05/22/2026
We recently had a call about a wet basement that we investigated. After asking a lot of questions, we began to suspect a footer tile issue. We started locating tile around the house that we could access without digging and had a suspicion about the problem after looking at the neighbor’s new fence line.
It turns out the previous owners of the property had family living next door and had connected their footer tile to a field tile on the neighboring property. Years later, ownership changed on both properties and the neighbor installed a fence. You may have already guessed it… a fence post had been driven right through the old footer tile that nobody knew was there.
The moral of the story: try to keep records of all your drain tile for yourself and possibly the next owner. Take pictures and save drawings whenever you can to help keep track of tile locations. Repairs can become costly for problems that may have been preventable. Thankfully, today we have a lot more tools available to track drain tile than they did years ago.
