You’re Watering What?

This isn’t really a plumbing how-to or anything, because as our site visitors know, .\\ doesn’t do plumbing. But I was recently reminded of a “trick” related to both good home upkeep and plumbing - something we had to do on a regular basis when we lived in northeast Texas. There’s a practice up there, in the drier, sunbaked areas, called “watering the house.” Yep, I said watering the house, or more specifically, the foundation.

In certain areas where the ground dries out and separates in the summer, it’s essential to moisten the soil around a slab - if your house sits on a slab, then you end up watering your house about twice a month between May and October. If the ground around and under your slab dries out completely, your slab can crack more easily. Since slab repairs and house-leveling are expensive, watering the house is a sensible practice.

For folks who live in areas prone to slab breakage, here’s a really simple way to manage this potential risk… it’s called a soak hose. You’ve seen them in the garden department of your local discount store - those black pourous hoses that allow water to slowly seep through them. They don’t cost much more than regular hoses and they solve the moisture problem very handily.

At one point in the spring about a year after we moved to Corsicana, TX, we dug out flower beds along the two sides of our home. We were thinking about laying soak hoses in the back of the trench so we could water the beds without watering the yard if we needed to. A neighbor, who’d lived in that area all his life came over to see what we were up to and when saw what we were doing he got one of those “eureka” looks then dug up parts of his yard right next to the house and put soak hoses in the ground. When we asked him why he put the hoses where he had no planting beds, he said “to water the house.” I guess he assumed that we knew about the slab breakage problems so prevalent in that area in the hot dry summers. We had accidentally done just about the best thing you can do for a house that was already built - put in a watering system for the slab.

In order to use the soak hoses without interferring with any other use of the outdoor spigots, we bought a couple of “Y” connections from the local nursery - we didn’t buy those from the discount store because the connectors the nursery had were solid brass and felt a lot more hefty, and we didn’t want the connectors to crack in the winter. And yeah, it’s strange to live in a place where it’s 110 degrees in the summer and 10 degrees in the winter. Anyway, the “splitters” we got had individual valve controls so we could turn on the main spigot and then selectively turn on or off the two split out connections, thus enabling us to water the house without watering the yard, or vice versa.

We were never able to determine the longevity of this kind of solution though. You have to admit, the idea of putting a pourous hose under the dirt seems like you’re just asking mother nature to break up your pretty hose. We lived in that house for about ten years and never had a problem with degradation of the hoses - I don’t know what they’re made of but evidently they hold up pretty well when they’re used regularly. You could probably accomplish the same thing by taking a regular rubber hose and poking holes in it. The point is, sometimes you need to water your house. You might check with your local agricultural extension office and find out if the soil in your area puts your slab at risk of cracking. If so, don’t just sit there, water your house!

~ .\\