then they quietly stop while looking exactly the same from above.
A French drain is a perforated pipe in a gravel bed, usually wrapped in filter fabric, designed to collect water out of the ground rather than off the surface. In Florida sand, the failure mode is predictable: fine sediment migrates into the fabric and the gravel voids until the whole assembly can no longer take water in, even though the pipe inside might still be perfectly clear.
That is an important distinction, because jetting the pipe is cheap and re-bedding a French drain is not. We assess the pipe and the outlet first, clean what cleaning will fix, and tell you plainly when the problem is the bed rather than the line. Selling a jetting job on a silted bed would be taking your money for nothing.
Signs it has stopped collecting
- Ground staying soft long after rain
- Water surfacing above the run rather than entering it
- The outlet barely trickling during heavy rain
- A system more than ten years old in sandy soil
- Beds and lawn holding water they never used to
What we check
- Whether the pipe itself is clear or silted
- Whether the outlet is buried, crushed or blocked
- Whether the fall to the outlet still exists
- Whether the bed and fabric have blinded off
Where the honest answer is not cleaning
If the pipe is clear and the outlet is open but water still will not enter the system, the bed has blinded and no amount of jetting changes that. We would rather tell you that on the first visit than sell you a clean that cannot work.
Straight answers
Questions about french & landscape drains
Can a French drain be cleaned at all?
The pipe can be jetted, and where the pipe is the problem that fixes it completely. What cannot be cleaned is a gravel bed and filter fabric that have silted up, because the blockage is in the ground around the pipe rather than inside it.
How long should a French drain last in Florida?
In sandy soil with proper fabric and a clean outlet, many years. Systems that fail early almost always failed on installation detail: no fabric, the wrong stone, or insufficient fall to the outlet.
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Flat rate, quoted before we start
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Call and talk to a person. You get a straight answer on what it is, what it costs, and when we can be there.