Patio spaces can offer you lots of great benefits. They make your yard more usable, they offer a beautiful solution to increase the curb appeal of your property, and they can offer a connection between your home and things like swimming pools. Patios are spaces that are relatively flat, which means that drainage is essential to keep them from becoming areas for significant standing water.
Patio spaces can also be tricky to manage if you live in an area where there is a stormy season that comes along with a lot of moisture each year. Stormwater management is key to keeping your patio usable all year long and to preventing flooding and standing water that can lead to issues with the foundation of your home as well as your landscaping.
Stormwater Management for Patio Areas
There are a variety of different kinds of stormwater management that you will need to use in most cases to ensure that your patio area stays usable all year and isn’t a source of flooding and other water management issues. These solutions can often be customized entirely to your needs as well, ensuring that your patio area will stay in great shape for years to come.
1. Trench Drains
Buy trench drains if you are starting from scratch to manage water in your patio area. You will need trench drains to help take water away from your patio area and out to the storm and sewer drains around your property. Trench drains are an ideal solution for nearly any kind of drainage need and can be placed in nearly any location.
Trench drains can also be customized with aesthetically pleasing gratings, or they might be designed with a slot-style opening that allows water to flow through a nearly invisible seam in the patio and down into the storm sewer when it rains.
Trench drains are the foundation of any good drainage system and are perfect for your yard, your patio, and even your driveway or walkways around your home. You can customize your trench drain solutions as well so that they can handle nearly any amount of water runoff and can even take on unique shapes, such as curves.
2. Perimeter Drains
Perimeter drains are a good idea to have installed around the edges of your patio. These can also be trench drains. They will pull water from the central area of your patio and take it away to the storm sewer or a catch basin with ease. The slope of your patio needs to be correct for these drains to work properly, but so long as your patio has been laid correctly, your perimeter drains should be able to put in lots of hard work for you every time there is precipitation.
3. Gutters
Your home absolutely has to have proper gutters and downspouts if you want to avoid standing water all over your patio surface. Gutters keep precipitation from ponding against your home’s foundation and they also keep water from ruining your roof or drainage into crawl spaces and other vulnerable areas of your property.
Your gutters will need proper maintenance each year as well to ensure that they don’t get clogged and cease to do their job. You will want to check on gutter health each year to verify that your gutters aren’t going to cause standing water issues and flooding due to lack of upkeep. Gutters are a very common source of drainage issues and water damage on properties around the world, so you need to be sure that you don’t neglect this aspect of your water management plan.
Why is Water Management so Important?
Many people think about the parts of water management that directly impact their use of an area of their property. It can be hard to enjoy your patio if there is standing water all over it and it can look unsightly during the right months. However, there are other reasons that you need to manage runoff on your patio properly that many people do not think about.
You need to be sure that your patio isn’t causing drainage issues because it typically is quite close to your home. Patios that are not built with proper drainage can lead to water damage to the foundation and walls of your home and can also breed mosquitos and algae. You will have an unsafe, unsightly, and possibly also negative impact on your patio if you do not make sure that it drains correctly.
If you have a swimming pool connected to your patio, drainage is critical for safety as well. Slipping and falling in standing water around a swimming pool can be very dangerous, and you do not want guests or family to get hurt due to issues with the water management solutions for your patio area.
Water management all over your property is critical for its safe use and for the prevention of health risks as well as damage. You should consider drainage to be a top priority throughout your property both for curb appeal and also for the safety and longevity of your home and the surrounding yard spaces near it.
Caring For Your Patio Means Installing Quality Drainage Systems
There is no reality wherein you can have a patio and avoid having proper drainage installed in it. You should be sure that you are not causing drainage issues that might be damaging your foundation or undermining your landscaping by neglecting to install trench drains and other drainage solutions on your property.
Getting quality drainage components is key as well. Make sure that you have the right kinds of drains and that they are made to last. It can be very costly to repair drainage issues in a patio space, so you should be sure that you are not cutting corners with the installation process. No home with a patio can be without proper drainage and you will likely need to keep all three of these important drainage factors in mind as you are adding or maintaining your patio at your home.
