Driveway Culvert

[Mike Heidrick]

Anyone installed a driveway culvert? I have a small on vehicle wide or so one that crosses a drainage ditch into the yard area that leads to my new shop. I want to have one that is about 5X that long so I can widen the access to the new building. Any advice from the memebrs here? Ill be looking at youtube too. Thining soil compaction and slope are the only real gotchas.

[Jim Andrew]

Yes I have installed a culvert. The main thing is to get one big enough to handle the flow of water. Not hard to install it, if you have a skidsteer, just make the thing fit low enough to not block water in the ditch, and fill it in. Put gravel on top. Even better, if you dig dirt out and put some gravel under the culvert. Will allow the water to drain away and the culvert will last a long time.

[Ole Anderson]

A few questions: How deep and wide is the ditch? Depth is more important than width. Are there drive culverts on either side of you? Does the ditch drain a lot of acreage, or just some front yards and road? Needed to determine what diameter culvert you need. I wouldn't go smaller than 12" for a road ditch or any smaller than the ones next to you. Ideally you will set the invert (bottom of the culvert) even with the bottom of the ditch and no less than 1/8" per foot slope (about 1%). Set it deeper than the ditch and it will fill in too easily. What kind of soils do you have?

[David L Morse]

I would check with the agency that maintains your ditch, probably the county highway department. They will almost certainly have requirements for size and depth as well as material. Also, be sure to have a check made for buried utilities. I replaced the culvert on our rental a few years ago and had to hand dig it because of buried gas and phone lines.

[Tom M King]

I've put in a bunch of them, but here, on a state highway, you provide the pipe, and the state crew comes and does the install for no charge. Go as large as possible on the pipe.

[Tom M King]

If you need to design the width of a turn-in, google "driveway design highway entrance" and you will find all sorts of information about radiuses and widths for different vehicle types and road widths.

[William C Rogers]

I would check with the agency that maintains your ditch, probably the county highway department. They will almost certainly have requirements for size and depth as well as material. Also, be sure to have a check made for buried utilities. I replaced the culvert on our rental a few years ago and had to hand dig it because of buried gas and phone lines.

Mike, I installed across the entire front of my house. I didn't want to cut the ditch with a push mower. I was "required" by the county to install two surface drains as this was on a street to keep water off the street. I used 16" concrete pipe. They were "seconds" with minor chips that was 1/2 the cost of firsts.

edit: my length was around 150-200 feet.