KD, I ended up laying about 120 feet of 4-inch COEX to carry away my downspout water. I used the universal (red can) cement for the fittings and it worked well on those joints that fit fairly tight. I used a few splice fittings, which tended to be sloppy, but I relieved some of the stress on them by wrapping them with Pasco 10-mil PVC pipe wrap tape. When this house was built, the contractor ran the downspouts into 4-inch corrugated about 18 inches deep. The property slopes front-to-back, so the corrugated runs to the back of the house, where amazingly, the runs from the two sides of the house were connected together via about a 40-foot run of 4-inch perforated corrugated. This was right against the foundation, such that water would bubble up out of the ground along the foundation in the backyard. I unhooked the perforated run at each end and connected the two side runs to my new COEX line. I also have some Multi-Flow lines that I'm draing into this new COEX pipe. So far this winter, I'm high and dry. Thanks for responding to my questions last summer.

onward, Go with the 4" black-corrigated pipe. The reason being as you suspect, 3" pipe could freeze up and you'll be starting all over again with 4" pipe. Something else that worked out for me is to use a 90 degree corrigated elbow from the downspout to lead out to the rest of the corrigated pipe. Put some stone down first for a base under the elbow. This way when it rains "real heavy" the corrigated pipe will not pull away from the downspout. Best of luck with the project, rredogg

Agree with the succulents idea. Sedums alone offer numerous options. One word about those polymer water absorbents: I tried them in large planters in our downtown back in say, 1990. The idea was, of course, to reduce the amount and frequency of watering, this being a logistics nightmare. Thing is, then as now, if we start out running on Monday morning, we can just get to everything in our system twice during the work week. Adding these polymers changed nothing. It's not as if now we could just water them once. Also, even though you mix them into the soil as well as you can, inevitably, some are going to end up right at the surface. No big deal I suppose, but it's somewhat jarring to see little blobs of jelly all over the growing medium surface following every rain or watering. Personally, I don't think these things work. Sure, they do absorb water and they do sell up to much larger than they started out. But we don't use them for those reasons. We use them to reduce our workload and our need to water. This never happened in my experience. Finally, as I said, this was quite a while back. Maybe they're better now, I don't know. But for the price of this material-used to be quite high-I never felt they were worth it. Of course, ymmv. +oM

How large of an area are you talking about? Can you take pictures? If it is not a huge area, I might lay concrete pavers as close to each other as possible, covering the ground completely and then fill over the top with a thick layer of rock. The pavers will keep the water from displacing the soil or splashing on it, and should keep the area clean. Then I'd get some pots and plant some water loving plants in them and line them up on top of the rocks...kind of like this (altho these don't appear to be water loving plants): another idea, if your spot isn't too big...would be to install the rock and then use metal or tile pipes to get the plants up off the ground a bit and keep the dirt contained...