If you know exactly what you need done and just need labor then drain doctors does quality work. If you are having flooding issues and need the problem identified then this is long but worth the read for you.
This work was done last October and I wrote the review then. I waited to post it to see if I would change my mind about anything.
During the initial sales pitch, the tech told us that the hardpack at 12" would divert water and
was probably draining toward the house because that's the way the hill sloped. We asked him if the water could penetrate the hardpack and I believe he said "hard as rock, no water is going through that." At another point he said "we do a lot of research into these things" and that although a French drain wasn't 100% certain, it should do the trick "unless there is an underground stream". He quoted a 12-18" drain because of the hardpack. When they arrived, he dug a four foot test hole and found water coming out the bottom so they dug a four foot deep French drain (no extra charge) to capture all that water. The drain goes to about 12" from the surface then they dump the clay hardpack that they said previously was impermeable on top of it. When I argued about it, the tech said the drain wasn't mean to catch surface water, it was meant to catch ground water. When I demanded a fix before paying, he said topsoil wasn't permeable so replacing the clay hardpack with topsoil wouldn't help and offered to do a drain on top of the drain to catch surface water. (Again, no extra charge).
In addition to the two destroyed bushes, they piled the clay from the trench onto the rest of our yard without any tarp. When I told them to scrape it off, he said that he did it to level the yard so water would hit the clay and the surface water would flow into the drain - the drain that on another day he said wasn't to collect surface water.
So lets review: Tech says on that hardpack is hard as rock and when water hits it, the water will flow through the topsoil to the 12" deep French drain. Then later, tech says that the drain is to catch deep water which means water underneath the supposedly impermeable hard pack, and that water won't flow through the topsoil anyway. Those are the facts, my opinion is that they say whatever suits them at the moment.
Lured by a "10% if you book now!!" offer and a hurry to get the job done, we hired them to do a French drain. Since then our basement has flooded again and we've had four other companies out to look at it. One said the odds of a French drain having worked was 50/50, the other two flatly said they wouldn't have done a French drain. Three of four suggested an interior footer drain. Drain Doctors had also suggested an interior footing drain and quoted $12k for it. We went with their $6k French drain instead. Here's the kicker, the three quotes we got later for an interior footer drain range from $5.5 to $8.5k (because they use gravity feed instead of the sump pump that drain doctors said to do.) Had we waited, we could have had a 100% effective interior solution for the same price as the "probably work" French drain.
After the work was done, the basement flooded again. The tech wanted to relevel our yard (no extra charge) so the surface water flowed to a corner and then cut a trench through our planting berm for it to drain out of. When I told him that would look ugly his reply was "we're the drain doctors, not the landscape doctors." When they were selling the job, the French drain was the solution. No mention was made of leveling the yard.
(It was pretty obvious they weren't landscape people since they tore out two bushes and threw them away without a word. They were the kind that die back in the winter so they looked like just a bunch of dead sticks, but they were obviously enough bushes that a question would have been in order - I was home at the time)
Then the boss came out to look at the site (at the other companies it was always the boss or a 20 year veteran that did the quoting.) His suggestion was to tear all the drywall off the basement to see where the water was coming in, then build an exterior footer drain will wall board down to the point water was coming in (up to eight feet deep). We didn't have them quote that, but another firm ballparked an 8 foot dig at $30k. This is the same boss who, when told another firm wanted to do a drain board partway down the wall said that was a ridiculous solution. Apparently not such a ridiculous solution when it's his firm doing it.
Drain doctors did do quality work, and they came back and tried to fix the problem at no extra charge (although we were withholding payment). But when it comes to diagnosing the problem shame on us for not waiting for more experienced firms to quote the job. read more
