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When the soil starts to dry out around here, some of our clay soils, they actually start to shrink
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That can spell big problems if you have a shallow foundation like in a room addition, a garage
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maybe your house built on a slab. You can get all kinds of big settlement cracks
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Well, how can we solve that? The thing to do is to actually make the soil down deep think that it's raining
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That's easy with this proper tool. The reason we're drilling a hole is we want the water from your garden hose or your sprinklers
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to get down into the soil quickly instead of just staying up on the surface and getting
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taken by all the nearby plants. We're going to drill one hole here right now just to show you how easy it is to do
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When you go to do it at your own home, you're actually going to drill holes at two feet
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on center about two feet away from the edge of the foundation all the way around your house
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I about 16 inches deep now and that really important The reason why is we want any water
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that falls either via rain or through your garden hose to get deep into the soil rapidly
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And the way we're going to do that is I'm going to pour into my hole this standard rounded small
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pea gravel and you just fill the hole all the way to the top with a pea gravel and then watch what
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happens. You'll be shocked how much water it'll take. Look at this water. It's just flowing down
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into the gravel. Watch this. Look how much water this hole can take and as I pull the hose away
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the water disappears. It's flowing down through the gravel and deep down into the soil and that's
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a good thing is it keeps the footer or the lower part of the foundation moist and wet
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all the time so that the clay soil doesn't move. I'm Tim Carter, Ask the Builder. If
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you want to discover more home improvement tips, go to askthebuilder.com
