Yard, Gutter & Downspout Drainage in Schenectady

• The arithmetic
• Grading
• Downspouts
• Window wells
• Wet yards
• Questions

The arithmetic that convinces people

An inch of rain on a thousand square feet of roof is roughly six hundred gallons. A typical house has four to six downspouts, so each handles somewhere around a hundred to a hundred and fifty gallons per inch of rain.

This area sees close to forty inches of precipitation a year. A downspout discharging at the base of your foundation is therefore delivering something on the order of four to six thousand gallons annually, directly against the wall, soaking into the soil beside your footing.

That's why we ask what your gutters are doing before we ask anything about your basement.

Grading: six inches over ten feet

Soil against the house should fall away from it — about six inches of drop across the first ten feet, then simply keep going downhill or at least not come back.

Very few century-old houses here still have that. The soil dropped into the original excavation keeps compacting for decades, and it drops furthest in the band closest to the wall. Positive slope becomes flat, then becomes a shallow trough along the wall collecting roof runoff and snowmelt exactly where you least want it. Add flowerbeds with edging that traps water, mulch built up above the top of the foundation, or a walk that's heaved toward the house, and you have a system for irrigating your own footing.

Fixing it means adding soil — clay-rich fill against the wall rather than topsoil, which is porous and holds water — and rebuilding the slope. A few hundred dollars for one corner, up to $2,600 for a full perimeter with awkward access. Do it in a dry stretch so the soil compacts properly.

One caution: don't bury the foundation. Keep at least six inches of wall exposed above finished grade. Less than that invites water in at the sill and, on a wood-framed house, into the framing.

Downspouts, done properly

• Discharge eight to ten feet out, minimum. Further on clay. A two-foot splash extension accomplishes almost nothing.
• Discharge downhill. Ten feet onto ground that slopes back toward the house is ten feet of nothing.
• Buried leaders are tidier and last longer. Solid pipe, not perforated — you're transporting water away, not distributing it beside your foundation. Pitch it, and terminate at a pop-up emitter or daylight.
• Keep gutters clear. An overflowing gutter sheets water down the wall and defeats every improvement below it.
• Check the seams each spring. Ice damming and snow load pull gutters apart at the joints, and a gutter that separated in January is a downspout that isn't connected during the thaw — which is our wettest stretch.

On buried lines specifically: anything shallow will freeze solid here. Run it deep enough to clear the frost line and give it a proper outlet, or treat a shallow line as a spring-to-fall arrangement and swap to a surface extension once the cold sets in.

Window wells

An uncovered window well is a bucket sunk into the ground against your foundation, directly beside a window that isn't waterproof. Rain falls in, snow accumulates and melts in it, and the level rises until it finds the window. In a snowy climate the second mechanism matters more than the first — a well packed with snow in February is a reservoir waiting for the thaw.

Two parts to the fix: a gravel-and-drain retrofit inside the well so water can percolate away, and a clear polycarbonate cover so most never gets in. $300 to $950 per well, and it's the complete solution for a specific and common complaint — water appearing under one basement window and nowhere else.

When the yard itself holds water

Sometimes the problem is the lot rather than the roof. Silt and clay drain slowly, and on flat ground with a high seasonal water table surface water can sit for days after a storm.

Options, roughly by cost: a curtain or French drain to intercept and redirect surface and shallow subsurface water; a dry well to give roof water somewhere to go where there's nowhere to daylight; a catch basin at a persistent low spot, piped away; or regrading and swales to move water around the house instead of through it.

A curtain drain across the slope above the house is often the single most effective exterior measure on a hillside lot — and there are plenty of those in Niskayuna, Glenville and Rotterdam where houses sit part-way up a grade with water arriving from uphill. Where it stops being useful: if your lot is genuinely lower than everything around it with nowhere for water to go, exterior drainage can only do so much, and the honest answer becomes interior drainage and a good sump. We'll say that rather than sell you a drain discharging into a flat yard.

Drainage questions