Drain tile is a corrugated plastic pipe laid at the bottom of the foundation wall and used to drain excess water away from the foundation. (scroll down for why it’s called a tile.)
EXAMPLE:
The drain tile under my house is made from PVC.
Why is it called a “tile”?
Like many things in the modern world, we get the name “Drain Tile” from our farming ancestors. Clearing great pieces of land to farm in had more challenges than removing trees and transporting rocks. Even with perfectly tilled fields, there would be another aspect of Mother Nature to contend with, water.
Drainage is important throughout the world, and farmers know it better than anyone. In order to properly farm their fields, they could not be flooded. Farmers needed an efficient way to drain their fields after rain so as not to ruin crops. Trenches were initially dug, graded towards low spots in the field, allowing the water to drain away (mostly into somebody else’s field).
Eventually, cylindrical clay pipes were laid in the trenches, end-on-end, in order to allow those trenches to be filled in. These 4” diameter, 8” long pipes would not be sealed at the seams in order to allow water to flow into them. The stream inside the pipe would then flow water away from the field to keep the crops safe.
Farmers who had done this to their fields would consider those lands to be “tiled.” The clay pipes were then referred to as “Drainage Tile” and eventually “Drain Tile.” The plastic pipe used today bears little resemblance to the old Clay Drainage Tile used in the farmers’ fields, however remnants of it can be seen in older homes.