Well, the good news is I’m still alive, the bad news is I got really sick. Just a weirdly long cold and fever. Anyhow, I’m slowly getting back to it but don’t have much information to report.
Since wasn’t well enough to do much physical work I did look into some non-immediate projects. The land my family has heavy clay soil and often holds too much water. There is plenty of slope, about 6% grade, so the solution seems like ditches or tile drains to let the water run downhill into either ponds or the natural creek that flows through the property.
Mapping out the slop is rather difficult, but Google Earth Pro, which is free and downloads on the computer allows you to draw a path and then see the elevation profile. I also was able to overlay a .geoTIFF file from a Canadian lidar survey (High Resolution Digital Elevation Model Mosaic – Terrain) for better elevation values but the problem with lidar is that it can be confused by tall trees, so it only works for the cleared areas of the land. And the data is old, so land that I have cleared it doesn’t know about. I suspect the USA Landsat data is better.
Digging ditches is the easiest, and there are some ditches there from long long ago (50+ years?) but they are mostly filled in with sediment, to the point of being ineffective. So tile drains would be better and longer lasting but there isn’t anyone around here who does tile drain installs. For DIY the cheapest pipe I could find was 1 CAD per ft. At 30 ft spacing, that’s 1450 ft of pipe per acre, so the cost climbs pretty quickly if you want to do a big field. Trenching and backfill aren’t free either.
Long ago the tile pipes were fired clay sections about 1 ft long butted up dry end to end. The water flowed in through the but joints and then down the pipe. I guess they still make them, though it’s uncommon, I found a company in New Zealand claiming that they are more durable because you can pressure wash snake-clean them without damage. Anyhow that reminded me of another thing I saw about making pavers with post-consumer plastic and sand or rock dust. This is pretty easy, just heat plastic til it melts then add the sand, and pour it into molds. There is no reason you couldn’t use the process to make tile sections. Strength is similar to concrete and underground uv and freeze-thaw cycles aren’t an issue. It would be a good use for postconsumer ABS and polystyrene (PS) which are difficult to recycle, in Nova Scotia I think they collect solid PS but the foam is landfilled. I imagine the ABS is landfilled eventually too. Anyhow, I’m not going to do that now, but if someone else wants to make me 10s of thousands of plastic/sand drain tiles I’ll take them! The pavers could also be useful for barn floors if they are significantly cheaper than pouring concrete.
Sun Aquasystems 