How much gravel needed in drywell next to house

I have an 8 ft boulder retaining wall that is next to the house and faces the house. The pit is probably about 6 ft wide and 8ft long. Here is a diagram. The "o" are the boulders.


YARD

--------------ooooooo--------------
xxxxxxxxxxx|PITPIT|xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx|PITPIT|xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx---------xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
HOUSE


My two questions are:

1. How much, and what size gravel should I have in here?

2. How does gravel even help drain in a case like this, or is it just cosmetic?

3. Soil constantly flows down into the pit and dont see obvious place where its falling in (maybe from between boulders). I tried layering landscape barrier up top, but doesnt help. Is best option to plant plants everywhere?

4. I put in a dry well as per recommendation of an inspector, but dont see how this will really help in this tiny space. Can anyone explain if this was useful? I dont really have a lot of water that goes in there, but gutters have been known to back up some times and spill into the pit

5. I am also not sure how far to dig down below the stucco before I put the rocks in.

 

Welcome to the forums.

I see your diagram but an actual picture or two would be a big help. http://www.doityourself.com/forum/el...rt-images.html

I take it you put the pit in as the inspector required a drywell for runoff. Usually the pit would not be right next to the house. Any extra water producing items like downspouts would be directed directly into the drywell.

Do you water problems in the house ?

A pit is normally filled almost to the top with crushed rock. You could keep the rock shy of the level of the grass..... cover it with gardening fabric, then top soil and seed.

 

The rain gutter is not related to these. It empties far away on the lawn.

No water problems yet. Inspector didnt require it, just a recommendation. Starting to think this was a bad recommendation

I dont know what to call this kind of "pit" buy that seems to not be the best word.

P.S. Someone should fix the image uploader so that it tells you max dimensions cause I had no idea why it kept failing.

 

Is this pit/drywell directly against the house's foundation ?

 

All those walls go straight down to the basement so yes.

theres nowhere to channel this water away from the house. You can see the dry well in the middle so I guess the idea was.a ace to store water should.it.get wet down there

 

In my last post. Hard to type on these small phones