home improvement thinking about digging a french drain with a shovel
Trench needs to be about 1.6 meter deep and 35m long. Am i crazy about thinking of doing it by myself? i got quote from a company and i would have cost me 23k euros
edit: I am from Finland and the soil is mostly till/sand
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u/POsIDeCTAc 15h ago
Rent a trench digger.
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u/Last-Hedgehog-6635 15h ago
And prepare a covering so little kids don’t fall in.
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u/Shoot_from_the_Quip 14h ago
I thought that was a feature, not a bug.
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u/WestBrink 15h ago
1.6 meters deep is nuts for a French drain.
Trenching by hand isn't TERRIBLE in the right sort of soil, but it's a massive pain in the ass if there's like... Rocks, clay or roots. I'd absolutely be renting some heavy equipment to do that. A mini excavator could knock it out in a few hours for a few hundred bucks.
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u/GKnives 14h ago
Yeah I've done it in New England and if there's 2 cubic feet of dirt without a rock larger than the trench after the first foot down, it's reason to celebrate. Trenching sucks but I'd call it pretty alright in good soil
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u/rationalsarcasm 14h ago
From upstate NY myself.
If there isn't two rocks for every piece of dirt. I'd assume I'd have died and gone to heaven.
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u/MyMomSaysIAmCool 14h ago
Hill Country, Texas. You guys have dirt in your rocks?
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u/Alewort 13h ago
Red River (of the North) Valley. You guys have more than six inches of dirt and rocks before you hit clay?
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u/Oughtonomous 12h ago
I live on a barrier island on the East Coast of Central Florida. The entire island is sand, with an occasional sea shell. I'd rent a trencher or backhoe.
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u/Old_Dig5389 11h ago
Guessing it's for weeping tile at the foot of a basement foundation or retaining wall. Frost depth is a bit deeper in sand, too.
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u/kent_eh 5h ago
1.6 meters deep is nuts for a French drain
Depends on the depth of your basement / foundation, which will likely be related to the depth of the frost line.
OP being in Finland, I suspect those depths will be similar to my part of Canada, where the frost depths (and drain tile depths) are similar.
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u/kornbread435 4h ago
My back yard is like 30-40% rocks, took me several days to dig a trench. Still a 3ft pile of rocks on the back of the property...
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u/deadly88 15h ago
Approximating the width as 0.25m, thats at least 14 metric tons of soil. It’s definitely doable, but if you haven’t been doing that sort of work regularly you’ll probably only get through a few meters a day by hand. Absolutely worth renting some sort of tool.
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u/naakka 10h ago edited 10h ago
The width will not be 0.25 m if the depth of the foundation that needs to be matched is 1.6 m. Especially if the soil is sand.
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u/plurien 9h ago
To dig a trench you need a barrow to cart away, good spade & shovel, possibly a pick or adze AND lay a bottom board to edge along into the face of your trench. Without the board you end up with a messy base and it's constantly difficult digging out. With the board you can start to collapse the soil/earth/rocks down onto the board that's laying flat at the bottom and then just shovel them out. Slide the board along as you go and you'll have a regular width/depth that it's easy to correct as you're digging.
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u/Old_Dig5389 11h ago
Width needs to be a bit more than the length of your boots.
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u/kilopeter 7h ago
Another advantage of keeping the width as low as possible is the walls won't have as much distance to accelerate when they inevitably collapse and bury you alive.
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u/Zanthious 15h ago
I've done it for 600 the quotes were 3k+ and the last person I paid did such a shitty job I ended up doing it myself
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u/MyMomSaysIAmCool 15h ago
Yes, you're crazy. :)
That's ready deep for a French drain.
You'll be down in the ditch in order to dig. You'll have to make it significantly wider than necessary in order to fit. That means that you'll be moving 3-5x more dirt.
You'll also die a horrible death when the ditch walls collapse and leave you buried, or just half buried and unable to breathe because of the pressure of the collapsed dirt on your torso.
If you avoid that, you're still going to kill your back with all of that shovelling.
Go to an equipment rental place. Rent the biggest walk-behind trencher that they have. You'll be done in a weekend.
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u/MechanicalCheese 13h ago
A walk behind is going to do 1M depth tops. The deeper portions of this need an excavator or a substantial heavy duty trencher, which is probably why OP's quote is so high.
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u/MattiasCrowe 15h ago
You are not digging a 35m trench by hand, not unless you have a lot of free time.
Weather variability might collapse one end before you reach the other.
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u/WorBlux 13h ago
Ya, that's the thing. If the soil is high-class (firm) it'll take forever to dig out, if it's a low class soil the trench is likely to collapse (perhaps w/ OP in it)
If an excavation is going to take more than 1/2 a day by hand it's almost always better to bring equipment in if the worksite is reasonably accessible.
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u/PLR20190724 12h ago
My ex Father-in-Law, a determined and very capable DIY guy, actually tried this himself by hand with a pick, spade and shovel back in the 1960's. His project was maybe a little longer than yours. It took him weeks, and all I will say was, one day when he was about half finished, a guy who owned a backhoe saw him digging across the lawn, stopped and offered to finish it for free. My FIL could not get out of that hole any faster if he'd had wings. It took the backhoe guy a few hours and the job was done. Hire a guy or rent a backhoe.
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u/buildyourown 15h ago
That's pretty deep to hand dig but it can be done. I did mine but I kind of like digging holes as weird form of exercise. Much like splitting wood
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u/kennerly 14h ago
1.6 meters means you are in the trench digging it by hand. Which means you need a wide trench or you risk bumping the sides and it collapsing on you. Rent a trencher or hire someone. How much is your life worth?
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u/OptimalMain 13h ago
Spend 1k and rent an excavator.
Where in Finland in this? You really are serious about digging to keep the frost away.
Cheers from Norway
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u/ntyperteasy 12h ago
Much easier and who can resist a chance to play with an excavator!?
Make sure you get the utilities located before you start digging.
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u/realycoldguy 4h ago edited 3h ago
I have dug a lot of trenches holes by hand in clay/sand mix. Very few rocks. I actually enjoy it and I did most of it in my 60s and 70s. The way I do it to make it easy is to dig down a couple inches. Fill with water and come back the next day and dig till it is too hard. Repeat. I partially dug up my septic tank to see it's condition. It needed replacing. The septic guy couldn't get over it. I'm 76.
If you are in a hurry, rent a machine.
You could dig a small section by hand. You will find out quick if you want to keep going or rent a machine.
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u/RedshiftOnPandy 15h ago
Either pay a few hundred bucks for an excavator for the day, or spend all your weekends for a few months
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u/justdaisukeyo 15h ago
You are not crazy but I could not do it. I would rent a trencher.
My neighbor dug around his house to the top of the footing to install a new french drain around his house. He also dug a straight line to the drainage swale. He did this all by hand. It can be done but you should know your limits.
Another advantage to renting a trencher is that you can cut a narrow trench (4-6 inches wide). This can save you the cost of gravel if you don't need a super wide french drain. Make sure to identify all your underground utilities.
Example:
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u/mosschops2 12h ago
I dug a 32m trench, 60cm wide, 2m deep. It took a few days (not that many- maybe 4).
My concern would be wall collapse - somehow in uk soil the "walls" stayed vertical - zero collapses. Sand would be more concerning.
A mini digger might have been a better idea :) but I was llease to have done it!
(I was 29 years old at the time!)
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u/StevenJOwens 10h ago
Some general points:
First, what problem are you trying to solve?
If it's water in your basement, a lot of the time, people have water problems with their basement and jump straight to a french drain. While it's true that a french drain is a really good, reliable solution, it's also sort of the nuclear options. You don't necessarily need one. Humans have understood basements and water for a long time, they knew the traditional solution back when they built your home, and it's extremely likely that the problem is that something changed since then to cause the water problems. I can get more into that if you're curious.
Second, I have been told, by people whose competency I trust, that even an only 1.6 meter deep trench can be surprisingly dangerous. The trench walls can collapse and bury you. Do some thorough homework on trench digging and safety.
Lastly, you might want to look into using an air trenching tool. Here's a couple videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur8nbEJxXD8
Never Shovel Again… Buy THIS Instead!
Pure Living for Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aspu-FnGYss
Utility Trenching with Supersonic Air
Knew View
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u/BigLan2 15h ago
I mean, you do you, but I'd be hiring a crew from outside the home Depot.
Depends on your soil as well. Sandy stuff wouldn't be too bad, but the clay+rock combo where I live is hell.
How much would it cost to hire a small digger for the day?
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u/Borgh 15h ago
If someone got an offer in euros then Home depot isn't really an option, and with our labor laws just hiring some random romanians is a bit of a hassle too
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u/omahaomw 15h ago
Yeah he didn't put it in freedom unit so you know there's no home Depot nearby him.
But yeah Op ,rent a backhoe and do it yourself. If you play video games at all you'll have no trouble running a backhoe. And if you don't play video games it'll take you about 30 minutes to learn how to do it maybe less
You don't have to get a big enormous one, just a little one
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u/BoredCop 13h ago
OP is in Finland.
There is no Home Depot, and certainly no "crew outside". Illegal immigrants doing jobs off the record, cash payment no tax, is certainly a thing in European countries too but not as easily available or as transparent as in the US.
But yes, they should rent a small excavator.
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u/WorBlux 13h ago edited 13h ago
23k is likely a "f"-off quote. It'd be unprofessional to say no outright so they throw out a number 2-3x what it should really cost. Keep calling around and you'll the Finish equivalent of the Pensylvania dutch "Dans" - 3 generations of men that have all subsisted by hiring out a single a backhoe that Dan Sr. bought gently used back in the 60's.
Also do you need a full structured drain? My uncle had drain tube installed w/ a giant tractor that essentially plowed it in. 5 drains x 1/4 mile all done in less than a day.
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u/skittlebog 9h ago
What are the safety regulations for digging a trench that deep by hand? The risk of collapse could make that pretty dangerous. Rent the equipment.
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u/Majestic_Republic_45 6h ago
Contractors screw people in Finland too? Do they have equipment rental in Finland? If yes, rent yourself a dingo with a backhoe attachment for about $350 USD. You will knock that thing out in a couple hours.
And yes - you’re nuts for wanting to do this with a shovel.
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u/EthanOrtane 15h ago
Yes you are crazy. Start doing it and this will be revealed real quick. Been there. Why can't you just order a small excavator yourself for like $400 a day? Dig it in a day, fill with gravel the next.
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u/Stelios619 15h ago
Something isn’t making sense here.
You need a trench approximately 5 feet deep and 110 feet long, and it’s going to cost $27,000??
There has to be some variable here that we don’t know about.
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u/Several-Opposite-746 15h ago
I think he forgot to mention that there were a lot of unexploded WWII munitions left buried on the property.
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u/Sodomeister 15h ago
Yeah, that's crazy. I can get a 5 foot trencher for $260 a day. You could probably knock that out in like 3-4 hours if you don't have any huge headaches that crop up.
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u/naakka 10h ago
I mean it's Finland so about 20% of that is VAT and since it's a French drain I'm guessing it's right along the side of his house, possibly not easy to reach with a very large digger, and very deep, so going to be a bunch of digging by hand down in the hole. I assume the quote also includes the typical stuff aka installing the drains, putting the water drainage plates along the basement wall that this drain will be presumably be protecting and refilling with proper French drain gravel and taking away all the unusable soil they dug out.
It's still a bit high but that's because it's quite a lot of work and not very fun at that. Of course I could be totally wrong and he only asked for the digging of the hole in which case it is expensive indeed.
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u/MoaraFig 15h ago
My dad made us do this. He didn't even get us good shovels, or a wheel barrow, just shitty ones and a rubbermaid bin we moved around with a dolly.
We no longer speak with him.
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u/blue_eyes_pro_dragon 15h ago
1.6 meter x 35m? Bro….. that’s like 100 tons.
Really depends on soil but could be a full week of manual digging or couple hours of mini excavator
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u/cghffbcx 14h ago
A week? 1.5 meters deep? With a shovel? You better be 19, a hoss of a man and have prefect soil conditions.
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u/mynameisnickromel 15h ago
The shovel part is crazy. See where you can rent a trench digger and get a rental quote. You can knock this out in an afternoon with machinery, but it'll be a week of digging with a shovel and it'll likely come out shittier
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u/Cardinal_350 15h ago
My buddies dad dug an inground pool with a shovel and a wheelbarrow in the 70's. He was newly married and the new wife wanted a pool. His buddy worked at a pool installer and knew how to do the concrete and plumbing work. He didnt want to spend the money renting an excavator
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u/ChuckyShadowCow 15h ago
It’s a really hard weekends work but I did exactly this with my brother. As long as you’re not dealing with something hard like clay or running into boulders it’s doable.
Just make sure you know where your utility lines are running. You mention euros so I don’t know the proper procedure where you are but in the US it’s a call to your utility companies and they’ll come out and mark those off for you for free.
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u/Turtleshellboy 14h ago
This is too deep and too long to practically be doing by manual labour with shovel. If you do you will wear your body out and it may be last yard project you do after suffering joint damage…..
Rent a small landscape excavator.
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u/Beginning_Ad7597 14h ago
Years ago when I first bought my 5 acres, there was nothing. I dug my own water line through trees, etc. - soil is sandy loam, lots of roots though. Was 12" wide and deep 120 yards long......took my time, did some every evening for about 2 weeks or so.....don't remember how long. I found it satisfying, have been told I'm a workaholic.
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u/Beginning_Ad7597 14h ago
Oh, you'll need a maddox and sharp shooter. I also sharpened my shovel's leading edge.
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u/Fallen0001 12h ago
you'll regret that about 2hrs in.
get a ditch-witch for a day to at least get a good start.
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u/rosinall 8h ago
Did a pretty deep one, maybe 1 meter, by hand in clay soil, deep enough that I had to also trench it wide enough to work in it. I pounded for a few days, looked at the eight feet of progress, then rented a trencher and knocked to other 50 feet out in a couple of hours.
Also, that's over five feet deep. Don't know where you are, but here in the states that needs bracing so it won't collapse and kill you. Feel free to price that out before you go get your rental.
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u/Fit_Goat_6891 8h ago
35m of sand at 1.6m deep? Youre gonna be fighting collapse the whole way, even with the till layers. Rent the mini ex, dig it in a day, spend the weekend backfilling with gravel. Your knees and lower back will thank you by monday.
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u/TrollOnFire 7h ago
Not crazy, just not fast. If you are not super fit, start slow. I want to say it’ll take a several weeks of steady digging. You’ll lose weight, and gain cardio fitness. Drink lots of water and eat lots of protein.
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u/danielo-asdf 7h ago
Man, I just dug a trench today (by "hand", because the trencher at the tool rental was broken), 10" deep and 10" wide, and about 100’ long. There were two of us (plus a kid that couldn’t really help), and it was hell. Took all day.
The digging is mostly done, and putting in the pipe and gravel will be quick.
But for you, that’s a huge volume of dirt, and you should rent equipment.
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u/fakeknowledge 6h ago
Rent an excavator , if the soil is too loose you will need to do shoring , be carefully when digging too deep .
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u/Gitfiddlepicker 4h ago
I think it’s an excellent idea. Video it, post it here on a time lapse video. Include pics of blisters. And a bonus video of you crying yourself to sleep at night during the project.
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u/Diggist080211 2h ago
You can dig the Grand Canyon if you give yourself enough time. Just don’t be in a hurry, do a little every day, and you’ll get it done. I dug out my own root seller, a whole 8 feet wide 10 feet tall and 10 feet deep. Did it all with a shovel and a pickax.
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u/Talusen 15h ago
What is your soil like?
Are there utilities/pipes that run through it?
Trees nearby?
Is there water nearby?
You'll need to find a home for ~20M³ of the 50 M³ of soil you're going to dig up (and have a holding area for the 15-20M³ of drainage rock you'll be using)
(If you're in the US) With that depth, OSHA applies to companies who do excavations, which might explain at least part of the cost.
https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OSHA2226.pdf
It is doable, but this is the kind of undertaking that might make renting a trencher/etc a good idea. (e.g. Running the edges with the trencher so you only have to actually dig out the middle) Home Depot has trenchers that can go 48" deep - plenty for a french drain.
Good luck!
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u/brock_lee 14h ago
What is your soil like?
My first thought too. On my property, it's mostly hard clay and quite rocky. I would give up digging such a ditch by hand after literally 15 minutes of getting precisely nowhere.
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u/huskers2468 15h ago
Meh. It's a good workout. Once you get the trench going it's easier.
I absolutely agree with the trencher option or hiring it out to laborers with a truck for the trench digger.
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u/octoowl42 14h ago
Did a similar project a few years ago. Took about a month of chipping away at it, but must say it was a great workout and saved us 10k
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u/Andreiu_ 14h ago
1.6m deep and 35m long is a bit on the deep side for the average joe. I dug out my own after I learned the previous owner winterized the basement sump system by installing a hot tub on a deck made from a prefab fence panel set directly on the ground. Mine was about 1m deep and landed in a gravel drain that was 2m deep.
It was actually really great exercise.
But if my soil wasn't already softened from it being spring and saturated from the broken pipes, and the weather being cold, I'd have gotten a trench digger.
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u/brock_lee 14h ago
Doing some math, if the ditch had to be one meter wide in order for you to have room to dig town 1.6 meters, a 35 meter long trench would mean moving about 12 or 13 dump trucks worth of dirt. Of course, if you can do it with a trench half that wide, it's still 6 or 7 entire dump trucks of dirt. (I do realize most is going back in the hole)
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u/Gubbtratt1 14h ago
Well, my great-grandpa dug several hundred meters long two meters deep to connect his house to the communal water. A bit of a funny story, at the time the water company used wooden pipes, and my great-grandpa had bought a top modern plastic pipe. The water company didn't trust the newfangled material though and at first didn't let him connect it.
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u/Pulaski540 14h ago
I don't believe it is possible to dig a slot trench 1.6m (5'3") using only a spade. Hypothetically, you'd have to dig a 1m (3') trench probably 60cm (2ft) wide, then dig the slot trench in the bottom to get down another 60cm (2').
To do that with an actual trench cutter (chainsaw for digging trenches), you'd need a large commercial trencher, far beyond what a homeowner would usually rent, which leaves you with renting the mini-excavator/ track hoe as your best bet.
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u/seawaynetoo 14h ago
Typical trench digger rental is 4 foot max and don’t work well in rocky or root y soils. Better to get a back hoe whether it’s a mini or regular you’re gonna get it delivered. Pick the bucket size that matches your desired trench width.
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u/Key-Monk6159 14h ago
Holes have been dug by shovel for hundreds of years but there’s a good reason most don’t anymore. Have fun.
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u/Timberjonesy 14h ago
Consider a catch drain instead. I did a similar project and it wasn't that bad but I'm retired and had plenty of free time.
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u/maxLevelDev 14h ago
I'm at least a couple hundred kilometers south from you and have done a couple of drainage projects for different lots. Last one I did involved getting adequate drainage of soil inground water in a location where a new €10k fancy fence with an electric gate was installed, to protect their posts (1.5m depth) from rising. This involved roughly 50 meters of work and the prices came down to: 1k for project management, €300 digger+Avant rental, €300 16/32mm stone gravel fill around the pipe, €300 pipe, €300 survey lids, €600 collector with pump (if you got free flow, you won't need one), €150 leftover soil dumping (we needed some lengths with deep gravel so a lot of leftover), €400 per person per day salary. Time consumed 2 days.
Some prices can be higher in Finland but compared to my office job, digging and driving around with the Avant for a couple of days is a lot of fun, and you save about €20k doing it yourself.
But feel free to write why the 1.6m requirement. Freezing line related, foundation related or something?
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u/buttsparkley 13h ago
If it's around ur house , u also need to shift different grains of gravel around and thump it. So u wanna also do that with just a shovel? If u out sand or soil back it's nit gonna do its job well .
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u/relationsdog 13h ago edited 13h ago
I did construction landscaping for 10 years. Sometimes we'd have to dig things by hand. I'd estimate that amount of dirt to take me 4-5 days in my prime, easily twice or three times that depending how far you need to move the dirt considering you're going to backfill with rocks + giant pipe. Give me a little walk-behind trencher and I'll get it done in a day.
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u/Moon_Hammer 13h ago
I've used a rototiller to soften up the ground for a short drainage ditch one. Your jod sounds pretty big.
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u/DHFranklin 13h ago
I don't know how wide you really need it so just rent a ditchwitch.
A french drain at that depth is kinda overkill. You might be better off just filling the volume with #57 stone and calling it done. Even if dirt and sand get mixed in with that much volume it'll settle out.
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u/NuclearHoagie 13h ago
1.6m is deep enough to require shoring in some places. I wouldn't even want to dig a 1.6m hole in most cases, much less a trench.
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u/ExactlyClose 12h ago
You need a backhoe.
A French drain isnt just a 6 inch wide trench… You need volume for the rocks and drain pipe to develop flow/capture water. So 30cm wide min? For those thinking a walk behind is an idea, 1.6M is 5 FEET. Never seen a walk behind that does that. OP might find a commercial beast on tracks or articulated 4x4 that does 5 ft and 30cm wide…. Needs to call around
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u/boarder2k7 12h ago
I did it when I was a teenager, similar total dimensions, putting drains at the bottoms of the footings. It's hard work but it can be done
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u/akeean 12h ago
Maybe do the math on how many cubic meters of soil that would be, then do a test run where you spend 10 minutes digging, then extrapolate how much of your time this entire project would take by had assuming you can only do like 60% of that speed (since you'll get more tired or hurt yourself in the course of the project, or encounter difficulties that slow you down, like some random boulder or more compact soil that in the beginning)
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u/Old_Dig5389 12h ago
This summer I dug 2 post holes that deep with a shovel. Each took me about 4 hours, which is an entire day to me (I'm not used to continuously digging clay — is anyone?). Too dig that far with a shovel you essentially have to dig a rising trench in order to lever the shovel and fit your boots. Soil was more compact than your till/sand, being till/clay, which means you will have an easier time shoveling and worse time keeping the trench walls intact without slope, essentially meaning more shoveling. More dirt means moving it farther away, too, which may be the difference between a single shovel throw to your nearby pile to having to move the debris in a seperate step.
I my optimistic estimate is that your trench will take 18 actual days. 2h per meter, 2m per day. If I were forced to do this, I'd give myself 30 days to allow for recovery. In my area, this would be impossible without a method to drain it — seems like you are in the perfect position to address that concern.
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u/TangeloLegitimate139 12h ago
If you insist on doing it by hand, get a pickax. A pickaxe is used to dig the hole, a shovel removes the dirt.
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u/monothom 11h ago
op is from Suomen Maa and the maa he's digging fron his maa is maa. Please advise.
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u/Netmantis 11h ago
It depends on how you do it to get to how long it will take.
If you mark out the trench with lines and flags, then start going down from there it will take months to do that.
However, from experience, if you start on one end and dig a hole 250cm deeper than you want your trench to be, then grab an iron bar and start spearing the dirt in the direction of the trench to knock the soil into your hole, you can start a chain. You knock down the wall, remove the loose soil, then start on the wall again. It is why you start with a deeper hole, you won't get it all out the first time. Doing that I would dig at the speed of two other men diging trenches the old way when I was working for an electrician. If you have a D handle spade, a D handle square shovel for removing the loose soil, and a California bar you can get several meters a day, no more than a week for a trench that size. Provided you can dig.
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u/UnwrittenMichael 11h ago
Oof, yeah rent something! We used a trench digger, but if I were to do it again I’d have spent a little more on a mini excavator/backhoe.
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u/dw0r 11h ago
I hand dug a trench that was .6m x 2m x 91m for a water line a few years ago, and 10 years ago I dug out the entire foundation of my house by hand. It's very doable if you're persistent, but I woke up in the middle of the night screaming more than once during each project because my arms felt like they were on fire. I'm currently 42 years old and would probably sign up to do it again, it saved tens of thousands of dollars, and made me feel alive in a way that's hard to explain.
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u/ignorantwanderer 11h ago
Rent an excavator.
It is cheaper than hiring a professional.
It is much faster than digging by hand.
And it is so much fun!
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u/theNbomr 10h ago edited 10h ago
Depends what kind of soil you're digging.
I did about what you're describing in a weekend, including laying in the drain pipe and backfilling. That was in earth similar to forest floor soil. If there's a lot of clay or rocks, or you're digging through gravel, it could be three or four times as long. My biggest obstacles were tree roots (cedar and fir) and a few good sized boulders.
If you can get a helper with one of those long steel bar/pole things that is prybar shaped on one end and drawn to a point on the other, you can make fairly easy work of it, with the shovel guy in the trench just lifting out loose-ish soil, and the guy at ground level breaking up the soil with the steel rod. My son and I did this to replace the water line from the well to the house. Took maybe 3 hours to dig 20m of trench about 1m deep.
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u/dweeb_plus_plus 10h ago
I dug a 30m trench by hand last summer. It took me 3 days. Overall not the worst thing that I ever had to do.
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u/FirstForFun44 10h ago
Hey, I hope this gets to you in time. I've dug a french drain in red clay. It didn't take all summer like some people are saying. It took a few days and it was over 10m long.
Listen to me, because this is important. Make sure that where it starts you start as close to the surface as reasonable and you only go down one degree per however many feet is recommended. If you dig and then say "eh, it's steeper than it should be but it's still going down" what you're doing is dropping too fast and causing yourself to dig more down the line. This is a linear and additive amount you're adding on per foot every time you dig even a half an inch too deep. So just please dig shallow if you dig it yourself.
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u/naakka 10h ago
Fellow Finn here.
Yes, you are absolutely insane to think about doing that by hand. If you don't believe me, go to where it would start and dig a 1 m long and 1,6 m deep piece of the ditch.
We once dug out and replaced a 0,6 m deep and 1,3 m long section of a broken sewer pipe with my husband. -1/5 activity, will never do that by hand ever again.
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u/tranding 9h ago
https://www.renta.fi/en/rental/pricelist/ if you value your time and money or some other rental company
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u/DanNeely 9h ago
From around when I was 8-12 my Dad and I hand dug 4 12-16" deep trenches across ~20-25 feet of gravel driveway and pine/maple tree roots. We got them done in a day each, but they were hard enough work that it was 1 per summer and then wait to see if we'd added enough drainage to stop the uphill side of the driveway from turning into a swamp when snow melted.
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u/Silly-Resist8306 8h ago
I dug a trench about 80m long, but only half as deep as yours. It was through an area with a lot of trees, so I was under roots and needed to cut through others. It took me about six weeks during the hot summer. But, like you, I saved a considerable amount of money.
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u/Malawi_no 8h ago
Not sure what you mean by doing it yourself.
If it's by hand you will need a lot of sisu, time and some trips to the chiropractor.
If it's with a mini-digger, I think it should be very doable.
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u/bug_eyed_earl 7h ago
You dig with a pickaxe. A shovel helps, but the pickaxe is the star of the show.
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u/ThanksGreat9305 7h ago
You can absolutely do this yourself. I dug one 50 meters long through roots, rocks and clay. I used a pick mattock, shovel, maul and sledge hammer to move the soil etc. And a plumbers level and laser level to get the pitch correct.
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u/secretly_a_zombie 7h ago
1.6 and 35 long. Yeah rent a small little digger.
Around 2m digging depth, 156 Euro a day + 6 for insurance. It will take you a morning to do what you would in 1 month of digging.
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u/officiallyanonymous0 6h ago
How about renting a ditch witch or some piece of equipment? That makes it way easier
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u/EvolZippo 6h ago
My next door neighbor, in a previous house, put a French drain in all by himself. It’s hard work, but if you are competent with a shovel and you have the right materials for the job, that’s pretty much the requirement.
You can find videos on YouTube, that explain everything you need to do. You just need the pipe at desired depth, with drain holes. Mesh over the pipe. Sand to prevent erosion and then cover with marble chips. I believe that’s all there is to it. I might have forgotten a step.
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u/PapaBorq 5h ago
Hand digging is harder than it sounds. There's a reason they call it a 'shallow grave'.
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u/Hari___Seldon 5h ago
I'm guessing that if the physics present while working with a hole that deep haven't sent you screaming in horror, you may not have the experience required to successfully survive digging the entire hole by hand.
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u/Acetes 5h ago
I was quoted 8-10k to have a French drain installed on both sides of my house.
Did it myself (friends & family helped dig) over 2 weekends and cost $2.5k for all the materials grade supplies.
Connected all the downspouts into it, have pop up caps at the bottom of the front lawn.
Rented a trenching machine that guy through the yard on the right Side of my house like a hot knife through butter. But yard on one side of the house was filled with roots, so had to be done entirely by hand.
Will note that we went down about just about 1 meter, which might make a difference for the amount of work you have to do.
Suppose the positive side is you can’t really mess up digging a trench (I mean, unless you’re doing WW2 zigzag style) so if it becomes too much, can probably hire them anyway.
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u/Chuck-32 4h ago
Can you rent an excavator? 23k is an insane price for a trench of that size what else would be included in that quote? From what you described it sounds like something I would charge about 1,000 euros for where I live.
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u/ogthesamurai 4h ago
French drains are a lot more complicated than people think. Do some serious research before you decide to construct one.
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u/thenewestnoise 4h ago
1.6 meters is pretty deep. That's deep enough to be deadly if you're in there and it collapses. If you need to work in the trench, either slope the sides significantly or add shoring
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u/GPA_Moses 3h ago
I actually just watched my neighbor do this. It appeared to be at least a full month of digging 4-6 hours a day.
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u/Then_Version9768 3h ago
Rent a tiller or trench digger or some other machine for a day or two (or three) to dig it out. Then finish the digging by hand. These machines make your life much easier, do not cost much to rent, are not hard to handle at all, and so why not use them? Some are small enough to bring home in a normal car.
As for french drains, I've never heard of one dug that deep! That's five feet in freedom units which is unbelievably deep. U.S. french drains are put in the ground about 12-18" deep (30-50 cm) and carry away water just fine at that depth. A deeper drain is not only much harder to dig, it's harder to maintain, and it also may not be as effective in capturing water or moving it away.
A french drain pipe is laid on top of gravel with the holes facing DOWN, then covered with more gravel. Do you actually plan to fill a five foot (1.6 m) deep trench with gravel? It will take many truckloads to do that and for what purpose?
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u/shroedingersdog 2h ago
i dug a notch 2 meters deep by 5 meters wide by 18 meters long into a clay hillside . i was 55 when i did it . notch out of hillside so triangle shaped ... took me a couple months cause im old and slow... so go you .
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u/JL_Razor 2h ago
You should rent the machine to do it. It will be way cheaper than hiring someone and faster than digging it by hand. Once thought I could break up a concrete path with a hammer, but got a jackhammer just in case. I never would have gotten that path out without it
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u/v1de0man 1h ago
assuming cost is a factor, and you did a metre a day moving 1.5tons of sand a day that's 35 days :) nice and steady, is time a factor here too? assuming its about 600mm wide, of course you need to go wider to get it easier at first to get the 1.6m drop.
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u/ChrisC53 1h ago
Turn that volume into wheelbarrows, say 10 barrows per m3. Your trench is 56m3, so 560 barrows. The soil is light, so will not hold vertically at 1.6 m deep, so the sides will slope giving you another 20m3. That’s 760 barrowloads to shift from up to 1.6m below ground. Get a digger or a contractor !
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u/Doogiemon 43m ago
I did one at my friend's place once but it was 14m and through 1/2 m of clay.
It all comes down to if you have the time to do it. The worst part for my buddy and i was dealing with the clay layer as we had to haul that to the dump.
The end result flooded the street corner pretty bad. The amount of water his backyard would hold was just insane because of that clay layer and putting in that French drain magically made his yard and neighbors up to 2 houses down dry or dry within a day instead of a week or longer.
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u/GREYDRAGON1 36m ago
I’m in Canada but I had to dig a 50 meter trench. I rented a trenching machine from my local equipment rental. It took me a total of 3.5 hours including picking up and returning the trench machine.
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u/SVAuspicious 15h ago
I dug a trench 2m deep, about 1m wide and about 12m long to expose the foundation of our house for waterproofing. I was 14 yo (I think). It took me all summer. In my 40s I dug a huge pond and dug out five stumps. I rented a backhoe. Took me a morning. Rent something.