How to Stop a Basement Wall from Leaking

in this video I'm gonna show you how to seal a leaking basement wall from the inside so we're well into the basement remodel and we've got in our last video we did all of our vertical fire stops and so I'm getting ready to do my horizontal fire stops in my insulation now for my basement as I mentioned previously I'm gonna be using an XPS foam board insulation now it gives me an ar-10 value because it's two inches thick and it acts as a vapor barrier against the cold concrete poured concrete foundation walls so before I throw that on I want to make sure I don't have any water coming in so I'm in South Jersey I just had a couple big rain storms after I had already taken off the builders insulation so I noticed there were a couple spots where I had a little bit of water coming in nothing major but I don't want that stuff coming in you know over the next 20 30 or 40 years however long we own the home and coming behind that XPS installation because then it can't get and run under it and then come up and I so I just want to deal with that now the best way from what I can understand to - to seal a foundation wall is to do it from the outside so what you can do is you can excavate and put like a rubber sealants against the foundation where the crack is and then backfill that in that's not terribly convenient for some of these gaps and leaks mostly because number one they're very minor and a couple of them are in the front of the house so I'd have to like dig out our flowerbeds and all that if it were a major leak it would be worth it but for a minor league I think I can do it with this this way and so what I'm going to be using there's a couple different ways of sealing it from the inside one method I've seen has been to inject an epoxy solution so you find your crack and you drill a couple holes on either side of it and then you inject at this epoxy solution that fills it in the gap and hardens and then seals it from the water from coming in any further I in a couple videos at least one video where someone showed that that system had failed and they fail frequently my concern with the epoxy would be it's not the same material as the concrete so it may heat and expand and contract at different rates than say the concrete foundation well so I can see how that over time may may loosen and fail and allow water past it the other method I've seen has been hydraulic cement and that's where you mix a store-bought hydraulic cement powder with some water and you shove that you kind of force it into the the gap where the leak is coming from with your hands that's the method I'm gonna be using in this video kind of makes a little more sense to me since it's concrete against concrete the only thing I have to do that's going to be a challenge is to expand the gap so you can't just plug hydraulic cement into like a really thin hairline gap you actually have to open the gap up a little bit with it with a hammer chisel so we're gonna be doing that in this video and showing you how to use the hydraulic cement to to do that [Applause] okay so I've gone ahead and cleaned out the chiseled crack and brushed it with a stiff bristle brush to clean it out and what I've gone and done is mixed my hydraulic cement with my hands that's what per the instructions on the quikrete container it sets very quickly so you only have that tell you to only mix as much as you can handle in about two or three minutes in terms of application the other thing I'm going to do is be wetting down this seam that I'm applying it into that way it's the concrete in the wall isn't taking out any of the moisture of the cement and then I'm just going to pretty much start low and jam it in there this is really really messy so while I'm applying it I'm trying to both work it in and make sure it's flat when I add my installation boards onto this it doesn't interfere with how it sits against the wall so I only got a a 2 or 3 feet up the wall and the hydraulic cement is becoming really difficult to work with at this point so I'm gonna stop there mix some more and then try to do the rest of the wall and and work quickly so that's all it took to get this crack filled I had to do the wall in like two batches so hopefully this will hold and keep any water from running out behind my insulation panels in our next video what I'm going to be doing is doing a couple little things to prep the wall for my XPS installation board and we'll be installing those installation installation boards along with my horizontal fire blocking so my horizontal fire blocking is both going to integrate with the XPS installation and as well as the framing so we'll actually be able to start framing out the basement soon and things will start to move a much quicker hopefully so if you thought this video was helpful give us a thumbs up and subscribe and we'll see you the next one

Channel: John Our Home from Scratch

Views: 195,897

Keywords: basement, leak, waterproof, hydraulic cement, tutorial, remodel, renovation, leaking, foundation, foundation crack, basement wall, stop a leak

Id: YnAwZtXLbbw

Length: 5min 57sec (357 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 18 2018