How to siphon standing water from your lawn with a garden hose

If you have standing water in your yard or garden and you want to drain away as much water as you can to help the area dry up and become less muddy, you may be able to do it by creating a siphon with a regular garden hose. You can do this even if you have no power, no generator, and no pump.

In this video I show you how siphons work, how to start a siphon with a garden hose, and what the process looks like to drain standing water from a lawn.

You don't need a significant elevation drop to accomplish this. Even a few inches of drop over 50 or 100 feet is enough to get a siphon going and it doesn't matter if you need to route the hose uphill in between.

I was able to drain about 1.3 gallons/minute (5L/min) with my garden hose. That's about 78 gal/hr or 1900 gal/day. If you are draining a large amount of water and need to go faster than that, you can use multiple hoses or larger diameter hoses. You can find videos on youtube of people draining large ponds with siphons using 6" PVC pipes, although those are trickier to get started.

Standing water is not good for grass and lots of other plants. I have sections of dead grass in my yard where it has repeatedly flooded. In my yard this is a temporary countermeasure since I often get flooding after a good rain. The long-term solution will be a french drain but in the meantime I can help keep my yard less muddy and try to save the grass by siphoning off the standing water.