Is there a way to add a wash stall (light use) with a very very simple drain system?

[vxf111]

When I designed my pole barn, I left one “stall” bay open (12x12) for what I anticipated would one day be a wash stall. I guess I was a little naive, but I thought that all it took was lining the walls with something waterproof, a concrete base sloping back to a drain, and a pipe under that drain leading the water away from the barn.

I was talking to my BM and she was telling me what an ordeal (and $$$) it was to put the wash stalls into their barn. It was around $40,000! Which included digging some sort of big underground system with a huge amount of digging/earth moving to take the water away. Now, that’s a 20 stall barn and heavy use. I’d be using my wash stall maybe a couple times a year to wash 3 horses and more regularly to rinse buckets etc.-- but not like GALLONS OF WATER A DAY use.

Is there a simple/cost effective way to do this? My barn is on a built up pad, I can’t just have a drain that points downhill-- much the way the downspouts on my barn take the water and send it downhill? Is there some way to do this that’s more in the $5-8,000 ballpark? Ideal welcome.

BTW I already have the water hydrant there and I had already budgeted/expected to have to do a compacted base and concrete. I was thinking all I needed to add to that was a drain and some pipe plus some sort of wall covering-- but I guess there is more to it?!

[yourcolorfuladdictio]

That really depends upon if you intend to use it during the winter. If yes, then I’d want the pipe down below the frost line so that it doesn’t get frozen and cracked. In NC we don’t have many “frozen” days and can get by with concrete sloping towards the wall and a crack for the water to drain under. Simple and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

[SugarCubes]

$40,000?!? :eek: Um, no. We had our landscaping/drainage guys put a channel drain along the back wall of the wash stall (I think the drain itself was $50) and the water drains into a buried corrugated pipe that flows down about 20’ behind the barn into a pop up drain thingy that disperses the water. The corrugated pipe was buried by hand, so it isn’t buried that deep, but it does slope downhill. I want to say the total cost for drainage was around $100?

So since you’re on a built up pad too, I’d imagine you could have a similar set up, just run the pipe down hill so the water flows out into either a pop up or a french drain.

[Gloria]

Talk to your plumber. I have a drain at one side of the wash bay, which then through a very short pipe into a big “bucket” just a foot away outside of the wall of the wash bay, sunk into the ground. The bucket is filled with gravel, and has a pipe sticking up above the ground. I cannot remember the name of this type of configuration, but your plumber should know. It has served me very well. I can wash three horses consecutively and never had flooding issue.

[JB]

@vxf111;8511142

When I designed my pole barn, I left one “stall” bay open (12x12) for what I anticipated would one day be a wash stall. I guess I was a little naive, but I thought that all it took was lining the walls with something waterproof, a concrete base sloping back to a drain, and a pipe under that drain leading the water away from the barn.

That’s exactly what I did. My barn stood for a couple of years with a dirt floor and an unusable (for washing) wash stall because of the dirt. When it came time to put concrete in the aisle and wash stall, it was each - it slopes to the middle back where there’s a drain, and a drain tunnel was dug from there, under that back wall, and out the back where, fortunately, the ground already slopes away. Easy peasy

I was talking to my BM and she was telling me what an ordeal (and $$$) it was to put the wash stalls into their barn. It was around $40,000! Which included digging some sort of big underground system with a huge amount of digging/earth moving to take the water away. Now, that’s a 20 stall barn and heavy use. I’d be using my wash stall maybe a couple times a year to wash 3 horses and more regularly to rinse buckets etc.-- but not like GALLONS OF WATER A DAY use.

How you can, or have to, or should do a wash stall depends a lot on where things are situated. I can imagine there are some setups where an elaborate dry well has to be built under the wash stall to handle any and all water use, which would be pretty costly. Alternatively, it might be possible to put a smaller dry well outside the barn for the stall to drain into, which would be cheaper.

Is there a simple/cost effective way to do this? My barn is on a built up pad, I can’t just have a drain that points downhill-- much the way the downspouts on my barn take the water and send it downhill? Is there some way to do this that’s more in the $5-8,000 ballpark? Ideal welcome.

Yep, see above, exactly what I did. And my whole entire concrete, including the drain, digging the trench, and the pipe was less than $5k.

BTW I already have the water hydrant there and I had already budgeted/expected to have to do a compacted base and concrete. I was thinking all I needed to add to that was a drain and some pipe plus some sort of wall covering-- but I guess there is more to it?!

Is the hydrant in the barn, or outside? One thing to consider about any concrete on top of a hydrant is if anything about it ever breaks. I was bemoaning (a little) the fact that I didn’t have the hydrant put in in the wash stall while I was having the concrete done, and the plumber who came to do the hydrant said he’d have tried to talk me out of it anyway because of any potential maintenance issue with concrete on top.

[BeeHoney]

Your drainage options will be dictated by the lay of the land around your barn. If the ground outside the wash stall slopes away, drainage will be easy, I would shoot for an open air drainage situation a bit away from the barn (and protected so a horse can’t injure itself on the pipe) and consider yourself exquisitely blessed.

Otherwise, you will need a sort of “dry well” which is a large hole filled with large rocks (and then covered with turf so you don’t know it is there). The water from the wash stall drains to the dry well and soaks into the ground. Now, the problem with a dry well is that if you tend to have any hair, dirt or manure or other solids going down your wash stall drain, there really isn’t anywhere for the solids to “go” and they would quickly form a clump/blockage where the drainpipe empties into the drywell. So, you can have the wash stall drain to a sort of collection box (I have no idea what it is called) where the solids settle out, and then just the liquid flows out into the dry well. This collection box periodically would need to be dug up, opened, and cleaned out. This is probably the best solution for you.

Or, if you have a bathroom in the barn you could have the drain connect to the same septic system.

[horsepoor]

Where do your gutter/downspouts drain to? What we did when we added the wash rack in mine was to tie the wash rack drain into the pipes that took the gutter/downspout water away from the barn. So they had to locate where those were (it all goes underground and way away from the barn then drains into the woods – here in the PNW, we move water away from buildings as far as possible!), then connect the wash rack drainage pipe into that. Also added a clean out system where they connected – I don’t know the exact term, but it is a place with a mesh bucket that catches all the crap (literally! manure, hair, rocks, whatever gets washed down the drain) so we can empty that periodically and don’t have it building up in the pipe system.

[Miss_Motivation]

http://stablemanagement.com/article/well-designed-horse-washing-facilities

Article covers the basics, which are:
-Water runs downhill
-Horses need room
-Concrete slab is worth it

[trubandloki]

I think BeeHoney covered most of it.
I will add that what kind of soil you have an how much you want to contaminate various wet lands in your area might also have some affect on how you do this.
Day-lighting your outlet is great except when you realize you will be using soap and conditioners and such in that wash stall.
If you will be dumping your discharge into a pond or waterway you might want to think twice about doing it that way.

It sounds like your barn owner put in a full septic and leach field.

@vxf111;8511142

I’d be using my wash stall maybe a couple times a year to wash 3 horses and more regularly to rinse buckets etc.-- but not like GALLONS OF WATER A DAY use.

Washing buckets daily will for sure use gallons of water a day.

[vxf111]

More details to follow. This is helpful! The hydrant is inside but I plan on leaving a non concrete area around the base. Horses live out so I only wash buckets maybe 10-12 days each winter on the rare days they stay in overnight during cold snaps

[bathsheba8542]

As with other posters, I have a drain out of the wash stall that goes down a few feet into 4 inch PVC that slopes away from the barn. About 30 feet away I have a containment system that is basically 6x4x4 feet filled with #stone (4 feet underground to within about 6 inches of the surface that is filled with a tank into which the PVC flows, and then an out pipe into the containment system. It works great for me without any problems. I don’t use it much in cold weather, but do dump buckets occasionally and have had no problems with freezing.

[trubandloki]

[QUOTE=vxf111;8511774]
More details to follow. This is helpful! The hydrant is inside but I plan on leaving a non concrete area around the base. [/QUOTE]
When we added concrete to our barn floor (was dirt previously), we used paver stones in an area around the hydrant. We made it large enough that digging all the way down to the bottom of the hydrant was not going to be impossible.

[fordtraktor]

I don’t think this will be a problem for you at all. I wouldn’t dump buckets down it in the winter though, I’d lug them outside. it might ice up at the end and get blocked if it is cold/awful enough you are keeping them in. Then your pipe might burst and wreck the whole thing. If you had it draining deep into some kind of drain field that would be different and it wouldn’t freeze below the frost line, but much more expensive. The cheap version you’ll have to be careful with a little, but the cost savings would be worth it to me.

[OTTB2]

Quite simple really… Get a liner of some sort and dig a french drain system, gravel cover with mats and that would do the job great… You could so do concrete with a mild slope to a center drain that would work too. I have no idea how a wash crack could cost 40 grand…

[vxf111]

By way of clarification, BM wasn’t necessarily telling ME that I was going to spend $40,000, she was just telling me what they paid. Apparently in addition to some fancier stuff in the barn (hot and cold water, 2 wash bays, one with a heater inside and sliding doors to shut-- they did have to install a lot of pipe to take the water away to a leach field (that’s the word I was looking for) because the barn isn’t uphill and otherwise there would have been major water issues all over the place. My layout is, thankfully, much better from that perspective-- but I still didn’t realize I needed more than a hole to let the water go out and flow downhill I guess I do need more. Not $40,000 and a leach field more, hopefully, but more.

I was planning to leave an area open around the hydrant so we could later go in if we needed. Pavers that can be lifted up is a GENIUS idea!

If the pipe comes out of the barn and leads the water away, no horse can step there. This is the front of the barn and all the pasture/horse area is behind the barn. People will walk there, but not horses.

No bathroom in the barn, no plans for that either. It’s a simple little barn at a farmette, I can pee in my house if I need to

The gutters just feed off the sides of the 4 corners of the barn. I don’t have any problem with that because the barn is up on an elevated pad so the water just goes out the gutter, runs downhill, and gets absorbed. There are 2 corners were it’s kind of muddy as a result, but that’s more because there’s little grass there (I had to sacrifice that area while growing grass elsewhere). On the 4 corners where there is grass, there is no mud issue.

No lakes, streams terribly nearby. Not really. The whole property slopes very very gently back and then I had a big elevated pad built for the barn so that water would roll away from the barn. So far so good, except in CRAZY driving rain no water gets in–and even that little bit SHOULD stop once I get concrete in my aisle so there’s no a huge gap between my sliding door and the “floor,” which is now just dirt.

What kind of contractor am I looking for here? The people who put in my water line/wells and then the concrete guy comes and finishes once they set up the piping? Half the trouble for me is identifying the right contractor!

[ASB_Stars]

You need a contractor who does what is called “flat work”. Anyone who does poured concrete foundations can point you in the right direction, When you have your aisle floor poured, you need to have them put in the drainage system for the wash stall, which will include a drain box, and the piping to take the water out. I have a utility tub in my wash stall, which is also plumbed through the concrete. If you haven’t thought about a hot water heater, now is the time. I couldn’t live without hot water in my wash stall, and I live over top of my barn. Being able to wash the horses with warm water is NOT over rated. Also, rinsing out buckets, mixing feed, and thawing out frozen buckets, are all things that are so much easier with the hot water right there.

This is not hard to have done- they will build out a frame for the concrete, around your doors, etc. You’ll need to talk to them about the drains, etc. Be sure to have them use concrete with pea gravel and polypropyline fibers in it- it is better for a barn aisle, and have them use a “street finish” on the concrete, so that it is not slick. it is still easy to sweep, but the horses stay up on it better. I have mats in my grooming/blacksmith area, so that they really don’t slip.

Good luck!

[BeeHoney]

@trubandloki;8511763

I will add that what kind of soil you have an how much you want to contaminate various wet lands in your area might also have some affect on how you do this.
Day-lighting your outlet is great except when you realize you will be using soap and conditioners and such in that wash stall.
If you will be dumping your discharge into a pond or waterway you might want to think twice about doing it that way.

That’s a GREAT point. When we installed our wash rack I had more than one plumber refuse to do the job because they were worried about somehow getting in trouble for doing something that did not conform to waste water regulations. I told them several times over that I was currently washing the EXACT SAME horses with the exact same products on some mats over gravel in an outdoor area, so this was no different, but nonetheless, apparently in some locations there are very stringent rules about where “wastewater” can drain. Eventual solution was to drain wash stall to septic system (same as for bathroom) which was deemed acceptable to plumbers.

I can picture a 40K wash stall after flooring, drainage system, walls, lighting, hot water heater and piping. Either I’m crazy or I have become that cynical after running a farm for as long as I have. Something you picture as being simple never is. Costs are always a multiple of what you think they will be. Nonetheless, I do believe our OP can install a wash stall for less than that amount.

[Gry2Yng]

I have two plumbers. One gets really bent out of shape about “code” and the other does not. One HAD to put backflow protection on my wash stall, which would spray all over me every time I turned it on, the other took the backflow protectors off for me. My farm is zoned ag and is not subject to much of the “city” code, but some guys just can’t get over it. They have a license to protect, I suppose.

[Lord_Helpus]

You need to check with your building dept in your county. If I had gone underground, building codes would have required me to have TWO separate septic tanks! (Still not sure why). By having the concrete slope to the middle of the back and cutting out 1/2 a cinder block, the water from the wash stall and from the washing machine flows out onto the grass behind the barn (which slopes away from the barn). The grass is always green outside the wash stall.

[Miss_Motivation]

And huzzah to whoever built your barn on an elevated pad. This simple step often eludes builders of barns… in all price ranges.

One barn on our place- the big, expensive one that was already there- was more or less built at grade or a little below. Stooopid, and it always causes problems. Makes me want to throttle the original builders who should have known much better!