Drainage Systems Around Pools: Different Options & How to Choose

When visitors picture Florida, it’s all sunshine, theme parks, beautiful beaches, wild national news stories, and maybe some alligators. It’s like heaven on earth but with a few crazy caveats.

You know better. You know that quintessential Florida looks a lot like this:

The sun is shining down, glinting off the water as you float free as can be in the pool. It’s blissful, it’s serene, and now, it’s raining. Suddenly, you’re scrambling out of the pool and running from the crack of the lightning and rolling boom of the thunder.

Florida seems to flip a switch between sun-filled paradise and flashflood without rhyme or reason. When it rains in Florida, it really rains. Without much warning, your perfect backyard pool has begun to flood the surrounding area.

In moments like these, your mind fills with frantic questions. Where will all that excess water go? Will the pool water damage your soil and hurt the vegetation? Will it flood and damage the landscape you worked so hard to create?

The Importance of Proper Drainage around your Pool

The first and most obvious reason to implement proper pool drainage systems is to protect your home, landscape, plants, and trees from damage. Any type of flooding can be damaging to these and other features of your property, and because pool water is often saturated with chemicals or salt, it can be especially problematic.

Drainage issues can affect more than just the health of your plants, too. They can also lead to issues with the pool water itself. If the water is flooding and overflowing into plants, grass, and other areas of your landscape, the soil, dirt, and other materials in those areas could wash back into your pool. This can create quite the mess, sure, but more importantly, it can be a chemical nightmare for your pool water, especially if you use fertilizer.

There is a myriad of reasons that pool drainage systems built into your landscaping are helpful. If you’re curious about what can be done to your landscaping to better allow your pool to drain, we’ve got good news—we’re here to help.

What Kind of Drainage Options are Available?

The best way to avoid pool flooding is to have a plan before you ever install the pool. Installation professionals will evaluate several factors to ensure no drainage issues occur, including the slopes and natural draining features of the property. When able to work with the natural topography of your location, drainage is much more efficient.

Because water runs downhill, natural slopes can sometimes be used to direct excess water into the desired drainage locations. Of course, this is often impossible, especially given the extremely level nature of much of Florida’s terrain. In cases where preexisting slopes cannot be used, a different type of drainage must be implemented to protect your home, your landscape, plants, trees, and more from flooding.

When it comes to drainage problems, there are plenty of solutions that we can provide. We’ve laid out a few of our favorite pool drainage systems below!

French Drains Around Pools

French drains, also known as strip drains, are essentially large troughs that are built into your land. Due to this simple yet effective design, they can handle a large volume of off-flow.

This type of drain is typically dug deep into the ground, is covered by a long, narrow gate, and collects water underground in order to funnel it elsewhere. Often, French drains will be placed around the deck of the pool, in the ground, or blended into the deck floor of your pool.

French drains are an excellent solution if your pool is on a slope with the decline leading toward your home or your plants. The excess water will run off into the French drain, collect underground, and funnel somewhere predetermined instead of drowning your plants or flooding your home.

Reshape or Regrade the Land

Though this process is quite involved, it’s one of the best ways to guarantee that drainage issues around your pool are a thing of the past.

Reshaping or regrading the land can mean many things, and the strategies used will be dependent on your unique property and need. Swales are a common feature implemented to slow and direct runoff. You can even reconstruct the entire flood-prone area to ensure no floodwaters drain toward your home or exquisite landscaping.

Creek Beds

A man-made creek bed is exactly what it sounds like—a creek bed you install in your yard with river cobble, weed fabric, boulders, and more in order to control the flow of pool or rainwater across your landscape. Not only does this add aesthetic value to your pool area, but it’s also incredibly functional, channeling the overflow of pool water away from your home and other areas.

Proper Paved Slopes Around Pools

It’s important to ensure that your paved surfaces are doing more than just providing aesthetics—they should be functional, too. We can help to make sure that your solid surfaces (sidewalks, pool decks, driveways, terraces, etcetera), have proper slopes built-in to help direct runoff in the right direction. This can be accomplished by grading the pool installation area and by installing retaining walls to aid with drainage issues.

How Landcrafters Can Help With Pool Drainage Systems in Tampa Bay

There are hundreds of questions that go hand-in-hand with pools, how to keep them draining properly, and what you can do to ensure the health of your lawn isn’t going to be negatively affected by a flooded pool. Luckily, we’ve been in the Florida landscaping business for two decades—that’s two decades worth of pool-flooding-the-lawn experience—and in that time, we’ve established some pretty clever, efficient landscape tricks to keep your lawn happy and healthy.

At Landcrafters, we want to help you as much as possible, and if that means coming in to assess your pool drainage problems, you better believe we’ll be over in a flash to help. To schedule an appointment, work out a quote with our office, or just chat about the problem plaguing your pool, give our office a call at (727) 493-7123.