Tallahassee Yard Drainage About yard drainage in Tallahassee, FL
Tallahassee Yard Drainage is a referral service covering Tallahassee and about 35 miles around it. Enquiries that come through this site go to licensed, insured local drainage contractors, and this page is about what that means in practice, including the things this site deliberately does not claim.
What this site is
It is a place to describe a drainage problem and get somebody competent to come and look at it. This website shares your information with local, licensed and insured providers who will contact you about your request.
The work itself is carried out by licensed, insured local contractors. You are entitled to ask to see both the licence and the insurance before anyone starts, and asking is sensible whoever you end up hiring.
What this site does not claim
There are no reviews or star ratings on these pages, no years in business, no job counts and no awards, for one reason: none of those have been verified for this listing, and publishing them unverified would make everything else here less trustworthy rather than more.
There are no published prices either. Drainage jobs here run from a buried downspout extension to a full system with catch basins and a tie-in, and any range narrow enough to be useful on a web page would be untrue. You get a number after somebody has walked the yard, and before anything is dug.
Why the writing is about clay
Most drainage advice available online assumes sandy, fast draining soil, which describes a great deal of Florida and does not describe Tallahassee. This city sits in the Red Hills, and the clay under the topsoil is behind the majority of standing water complaints in Leon County. Advice that assumes water will soak away has nothing to work with here.
That is also why these pages keep insisting on the site visit. The three common causes of standing water, the grade, the soil and something delivering more water than the ground can take, produce an identical looking puddle and are fixed in three different ways. The only way to know which one is in front of you is to look.
How a job goes
Four steps, in this order, every time.
- 01
Describe it
Where the water sits, how long it stays, and whether it showed up recently or has always been there. Those three answers decide most of what happens next.
- 02
Walk the yard
Grade checked with a level, a test hole dug to see how fast the soil actually drains, downspouts traced. Where water ends up and where it comes from are usually different places.
- 03
Plan and price
One written plan, with the reasoning for it, and a number before anything is dug. If regrading would fix it and a drain would be overkill, that is what the plan says.
- 04
Build it
Most residential systems go in inside one to two days. The yard gets put back: sod relaid, beds restored, spoil hauled off rather than spread in the low spot.
Start with the problem, not the product
Describe where the water sits and how long it stays. Everything else follows from that, including whether you need anything built at all.
Site visits by appointment