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Send your downspout water two feet further

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1The short version

The whole downspout does its job perfectly for ten feet and then quits in the last two, dumping everything it just collected right back at the one spot it was supposed to protect. It usually ends in a diverting feature, a simple bend of around 70 degrees at the bottom, though a downspout may instead connect to a sewer, a runoff drain, or a seepway that lets water soak in gradually.

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2What goes wrong

A downspout that dumps water straight down next to the house sends exactly the volume the gutter just collected from the whole roof into the six inches of soil against the foundation, which is the opposite of what the rest of the drainage system is trying to do. It's a common oversight precisely because the pipe itself looks like it's doing its job right up until the last foot.

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3The two or three ways people actually fix it

A cheap plastic or concrete extension, unrolled or snapped on, carries water four to six feet from the wall for the cost of one trip to the hardware store. A buried solid pipe running to a pop-up emitter further out in the yard hides the extension entirely and handles a bigger volume. Tying the downspout into an underground drain system, sometimes the same trench as a French drain, is the most complete and most involved fix.

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