Culvert is encasement for flowing water. Hence culvert pipe is a BIG (corrigated) tube (2' and up) that usually goes under the roadway to pass water from one side to the other.
You must,ve seen it before, just didn't know the name.

I have seen culverts before... in fact, we put one in where I used to live. Well, had one put in.

but I had never seen such a long tube used as culvert before, nor do I know of places where they put them instead of just having a ditch.

Here is a link that might be useful: this is the thread with the picture

I've always just heard it called " culvert" I had never heard the word " tube" added.
ivamae

Oh, now that I see the pic, I understand more. Is this not a plastic tubing? We have used it many times for different purposes. For example we used it when we put eavestroughs on a new shed. We didn't want the water going on the ground so we put the eaves trough to drain into about 300' of this tubing so that the water would run to the nearest creek. We have also used it as protection for a water pipe that ran from a country well to our house. The water pipe was threaded through this and then everything was buried under ground as was the tubing from the eaves troughs. You can get this in either solid or perforated, depending on whether you want the water to seep into the ground along where it is laid.
ivamae

Here in Nebraska we have a lot of little streams that are dry most of the time, but with a lot of rain can fill up and start running water. Most of the time they put them under roads, we have 2 under the driveways in our house connecting the ditches.

Stacie
girlsingardens

I know what a culvert is...and I know what a French drain is like you put around a house or building...it is usually not as big around as in the photos.

But I have never seen "culvert tubing" before. Around here, our culverts are made of metal and go underneath the road from one side to the other.

I'm wondering what something so long and slinky would be used for above ground.

I have neve seen it used above ground, but it is used a lot in farm drains in Ontario
ivamae

Maybe it's used above ground in areas where the ground is too rocky to dig a trench or to drain an area temporarily? I've seen that kind of pipe at construction sites, where it's used to pump water out of large holes.

We've used something like that ourselves, but it has little holes in it, all over. Around here that is called "perf pipe", but I don't know if Toni's has holes in it. We use it to drain water away from the side of the house and the driveway.

I'm thinking this was rolled around a reel of some sort, and cut to a needed length, and used in draining or transporting water to a certain spot. Like maybe irrigation. Just a guess though. I called Toni to ask her, but she didn't answer. Maybe she's teaching today. I left her a message so maybe we'll find out later.
Leslie

Sorry, sorry for not getting back sooner. I taught 4th graders today.

The culvert in the pictures is about 1500 feet long and thousands of pounds. The diameter is only 8 inches but it took both arms and both legs for me to lift any section of culvert off the ground. We actually had TWO 1500 feet pieces of culvert to wind up that day. The spindle in the picture holds one length of tube and sits in a pasture on the other side of the fence. When I saw the culvert all twisted up in the ditch I knew the tornado hopped over our house, only destroying part of our tree line and most of the chairs and plants on my deck. We were extremely lucky. Several of our neighbors were not so lucky. One a couple, a few miles west of us lost their entire house. My FIL, lost a couple of very large irrigation pivots but they were eventually replaced. The culvert was a pain to pick up but not anything to complain about considering what others faced after this early summer tornado.

I called my dh to ask him about the pipe this afternoon, hoping I could fill you all in a bit better. Well, he was on his back putting a clutch in his truck,,,so the mini version for its use is conservation. Our neighbor who owns a construction company had been using this tube for quite some time. My dh and his farming family have to deal with so much erosion every year, they thought this would be a good answer to many of their problems. Pipe like this can be cut into whatever length needed with only a big sharp knife. As Stacy said, we have so many dry streams that turn into small rivers, our ponds overflow. The tubes can be put into dams which take the excess water from high levels on one side to a lower, safer level somewhere on the other side. Field water ways can drain into the tubes which also lead to places elsewhere, most of the time, down a winding hill. Across from our house we have a pond &
dam with another larger overflow lake on the other side. On every side of our land the water flows into that small lake, saving a lower part of our town (a few miles away )from flooding. That's it as far as I know.

Wow...you must get a lot more moisture there than we do!

But thank you for that explanation. I've just never seen anything like that strung in ditches around here.

:-)

In this area we call those things plastic drain tile, but usually only 4 - 5", sometimes 6" in diamenter, occasionally some larger. Many farmers around here plough them underground 2 - 3 - 4' or so, following the contour of the land, to drain the moisture from the ground in spring to enable them to cultivate it earlier. Sometimes they lay them in grid patterns, draining into a larger tile that follows the contour of a valley.

They used to form tiles of similar size from clay and about a foot - 15" long, then bake them, and a tiling machine would dig a trench so that some people could drop them into the ground in lines to do the same job ... they were called clay drain tile. Often in cities they were laid underground around the base of house, factory, etc. foundations in order to drain away water that might collect down there, draining it into a storm sewer.

To us, a culvert, is a larger tube, made of steel with corrugations going round it, used to drain water from one side of a road to another, or under a driveway to allow water running down a ditch to move from one side of a driveway to the other. If it were not there, the water level would rise till it overflowed that depression, then run away at the lowest point around the edge, usually washing some of the dirt away as it did so at some speed, which we called a "wash-out". A substantial pond of water backed up will wash four feet depth of dirt out of a roadway in as short a time as a half hour, more usually a couple of hours or overnight.

Cars, and other vehicles, and wash-outs don't go together well - usually to the detriment (sometimes permanaently so) of the car's continued mobility!

ole joyful

Joyful, This tubing doesn't have a single hole in it for drainage, so using it for tile would be useless. Dh does use the tile you describe though. Lots of it. After thinking about culverts, they are one of those things we take for granted. If there wasn't culverts under most entrences, in dams (spillway) and plenty of other places we would have a real mess on our hands everytime it rained.

When we used it, as I stated before, from the eaves trough down spout to the creek, we used the solid pipe. When we used it for drainage, it was the perforated one. We can buy either, depending on the pupose. Of course the farm drainage ones are perforated. We used the solid one as we did not want this water seeping into the ground in this location, as it had to pass by our drinking water well. We did not want to take a chance on it becoming contaminated
ivamae