It's been a dry end to the summer, but when it has rained, it's tended to be aggressive with a lot of water falling in a fairly short amount of time. That's exactly the sort of rainfall that was giving us grief. The good news (knock on wood) that the new gutters and the adjustments made in how they connect to the house seem to be working. We've had heavy rain (at one point last night, it was falling at almost 3 inches per hour), but none of overflowing of gutters and sheeting down the side of the house.
Despite that good news, I was still worried about water backing up in the walk-out basement well and potentially flowing under the basement door. There's a small drain there with a cast-iron pipe headed out into the yard. I've never really known how that works. It might lead over to the retaining wall, but it doesn't seem to be connected to any of the weep holes in the wall.
When we first moved in, I cleared a lot of dirt out of the drainage hole, which had been blocking the pipe. More recently, I picked up a Drain King H34 hose attachment that jets water down the pipe. The idea is that the bladder swells to keep water from flowing back down the pipe and it forces out whatever is clogging things. I did manage to make a little progress with that, but it also led to water just bubbling up in the yard about 12 feet from the drain.
Concerned that I was going to cause a sinkhole if I kept forcing water down the pipe and into the yard, I eventually called in a professional.
A go at snaking it came back with just a hunk of the local clay indicating that (as expected) the pipe either had broken/collapsed or it did actually just dead-end into dirt (clay). After some discussion of options it was decided to just put in a new pipe, but angled like the gutter drain to flow into the side yard. There's a good change of elevation that direction, which made it easy to ensure the pipe would be emptying out. It took a few hours of work (interrupted by a crazy thunderstorm), but it's now complete.
