Window Well Covers and Drainage in Fort Collins

Window well covers and drainage are the two cheapest things that keep a Fort Collins basement dry, and the two most often skipped. A fitted cover runs $175 to $650. A drainage rebuild, meaning a new washed-gravel column under the well tied to the foundation drain, runs $350 to $1,100. Together they are what stand between the swelling clay under this town and the window seal in your basement wall.

Why drainage comes before covers here

The Colorado Geological Survey’s map of the Fort Collins quadrangle lists swelling and collapsing soils over the Pierre Shale as one of the area’s two most common natural hazards. Its hazards page describes bentonite and montmorillonite clays that expand up to 20 percent by volume when wet and exert up to 30,000 pounds per square foot. Two things follow for a window well.

First, the clay does not drain. Water that reaches the bottom of a well set on native soil stays there. Second, wet clay pushes. Standing water in a well wets the clay behind the well and against the foundation, the clay swells, and the well and the wall take the load. The flooding well and heaving well pages are the two ends of that same process.

The city’s own rule for new wells addresses exactly this: they shall be designed for drainage and connected to the building’s foundation drain (if present). We build every well that way and rebuild old ones to the same standard.

What a drainage rebuild is

1. Excavate the well below its base, removing the silted rock or bare clay at the bottom.
2. Lay the column. Washed gravel wrapped in filter fabric so the clay fines cannot migrate back in and silt it shut.
3. Find the outlet. The footing drain where the house has one, which is the city’s preferred connection. Where there is none, a deep gravel dry well. On a lot where water has nowhere to go, a pumped outlet, quoted on site.
4. Fix what fed the problem. Grade corrected to fall away from the house. Downspouts extended away from the well. CSU Extension’s advice for homes on expansive clays is to keep landscaping along the foundation to non-irrigated mulch and xeric plants and to direct roof drainage away from the foundation; an irrigated bed wrapped around a well is the opposite, and we say so.

Covers

Clear polycarbonate. The standard cover: light passes, snow and leaves do not. Fort Collins averages 55.8 inches of snow a year at the CSU campus station, and a well that fills with snow becomes a well full of meltwater in March.

Custom-fit. For oversized, composite, or stepped wells, and for wells on a slope.

Metal grate. The city’s guide allows wells in a series to use a metal grate cover, and requires fall protection for new wells adjacent to doors and walking surfaces. A grate is the fall-protection answer on a well beside a patio or walkway.

Every cover on an escape well must release from inside without a key or tool. We do not install anything that traps a person in a well.

On a rental, the cover can be mandatory. The City of Fort Collins Landlord-Tenant Handbook requires that window wells within 3 feet of a driveway or sidewalk be protected with guardrails or grate covers. It also holds the escape opening itself to the code in effect when the house was built or a 720 square inch net clear opening, whichever is greater, with a sill no higher than 48 inches. If you rent the house and the well sits beside the drive, a grate is part of the rental standard rather than an upgrade, and a cover that blocks the opening from inside would fail the other half of the same rule.

Grade and gutters do half the work

The Colorado State University Extension guidance for homes on expansive clay is short and specific: limit landscaping along the foundation to non-irrigated mulch areas and xeric plants that need little supplemental water, avoid planting trees next to the foundation, and direct drainage from the roof away from the foundation. Its yard and garden notes add that much of Colorado has heavy clay soils. Every well we drain gets the same treatment on the surface: soil regraded to fall away from the house, downspouts extended past the well, and a plain word about any sprinkler head or drip line that is watering the foundation. On a lot where the grade tips in, a perfect gravel column simply fills more slowly.

Timing matters too. The NOAA normals for the Fort Collins station on the CSU campus put the median last spring freeze on May 1 and the first fall freeze on October 6, with 16.10 inches of annual precipitation and 55.8 inches of snow. Drainage rebuilds are excavation work and run roughly April through mid-November; covers can go on any month, and a cover installed in November keeps the winter’s snow out of a well that will not get its rebuild until spring. The broken or missing cover page covers the failure modes.

Pricing

These match the pricing page and the well cost calculator. Colorado labor runs higher than the upper Midwest and the ranges reflect that.

The ten-minute check before you call

• When does it fill? Rain only points at the cover and the grade. Spring thaw points at the drainage column, because frozen ground sends meltwater sideways along the frost line (30 inches here) until it finds the loose backfill around your foundation, and the well is the low point.
• Look at the grade. The ground within six feet of the well should fall away from the house.
• Find the downspout. One discharging near a well is the most common preventable cause we see.
• Dig a hand’s depth in the bottom. Loose rock that keeps going means the column is probably intact. Clay an inch down means it is gone.

If the bottom is packed clay, no cover and no caulk will help. That is a rebuild. If the steel is rusted through at the soil line, the well comes out with it; see window well replacement. If the water has already reached the window, read the leaking basement window page before replacing the window, because the window is rarely the cause.

Send a photo straight down into the well and one from six feet back. Free measure, flat quote, across Fort Collins, Wellington, Windsor, and Timnath.