Gutters and leaders are necessary to keep surface water away from your home's foundation.

Water is erosive. Left unchecked it can carve a path through the earth to your foundation. Once that occurs, it clears the way for more water to get to the foundation more quickly in the future. That erosion paves the way for water intrusion into the basement and the costly repairs and cleanup costs associated with a flood basement.

Today I want to talk about surface water which is water that comes from rainfall. Surface water can often be diverted away from your home. Diverting surface water from the foundation can help to protect the foundation and stave off more costly repairs such as sump pumps and French drains.

Surface water is much different than ground water, and again, much different from a high water table. Surface water comes from above, while ground water and the water table come from beneath your home.

The first rule about dealing with water and your foundation is: Keep as much water away from the foundation as possible.

That is accomplished in two ways.

Grading
Leaders and gutters

GRADING:
The grade is also called slope, incline, pitch or rise of the land. The grade refers to the amount of inclination of that surface to the horizontal. How much slope is there? Grade or slope is applied to measuring existing physical features such as roads, landscape and garden grading.

There is garden grading and negative grading.

Garden grading is easy to fix; pump up your flower beds and landscape beds adjacent to the house. A trip to the home mega-store for a few bags of topsoil can make a world of difference. Pump the beds up drastically; make the slope as deep as possible from the house to the end of the bed.

Negative grade, or ground sloping back towards the building, is the more difficult situation to remedy. Sometimes the slope of the land is working against the home and could require a regrading of the yard to redirect the water around the property. The ideal slope is a minimum 1" per foot from the home for the first 10 feet. Then a gradient decline until a minimum of 1” per 10 feet is achieved. Many times the sidewalks or patio has settled allowing water to pond against the foundation. If the concrete is in decent shape the walk or patio can be mudjacked. If the walk or patio is broken into several pieces then replacement may be the only option.

LEADERS and GUTTERS:
The other main cause can be easier to remedy. Gutters and downspouts are designed to collect and divert water away from the home. Clogged gutters and downspouts terminating against the home can put a tremendous amount of water around the foundation in a very short time. That water is going to follow the path of least resistance which often times is into the basement or crawlspace. Properly maintained gutters and downspouts extending at least 10 feet from the home can go a long way to keeping the basement dry.