Best Sandbag Alternative - Hydrabarrier Ultra 5 Inch Height. - Water Diversion Tubes That Are the Lightweight, Re-usable, and Eco-friendly. Choose from 6 ft, 12ft, or 24ft lengths

We have been experiencing sudden, torrential downpours over the past two months. The ground water level is at an all time high, meaning water just runs off the surface in raging streams. The deluges are so bad lately, that I became concerned for my "basement", which is not a basement but the lower floor of a split level. I am glad I am cautious because I bought this and installed it across the sliding glass door to our lower patio. Well, a few days later we had another cloudburst--1.8 inches of rain in 75 minutes. The water was 5 inches deep against the hydra barrier, but my basement was absolutely dry. Yes, sandbags would work, but there is a peculiar effect of the hydra barrier. As the water pressure against the barrier increases, it compresses the barrier horizontally and expands it vertically. So while this is nominally a six inch barrier, during the worst part of the deluge the water depth was at 5 inches and there were two inches to spare. I am having a storm culvert added to my yard and have planted a lot of new shrubs and ground cover (the backyard is heavily wooded and grass does not do well) to mitigate the rain wash. In the meantime, this barrier is ready should I need it. I will leave it up whilst on vacation or traveling to be safe until I am certain the water mitigation is successful. It took 8 minutes to fill this, by the way, and we have relatively low water pressure here. Some notes: My patio slopes slightly away from the house, as it should, but the barrier tended to slide away from the house edges whilst filling. I solved this with three partially (30%) filled sandbags. I place one at each end anchoring the barrier near the house, and one in the middle. These were more than sufficient to hold the bag in place. Once the bag is filled it seems to stay put, but I left the sandbags in place. Believe me, rolling out this empty hydrabarrier and adding three light bags did the trick, and was faster and easier than deploying the estimated 24 bags of 40 pounds each it would have taken to build a ten-foot barrier six inches high. As I said, it took eight minutes to fill it. On the downside, the fill valve is an odd size. It does NOT accept a standard hose so you must either just hold it in place (tedious) or do what I did. I purchase a quick connect fitting (male) and it screwed into the fill valve. The valve is not designed for this, but it worked. I added a shut off valve to the end of the hose and now I can connect the hose and fill it easily. One must also allow the air to escape during filling, and the quick connect allows me to disconnect the hose, bleed out the air, reconnect it and resume filling. As I said, this process still took only eight minutes. Some sort of self-bleeding, quick connect attachment would enhance this greatly, but for $12 you can at least add a quick connect. Money well spent if for nothing more than peace of mind. But in my case, it saved thousands in water intrusion repairs.

It look good quality but I do not use it yet

Awesome , saved my garage

The garage built into our new home has been flooded four times in the last six months. I tested one of these in front of that garage door. Although water comes down our driveway, there is a slight up-slope the last couple feet. So, instead of leaning against the door, it simply rolled away. Concerned that harder wedges might puncture the material, I tried a 3/4-inch strip of styrofoam. Hah! The thing rolled right over it. We will be returning these for a refund. Meanwhile, an Internet search led to a product in Amazon's inventory that had not appeared in a couple hours of my searching for an alternative. We will next try the Floodworx Water Barrier It's a similar product but has what I would call an "outrigger," meaning it is less likely to roll away.

This was fairly easy to set up. Just laid it in the area I wanted to block and divert the flooding rainwater (before it started again). Took less than ten minutes to fill up with water. Getting the plug in and cap screwed on proved to be a bit challenging LOL but overall it’s working great at keeping the neighbors horse pasture from flooding my backyard again.