Manufacturing & Industrial Drainage

Applications · Commercial & Municipal

Trench drains for production floors, wash bays, forklift aisles, and shipping yards — specified around the loads and washdown your plant actually runs, and quoted same-day.

The problem: forklifts, washdown, and no tolerance for downtime

The drain that fails in a plant is almost never the channel — it's the grate in the forklift aisle. A loaded lift truck on small, solid wheels concentrates its weight into a contact patch a fraction the size of a truck tire's, and it crosses the same drain hundreds of times a shift. Grates chosen off a highway rating alone crack, rock loose, and eventually stop a production line while maintenance chases a replacement.

Around that core problem sits everything else the floor has to shed: sanitation washdown, equipment rinse water, condensate, and the stormwater that sheets across the yard toward your dock doors. Long, continuous trench runs handle wash-down floors far better than scattered point drains — the slab slopes one direction to the channel instead of being dished to a dozen low points.

Load class: rate for the wheel, not the vehicle

Load class is where industrial specs go wrong. Solid forklift wheels punish grates far harder than the same gross weight on pneumatic tires, so the standing rule is to spec by concentrated wheel load and go up a class when in doubt. Our Load Class Recommendation Guide covers classes A–F in detail; in practice:

Forklift aisles and dock aprons: Class C (H-20) minimum; Class D–E where heavy lifts or yard trucks cross constantly.
Wash-down and process floors without vehicle traffic: Class A–B.
Yard and truck courts: Class D–E depending on traffic.

Recommended systems

ACO PowerDrain (S100K · S200K · S300K)

Polymer concrete · ductile iron grates · quote-only

ACO's heavy-duty polymer concrete line with boltless ductile iron grates — the specification for forklift aisles, dock aprons, and yard crossings where grates take constant concentrated wheel loads. Three widths cover threshold runs through high-capacity yard drains.

ACO KlassikDrain (K100 – K300)

Polymer concrete · wide grate range · quote-only

General-purpose polymer concrete trench for the rest of the site — perimeter runs, employee parking, lighter interior floors — with grates from pedestrian duty up to heavy vehicular, including stainless-edged KS variants for food-adjacent or corrosive areas.

NDS Dura-Slope

Pre-sloped HDPE · stocked online

A pre-sloped HDPE channel system that installs fast and resists a broad range of dilute chemistries, well suited to wash bays and process floors. Dura-Slope grates run from pedestrian-rated plastic to heavy-duty ductile iron; the Dura-Slope FAQs & resources cover sizing and grate selection.

BG Filcoten

Fiber-reinforced concrete · non-combustible · quote-only

Mineral fiber-reinforced high-performance concrete channels — rigid, non-combustible, and dimensionally stable, a strong fit where plant fire codes or temperature swings argue against polymer channel bodies. See the Filcoten FAQs & resources.

Rounding out the site: catch basins collect point runoff in yards and truck courts where a full trench run isn't warranted.

Retrofit and replacement

Not every project is a new slab. If an existing channel body is sound but grates are cracked or rattling loose under lift traffic, replacement grates — matched to the channel make, width, and a corrected load class — solve the problem for a fraction of a re-pour. Send us photos and dimensions of the existing run with your quote request and we'll confirm what fits before anything ships. Full re-pours can be phased bay by bay to keep production moving.