Irrigation & Drainage in the North Shore & Northwest Suburbs

Before the first hard freeze, which means booking it in September or early October rather than reacting to a forecast. The normal first freeze at O'Hare is around the nineteenth of October, and the inland suburbs usually get there before the lakefront does. Water left in a line expands when it freezes and splits pipe, fittings and. Most expensively. The backflow device, which turns a routine seasonal service into a spring repair. Blowing the lines out and draining the backflow is the whole job.

Three usual causes, and more topsoil on the surface is not the fix for any of them. Grade: water follows the ground, and a low spot collects whatever the surrounding area sheds. Compaction: a clay subgrade that was driven over during construction accepts almost no water. Volume: one roof plane and one downspout can deliver far more water to a corner than that corner can absorb. Working out which it is means looking at where the water comes from, not only where it sits.

Usually, because the work follows the water rather than a standard layout. Sometimes the answer really is a downspout extension and ten feet of pipe getting the roof water past a flowerbed. Sometimes it is a short trench to a lower point and a regrade of one corner. Occasionally it is substantial. What decides it is a walk of the property, ideally while it is actually wet, which is the one time the problem shows you exactly where it is.

There is no universal number, because heads differ in output and zones differ in exposure. The way to find it is to put a few straight-sided containers out in a zone and time how long it takes to collect a set depth. That converts a guess into a measurement. The target is an inch to an inch and a half a week across everything, rainfall included. On clay, splitting a zone into two or three shorter cycles with a soak gap between them delivers far more of that water into the soil than one long run.

No, and running it anyway does real damage. Constantly wet soil keeps roots shallow because they never have to go looking for moisture, and it keeps the canopy damp long enough for fungal disease to take hold. Clay compounds it, since the water has nowhere to go. A rain sensor handles this automatically; so does the discipline of actually turning the controller off. The point of a system is matching water to need, not applying a fixed amount regardless.

Only when there is somewhere lower to take the water. A gravel trench with no outfall is a buried bathtub: it fills, then stays full, and the wet spot comes back. On clay there is a second consideration. The trench has to be properly bedded and wrapped, or the fine clay particles migrate into the stone and blind the fabric within a few seasons, at which point the drain is just a trench full of mud. Where it does fit, it is excellent. It is just not the default.