Downspout extension and drainage

A downspout extension moves roof water away from your foundation instead of letting it fall at the corner of the house. That is the entire job. It is also the cheapest thing most homeowners in Southeast Michigan can do about a damp basement wall, and it gets skipped for years because nobody thinks of it as a repair. Our W2 crews handle it as exterior repair work, scheduled next business day like the rest of the small jobs the Repairs division takes on.

Read this part before anything else. Wright’s does not sell foundation waterproofing. We do not install interior drain tile, we do not inject foundation cracks, and we do not do mold remediation. We carry no crew for that work and we will not bid it. What we sell is exterior water management, which means dirt, pipe and slope on the outside of your house. If your basement is actively taking on water through the wall, you need a waterproofing contractor, and this page will help you tell the difference.

What a downspout extension actually does

Your gutter collects everything that lands on one plane of roof and funnels it through a single outlet. Where that outlet ends is the one variable you control without spending real money. An extension picks the water up at the elbow and carries it out past the backfill zone, which is the disturbed soil the builder shoved back against your wall after the excavator was done. That ring of loose soil drains faster than the undisturbed ground around it, so water finds it and sits there.

Get the discharge point far enough out and the water lands on soil that was never dug up. It spreads, it soaks in slowly, and it stops loading the wall. That works often enough that we tell people to try it first.

Where the water goes when nobody moves it

A stock elbow drops water about ten inches from the wall. On a two story colonial in Canton, that is four columns of roof water landing in the backfill every hard rain. The soil compacts, then dishes, and the dish holds the next rain against the block. You can see it from the driveway. The mulch washes out in a fan and the ground at the wall stays dark for days.

What we will not sell you

If water is coming through a crack in your poured wall, or up through the joint where the floor meets the footing, an extension will not fix it and we will say so at the estimate. That is waterproofing, and it is a different trade with different equipment and a different warranty. We would rather lose the job than take money for the wrong repair. Ask us anyway, because half the time the honest answer is that the grade and the downspouts are the problem and nobody has checked them.

The corner of the foundation in a spring thaw

Late February in Washtenaw County hands you frozen ground with melting snow on top of it. The water cannot soak in, because the top few inches of soil are still ice. So it runs. If your downspout ends in a splash block at the corner of the house, everything coming off that roof plane joins the melt and pools against the wall instead of moving out into the yard.

Then the ground thaws from the top down and the wall gets a week of standing water instead of an afternoon of it. This is the single worst moment of the year for a foundation in this part of the state, and it is also the moment most people first notice a damp corner in the basement. The fix gets installed in October, not in March.

Why this ground holds water

Much of Washtenaw and Wayne County sits on clay and clay loam left behind by the glaciers. Clay does not drain. A hole dug into it fills and stays full, which is why so many lots here fail a percolation test. Add the high water table in low ground near the Huron River and you have soil that is already at capacity before the first drop of rain lands on your roof.

That is the context for every drainage decision here. You are not moving water into thirsty ground. You are moving it somewhere it can spread and evaporate, or to a low point where it leaves the property. Anyone who says a pop-up emitter in a clay lawn makes water disappear has not dug a hole in one.

The grade that settled backward

Your builder sloped the soil away from the wall. Then the backfill settled, for thirty years, and the ground around a 1950s ranch in Livonia now falls gently toward the house on at least one side. You cannot see half an inch of fall across six feet by eye. You can see it after a rain, when there is a dark band of wet soil hugging the block and nothing else in the yard is wet.

Minor grade repair is the other half of what this page sells. We strip the sod back, bring in clean fill, rebuild the slope so it drops away from the wall across the first several feet, and reset the sod or reseed. It is over in a day on most houses. Where a whole yard needs regrading, or where the low spot is the neighbor’s water and not yours, that is a bigger conversation.

Extensions above grade and buried runs to daylight

There are two honest ways to get the water out. Above grade, you add rigid extension at the elbow and run it across the ground to the discharge point. Buried, you trench, set solid pipe on a consistent fall, and end it at a pop-up emitter or where the ground drops away on its own. Each has a real failure mode.

• Above grade is cheap, visible, mowable around at best, and you can see instantly when it clogs or comes apart.
• Buried is invisible, survives the mower, and hides its own failures until water backs up at the elbow in a storm.
• Hinged and roll-out extensions are a compromise that works only if somebody remembers to put them back down.

We install either one. Where the yard is flat we usually argue for above grade, because a buried line with nowhere to fall is worse than no line at all. On a house with a walk-out or a grade break, burying it to daylight wins, and it reads as nothing from the street, which matters on a full exterior refresh.

The buried line that has no fall

A buried run works only if it drops the entire way. Set it dead flat, or let one section sag as the trench settles, and you have created a pipe that holds standing water all winter. That water freezes. Ice does not compress, so the next rain has nowhere to go, backs up the pipe and out the elbow, and lands exactly where you were trying to stop it from landing. We have dug up lines that held a solid column of ice from the emitter back to the house.

Solid pipe, not perforated, is the other rule. Perforated pipe in clay is a device for injecting roof water into the ground along its whole length, which in a trench running parallel to your foundation is the opposite of the goal. If a contractor specs perforated pipe for a downspout run near the wall, ask him why.

Splash blocks and the mower

A concrete splash block is the most common drainage device in Michigan and one of the least reliable. It gets bumped every time someone mows, kicked by the trimmer, heaved by frost. Three weeks after it moves it is aiming roof water at the wall it was meant to protect, and nobody notices, because it still looks like a splash block under a downspout.

If you keep one, set it on compacted stone and check it every spring. Better, get past it. A rigid extension fastened at the elbow and pinned down with sod staples does not wander, and it puts the discharge past the mulch bed rather than in it. We look at this during a spring maintenance visit along with the rest of the exterior.

Ice at the outlet in February

Every discharge point in this climate ices over between January and March. A pop-up emitter freezes shut. An above grade extension grows a plug of ice at the far end where sun never hits it. The roof keeps melting, the water keeps coming, and it stacks up behind the ice until it finds the nearest joint.

You cannot engineer this away completely. You can make it far less damaging by putting the outlet where sun hits it, by keeping the extension short and steep rather than long and lazy, and by walking the house after a thaw to see where water is actually appearing. Homeowners who leave for the winter should build that walk into a home watch routine or have somebody do it for them.

What a gutter guard changes and what it does not

Gutter guards keep leaves out of the trough. They do not change how much water reaches the downspout, they do not change where it goes after it leaves, and in a hard rain some designs shed water over the front lip. A guard is a maintenance decision, not a drainage one. Plenty of houses with guards still have a wet corner in the basement.

Worth saying plainly: gutter repair and gutter replacement themselves go to a partner. We do not hang gutter and we do not sell guards. This page stops at the elbow. Everything that happens to water after it leaves the downspout is ours, and everything above that outlet belongs to somebody else. If the trough is the problem, fixing the extension will not help you.

Sump discharge lines and where they let go

The pipe carrying water out of your sump pit is the same problem in a different jacket. It usually exits the rim joist, elbows down, and ends a few feet from the wall, where it pumps groundwater back into the soil the pump just removed it from. We repair and extend that line, and it is one of the highest value things we do on an exterior water damage prevention visit.

Extending a sump discharge is exterior pipe work, which our crews handle. The pump, the pit, the check valve and anything inside the wall belong to a licensed plumber. A discharge tied into a sanitary sewer is a code problem we will not touch. We will flag it and hand it off.

Where this work stops and waterproofing begins

Here it is a second time, because it is the most important thing on this page. Wright’s does not sell foundation waterproofing, interior drain tile, crack injection or mold remediation. Those are specialty trades. We will not quote them, we will not subcontract them under our name, and we will not imply that extending a downspout gives you a dry basement. It may help, and it often helps a lot. It is not a guarantee.

• Water on the floor along the wall, efflorescence on the block, or a crack that weeps during a rain means you should be calling a waterproofing specialist first.
• A dark corner after a thaw, mulch washing out under a downspout, or soil that slopes toward the house is ours, and it is a day of work.

If you are finishing the space down there, sequence matters. Get the water handled before anyone frames a wall. Our design-build side will not start a basement finishing project over an active moisture problem, and the same goes for basement flooring. A code compliant egress window installation brings its own well and drain, and that well needs somewhere to send water too, which is another reason to solve the grade first. Older basement window replacement work often turns up a well that has been filling for years.

How we work across Southeast Michigan

The houses change by town and the water problem changes with them. In Ypsilanti and the older streets of Ann Arbor, the bungalows have shallow footings, stone or block walls and grade that has been shifting since before anyone put gutters on them. Out in Dexter and Saline, larger lots mean there is usually somewhere to send water, and the buried run to daylight becomes the obvious answer.

Subdivisions in Plymouth and Novi were graded as a system, so a low spot at your wall is often a neighbor’s downspout two doors up. We look at the whole drainage picture before we quote. The visit follows the same estimate and scheduling pattern as everything else in the way we run a job, and it pairs naturally with getting the house ready for winter in October. Other outdoor work like deck repairs or siding can go on the same ticket.

Get the water moving away from your house

Walk your foundation after the next hard rain and look for the dark band. If you find one, the repair is probably a morning of work, and it is worth doing before October. If what you find is water inside, we will tell you plainly that you need a different contractor. Buyers working through a punch list from an inspector can send us that page of the report.

Every repair we do carries a written one-year workmanship warranty, and our crews are Wright’s employees rather than day labor. View our Portfolio to see the exterior work we have completed around the region, then contact us now for a free quote on downspout extension, grade repair or a sump discharge line that is dumping too close to the wall.