Drain Away

Why Is It Important to Bury Your Downspouts?

With all the rain in recent years, many homeowners have begun wondering about how their homes cope with rainwater. Retaining walls, gutter systems, and downspouts are integral pieces of an effective strategy to protect your home from water damage. Downspouts probably garner less attention than gutters and retaining walls, but they are just as important, if not more so. When they are not angled properly, water can flow back to the base of your home, causing significant damage to your home’s foundation. Instead of attaching a tail to your downspouts, however, you should consider burying them. Why is burying downspouts more effective and advantageous?

Tails Are Light and Can Be Dangerous

Consider the amount of time and effort that goes into determining the exact angle that a downspout tail has to be positioned at in order to keep water away from your home. Now, consider how light that tail is. It is really easy to displace a downspout tail – severe weather or a curious animal can redirect it without you even knowing. Moreover, since downspout tails tend to be longer than 12 inches, they can pose a tripping hazard to anybody walking by. Burying downspouts eliminates this hazard and ensures water is redirected away from your home at all times.

Buried Downspouts are More Environmentally Friendly

Buried downspouts can also serve a purpose greater than simply directing water away from your home. They can be fully implemented into a greater landscape to direct this water towards other areas of your property. So gardens, flowerbeds, and other plantings can benefit even more from the occasional spring or summer shower, while at the same time reducing the number of times you have to water them from a well or municipal source.

Buried Downspouts Make Your Property Look Better

The water redirected from downspout tails can make parts of your lawn very wet and muddy. Also, they just don’t look very aesthetically pleasing. Burying your downspouts gives you the power to choose which part of your property receives the rainwater and increases the curb appeal of your home overall.

GIVE DRAIN AWAY A CALL AT 518-288-6679 TODAY TO SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT.

We want to give an example of why it’s so important to control your gutter downspout water run off. It's not just for the foundation of your home, but also for other structures around the home such as decking.

We're going to tell you exactly why the wood in this image rotted. The downspout was pooling water right by the house's foundation and deck. That water also pools underground. You can see the unfortunate condition of the wood caused by that water. It didn’t have to be like that. There is the standard four-feet of aluminum downspout that comes away from the house. That's just not enough. Nobody ever ran it underground, so it would need to be corrected.

We’d divert that water to a low spot where it would correctly drain away from the house.

Like in this image, we see the damage caused to wood decks and their parts a lot. It's caused by excess water. Let's minimize that too.

For underground downspout drainage systems done the right way in eastern New York, give us a call at 518-288-6679.