Drainage Issues in Paving: Catch Basins
More drainage issues today – this time ;et’s talk about Catch Basins.
We have all seen those steel-grated manhole covers which are designed to catch the water on our street and roads. There are also those curbside drains, cut into curbs on streets which perform the same function. These highly effective drainage systems rely on a perfectly graded surface which funnels all the rainwater or whatever water produced on a road into their orifices and down into the sewage system per se.
It turns out, this simple system can also function perfectly in a driveway or even a patio when a home owner faces drainage issues resulting from the tougher terrain where simple solutions like merely sloping a surface to an appropriate point is impossible. What we then arrive at is the need to conduct the water elsewhere. This requires catching the water and providing a system to funnel it all away through piping and channels we create off the surface itself and sometimes under it.
Catching the water is the first issue. The grading required to perform best would slope everything into “catch basins”, isolated collectors, connected to pipes running under the surface itself and conducted out. These catch basins are either plastic, steel or concrete and have road-worthy tops, or grates, which filter things such as leaves, leaving them on top and allowing the water alone to enter. Placed appropriately, these units can handle 100% of the water from a road surface if engineered correctly. Needless to say, the primary grading should provide sloping to all of the various units installed.
A perfect system would not appear to be seriously sloped. The fact is that water needs very little slope top find its way downwards. In more seriously rainy climates, naturally, there may be a need for a more serious slope owing to quantity and frequency of rainfall..Nevertheless, appropriately-placed catch basins are designed to do the work of leaving our driveways clear of water and of conducting all drainage away from the home.












