Tastic Drain
Landscape Surface Drain and Ground Level Rain Gutter
The only drain that disappears into your landscape – no grates, no pipes, no concrete.
Conventional channel drains solve a hardscape problem. Tastic Drain solves a landscape problem. It’s the only drain system designed to sit in soil, fill with the stones of your choosing, and blend seamlessly into a dry creek bed or drainage swale. No grate to trip over. No pipe outlet to engineer. No concrete to pour around it. Just grade the ground, set it, fill it with rocks, and it works — permanently. The dual-level design with anti-clog weep slits means it keeps working after every storm, every autumn leaf drop, and every muddy season without intervention. Catch run-off on slopes in a dry creek bed lined with Tastic Drain.
- Invisible by design — stone-filled, naturalistic, no visible hardware
- Contractor-fast install — 8 ft sections maintain grade over distance; heat-bendable around obstacles; no specialty fittings
- Proven on wet basements
Run-off RUNS off. The lower level void improves drainage. The smooth surfaces insure that all the run-off actually runs off.
Fill it with stone, gravel, or rocks of your choosing.
The straight form factor makes it easy to set it into the ground maintaining a grade over long distances.
It’s available in full height, useful for holding larger rocks, or low-height which is easier to fill when using small stones. Both handle a huge volume of run-off.
Full-height is best for setting in the ground at the bottom of a drainage field or dry creek bed, beneath large rocks.
Low-height is ideal as both a surface drain, and as a ground level rain gutter catching drips from the roof. Small stones disperse the droplets.
Comprised of a length of Tastic cover stock, with an insert of Tastic base. That insert is modified with the addition of water weep slits. Not weep “holes”, as round drains can suck in debris and clog. These are weep slits. Testing shows them immune to clogging, once protected from large debris and leaves by your stones.
Tastic Drain is available in 8 foot lengths and 4 foot lengths. Shorter ones are cheaper to ship.
We call it a 4 foot length, but it is actually sized to fit in a 4 foot box, so our “4 foot” pieces are more like 47-1/4 inches.
The longer ones install quicker maintaining grade over a distance. Overlap pieces for any total length you need.
Set Tastic Drain in the ground at the low point and grade the surrounding landscape right up to the edge of the Tastic Drain so run-off can run in. Then overfill with stones or rocks to keep the banks from washing in, and keep adding rocks to make the drain field or dry creek bed you desire.
Apply heat from a heat gun to bend the cover stock around obstacles. Hold it in shape (with gloves) while it cools and it will keep that shape. Keep the cover intact to carry the water.
Cut the insert as needed. Even in pieces the insert does its job.
Full height is 3-13/16 inches high (just shy of 4 inches). The insert takes up the first 1/2 inch and your rocks fill the rest.
Low-height Tastic Drain is 2-1/2 inches high. After the 1/2 inch insert it calls for a minimum of 2 inches of stone.
Tastic Drain is 6 inches wide.
Custom bend the cover stock with heat to create spillways and to change the direction. Trim the edges to fit.
You can walk on Tastic Drain or drive over it. If a heavy vehicle was able to squish the insert, it would spring right back.
Contractors, Landscapers, Waterproofers:
Make Money installing Tastic Drain while providing better outcomes for customers. Resellers contact us.
Get the sell-sheet here.
Here’s where we used it and it exceeded our expectations, which is why we sell it as a product. This installation saved a wet basement and allowed us to finish the basement. The finished basement includes a sump pump, which is, thankfully, bone dry!
The back of the house faced a muddy hill, no ground cover, and when it rained torrents of brown water came downhill towards the house, trickling through cracks in the foundation, and percolating up from the basement’s dirt floor.
Behind the house was a perpetual mud zone.
On one side of the house there is no rain gutter, and that basement wall oozed water when it rained.
The basement could be inches deep in water, and the packed dirt floor would be muddy for days afterwards.
First we tried a commercial waterproofing service. They excavated the back wall of the foundation and coated it with rubber. When they filled the dirt back they included a french drain, one of those 4 inch corrugated perforated tubes bundled in peanuts, burried about a foot deep behind the house. Then plain 4 inch corrugated burried along the side of the house, downhill to the curb.
That worked, somewhat. That basement wall dried, but the area behind the house was still muddy and the basement wet, seeping from below.
Ironically, the french drain, though it relieves hydrostatic pressure, can be a reservoir, holding water in its corrugated coils, keeping the ground soggy.
Tastic Drain to the rescue. The area behind the house was excavated a bit so it sloped downward, away from the foundation, about 18 inches, towards Tastic Drain. The Tastic Drain was filled with rocks, big rocks, lots of rocks, a drain field of rocks. Tastic Drain is only 6 inches wide but it drains the whole drain field.
Full height Tastic Drain was used, but trimmed a bit at the high end to provide clearance for a deck to be built over the bed of rocks.
When it rains, water pours down the hill, under the deck, through the drain field and out the Tastic Drain, downhill to the side of the house.
A piece of Tastic Cover is twisted and trimmed to guide the flow around the corner of the house.
Around the side of the house the water dumps into Tastic Drain ground level rain catcher that runs along that side of the house. We used low-height Tastic Drain positioned to catch drips, graded the dirt on both sides of the drain, then overfilled with small stones which disperse the drips from the roof.
The drain goes downhill and at the end we installed a catch basin into the french drain’s 4 inch line.
The Tastic rain catcher worked great. It made that basement wall completely dry.
The surface drain behind the house completely changed the ground, making it dry for the first time, ever. We even landscaped the property to direct run-off into the deck where is disappears under the deck and pours out the Tastic Drain.
So it all worked out great in the end. The basement dried and we could pour a cement floor. But some stuff did not go as planned.
First, we had hoped to put a catch basin into the french drain at the corner of the house to take the hillside run-off pouring out of the Tastic, but it was too difficult to excavate the french drain at that location with enough play to install a catch basin. So instead we twisted some Tastic cover into a spillway to dump the runoff into the rain catcher on the side of the house. The rain catcher had been working great but we didn’t know if it would handle the extra volume of water. It worked. The low-height rain catcher handles the torrents spilling from the back of the house.
The second issue of our own making was, we installed the Tastic Drain rain catcher on the side of the house first, while the back of the house was still a mud zone, and a lot of muddy run-off went into our pretty river rock (a lot, clumps of grass and weeds nesting in the stones).
Once we got the drainage done in the back of the house the mud stopped coming.
The rain catcher continued to work great, handling all the run-off despite the dirt, but we wanted to freshen up the stones and clean out the mud.
We yanked clumps of grass and most of the mud came with, easily separating from the Tastic. We hosed off the stones and shuffled through them, sending the dirt downstream. Then we scooped up a bunch of stone out of each section, enough to lift the insert up a bit and blast away muddy bits undeneath with the hose. Some stones would try to get under the insert and we had to fish them out to get the insert back in place. It worked. What we saw was that only fine silt had come through the weep slits and the lower level was not getting clogged up. It hosed off easily enough.
Since then the only maintenance is blowing off the autumn leaves. Easier than cleaning rain gutters on a ladder, and less frequent, not urgent. It never clogs.