Downspout Drainage in Roseville, CA

Every downspout drops a roof's worth of water in one spot. If that spot is right next to your foundation, the water has to go somewhere, and it usually goes where you don't want it. We look at where each downspout on your Roseville home drains, then set up a route that carries the water away from the house.

Why downspout water matters

A roof collects more water than most people expect. The gutters funnel all of it into a few downspouts, and each one drops that water in a single spot, usually right against the foundation. In a light shower that hardly matters. In a long winter storm, it means a steady stream soaking the same patch of soil for hours.

That soil is holding up your house. When it stays wet, water can get into a crawlspace, under the edge of a slab or through a garage wall. It can wash bark out of your beds, undercut a walkway and leave a low spot that never quite dries out. Many of the drainage problems we see around Roseville homes start with one or two downspouts that empty in the wrong place.

Signs your downspouts are causing trouble

Walk around the house during a heavy rain or just after one. That is when the problems are easiest to see. Look for:

• Water pooling within a few feet of the foundation, especially at the base of a downspout
• A small trench or bare patch worn into the soil below the outlet
• Mulch, bark or gravel washed across a path or onto the lawn
• A damp or musty smell in the crawlspace, or standing water under the house
• A white, powdery crust on a stem wall or garage slab
• Water spilling over the gutter at the downspout because the drop is clogged
• A buried pipe that backs up and bubbles out at the top of the downspout

What usually goes wrong

The most common cause is simple. The downspout ends at a splash block, or at nothing at all, and the water has nowhere to go but down beside the wall. Splash blocks get pushed aside by mowers, buried under new landscaping, or tilted back toward the house as the soil settles.

Buried downspout lines fail in their own ways. Thin corrugated pipe, the black flexible kind, crushes under foot traffic and traps debris in its ridges. Roots get into the joints. Lines laid without enough slope hold standing water and slowly fill with silt. Some were never connected to an outlet at all and just end in the dirt, so the pipe leaks slowly a few feet from your foundation.

Another common mistake is tying downspouts into a perforated French drain. A French drain is built to collect groundwater. It is not built to carry everything that comes off a roof. Feeding a downspout into one can push water out through the holes right where you wanted the ground to stay dry.

Repair or replace

Not every downspout problem needs a new system. If a buried line is sound but clogged, we can often clear it and add a cleanout so it is easy to flush later. If one section is crushed, we can cut it out and replace only that run. On a side of the house where nothing is in the way, an above-ground extension may be all you need.

Replacement makes more sense when the pipe is corrugated and failing in several places, when the line has no real slope, or when it empties somewhere that causes a new problem, such as a neighbor's yard or a shaded walkway that stays slick. In those cases, digging up the old line and laying solid-wall pipe with a steady fall is usually less trouble over the years than patching it again and again.

We'll tell you which approach we think fits and explain why. If an extension will do the job, we'll say so.

Where the water can go

The goal is to carry the water far enough from the house that it can't run back. Depending on your lot, that usually means one of these:

• A buried solid pipe to a pop-up emitter in the lawn or a bed, placed downhill from the house
• A line to the street or a curb outlet, where the city and any HOA allow it
• A dry well, which is a buried chamber that holds the water and lets it soak away slowly, for lots with nowhere downhill to send it
• A connection to an existing storm drain line, if the house has one that still works

What a visit involves

We start by walking around the outside of the house with you. We look at every downspout, where it ends and what the ground around it is doing. If there are buried lines, we run water down them to see where it comes out, or whether it comes out at all. We also look at how the yard slopes, and at paths, beds and anything in the way, such as a patio or a gas line.

Then we explain what we found in plain terms and what we would do about it. If you decide to go ahead, the work usually means trenching, laying pipe with a steady fall, fitting the connections and outlets, and putting the soil and turf back as close to how we found it as we can. Underground utilities need to be marked before any digging, and we plan the route around them.

Downspout drainage in Roseville homes

Roseville is dry for much of the year, and that is part of the problem. Months go by without rain, so a bad downspout outlet is easy to forget. Then the winter storms come and drop a lot of water in a short time, sometimes several days in a row. A setup that looked fine all summer gets tested all at once.

Much of the area sits on clay soil, and in places there is a hard layer not far below the surface. Water soaks into clay slowly. It sits and spreads instead, which is why downspout water that would disappear into sandy ground ends up pooling beside a Roseville foundation. Clay also swells when it is wet and shrinks when it dries, so keeping roof water away from the house helps the soil around the foundation stay more even through the year.

The type of house matters too. Many newer neighborhoods have narrow side yards, with fences, AC units and gas meters packed into a few feet. Running a line through there takes planning. Older homes near the historic core are more likely to have raised foundations with crawlspaces, and there downspout water often shows up as damp under the floor long before anyone sees a problem outside. Irrigated lawns and beds can also hide drainage issues in summer, so a walk around the house in winter tells you more.

If you're not sure whether your downspouts are part of the problem, a visit is the simplest way to find out.