[s-cars] More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Keeping Water Outof the Basement

[JC]

+1 to french drains and needing to move the water, not make the house a
submarine. as Calvin says, you can do it from the inside of a completed
house if you have to, but the only real solution is giving the water a nice
path to follow.

BTW, I just did a mini-version of this to stop some water incursion around
our basement door this fall and if you get it right (aka figure out the
exact water path) it might be less work than you think - I put in about 6
feet of french drain in the right spot and now it's dry as a bone.  another
friend of mine stopped his massive basement flooding problems by putting in
french drains over 15 feet away from the house - didn't touch anywhere near
the house, but re-routed the groundwater flow before it could get to the
foundation.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: s-car-list-bounces at audifans.com
> [mailto:s-car-list-bounces at audifans.com] On Behalf Of Calvin Young
> Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 23:06 PM
> To: s-car-list at audifans.com
> Subject: [s-cars] More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About
> Keeping Water Outof the Basement
>
> The way to keep water out of the basement is to get the water
> to to go somewhere else.  This means draining it away by
> gravity, not using paint.  In time, nothing else works; water
> will get to the place it wants to go.  It is the irresistible
> object that will eventually move all immovable objects.
>
> The procedure before the house was built should have been:
>
> 1. Parage the walls with portland cement 2. Use a french
> drain tile system (perforated drain tile covered with
> stone) on the perimeter of the exterior walls 3. Cover the
> stone with a nylon fabric made to prevent the stone from
> getting fouled by the dirt.  Get the outlet of that drain to
> a place where gravity will take the water to your neighbors house.
> 4. Create swale around the house to get the water away before
> it sinks into the ground in the first place 5. use a
> guttering system that also gets water away from the
> foundation and into the swale
>
> Get enough water trapped around the foundation of a house and
> it will find a weak spot and come in.  Collected water weighs
> over 8 pounds per gallon.  As it accumulates, it creates
> tremendous hydrostatic pressures.  Just imagine thousands of
> gallons trapped in the soiled
> around your house, just looking for the one weak spot in your wall.
> It becomes like water trapped in a water tank.  The deeper
> the basement, the more pressure.  No paint can stand up to that.
>
> Ironically, the weakest spot is perimeterusually not the wall
> itself, but the "cove" area,  that place where the wall and
> the foundation
> meet.  This is the weakest spot and the pressures are the greatest.
> I have had three homes with over two feet of water magically
> appear after week-long drenching rains that suddenly became
> downpours.  To equalize the pressure, it filled all that
> space in the empty basement.  Just like us after three or four beers.
>
>   If you do not want to go through all that expense, next
> best is to create a french drain system inside the perimeter
> of the house with a sump pump system that will pump out the
> water that does come in; taking care to get that water into a
> swale away from the house for obvious reasons.  Yes, you have
> to cut the concrete all around the perimeter with a saw for
> about four inches or so and put in the tile, stone and
> fabric, and then re-cement.
>
> next best and cheapest is to just dig a hole and put in a
> sump pump with rock in the bottom.  The water, if there, will
> find its way to the low spot and be pumped out.
>
> Forget drylock, it looks good in the commercial, but is no
> alternative at all.
>
> If you insist on a sealer, Sears and other companies used to
> sell a product called "Crack Stop" that you poured on the
> exterior of the house near the wall after making a trench.
> This sealed the cinder block on the outside.  I think Drylock
> may have put them out of business because it seems like it
> worked better.
>   The last thing you want to do is sandblast the inside of
> the house, you will NEVER get rid of the dust and you have no
> idea what is in that paint, could be lead and that will kill
> you and your newborn.
>
> Cal
>
> >
> > Said basement has concrete block walls with atleast two coats of
> > paint.
> > I am going to finish off the basement using standard 2x4 stud
> > construction, but feel it would be prudent to seal the block walls
> > with Drylock or some similiar product. In order to do this
> I need to
> > strip the walls of the current paint.
> >
> > Does anyone know of a mediablaster that "recovers" it's spent media?
> > Also does anyone recommend a sealer other than Drylock?
> >
> >
> > Thanks
> > Chris
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