Main Introduction
Drainage and base preparation is the part of artificial turf installation that most property owners don't see and that most installation shortcuts happen in. Artificial Turf of Katy offers drainage and base preparation as both a component of our full installation service and as a standalone evaluation and remediation service for existing systems with drainage problems. The case for leading with drainage is simple in the Katy area. The soil profile across Katy, Cinco Ranch, the Energy Corridor belt, Fort Bend County, and the I-10 west corridor is clay-dominant. Clay doesn't drain. It holds water until it can't hold any more, and then it saturates. An artificial turf system installed on a shallow base over Houston clay will pond water at the surface after significant rainfall. It will stay wet longer, which accelerates infill compaction and pile matting. It will create an anaerobic environment in the base that causes odor in pet areas. And in extreme events — Harvey-scale events — it will become temporarily submerged if there's nowhere for the water to go. Harvey demonstrated all of this across the Katy area in 2017. Properties with proper drainage base preparation drained and recovered. Properties where the base was inadequate showed their failure modes under the load. Our drainage approach for the Katy area uses coarser crushed aggregate than standard suburban base specification, routed for active drainage toward a defined exit point rather than relying on passive percolation. Base depth is set for the clay soil profile rather than for a sandy soil environment where percolation handles the work. Drainage-first is not a marketing phrase for us — it's the reason our systems perform in the conditions that Katy actually experiences.
