Hoping some of you all can help me out. I have a house that was built in the 50s. And added onto in 1990. I have a full basement under the house and one part of the addition. The back room which is 16x20 is on a crawl space. I have footer drains around most of the house. But one side wall and the crawl space does not have drains. I already dug down around the footer of the crawl space and installed a pipe and used gravel up to grade. I’m now worried that the gravel will allow the frost deeper into the ground and it will reach the bottom of my footer. Our frost depth is 18-24 inches. I only dug about 4 inches Below the top of the footer. So I have about 18 inches of gravel around the footer now plus how ever much dirt is below my pipe the the bottom of the footer. I have no idea how deep it is. Do I need to add another layer of fabric and cap the gravel with dirt or will the gravel not cause any issues?

Where does the footer drain that you installed go?

Posted By smartwall on 17 Jul 2021 01:02 PM
Where does the footer drain that you installed go?

It runs around the house and is day lighted at the street.

That's what I was afraid of. The daylight means the drain pipe can introduce freezing temps to the footer. Try fabric and sand on top. The gravel has enough air movement that it could affect your footers. Pray for global warming.

You could put a 2-4 foot wide sheet of xps over the top along that wall.

https://ceresgs.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/90e7ed_d79c0e628e4e4944907873274f8e98c9.jpg