How to Stop a Leaky Stone Foundation - Basement Waterproofing

we're in westport connecticut and we're about to waterproof an old stone foundation it's actually in pretty good shape they've tried to do several different things to stop water from coming in and we're going to show you just what they've done why it didn't work and then the right way to go about waterproofing an old stone foundation [Music] these foundation walls are actually in pretty good shape the old stone foundation is actually my favorite these things will be here a lot longer than we will that's for sure and any foundations being built today these foundations will outlast them the one thing is is the way that they're set up they do leak like crazy so there's all kinds of different ways that people go about trying to stop water from coming in through you can see they have some foam that was shot in here they've actually put some mortar in after the original build of the stone foundation and then they've gone and tried to raise up the floor this is a real common way of of trying to waterproof a basement never works we've talked in other videos about a cold joint where you put wet cement against a dry cement or against in this case against a stone wall trying to hold water back you can't hold water back it's always going to find its way through a seam where concrete would butt up to either another concrete or to a cement wall like this and if you see they've gone to a pretty drastic effort there's a trough built there so the door can actually flow open and in notice the depth of the concrete that they've added at a much later date in order to try to stop the water from coming into the basement we have a complete report of a floor here if you can see it's done in sections there's a seam here and then another seam here another one there and then it goes a bit wider and then another seam and we also have water coming in underneath the walls so based on what we were looking at before trying to determine just how thick of a report that they did we don't know how much cement is right up against the wall right here and that's going to determine a lot of how we we install the system so what american dry basement systems has done is designed a system where we call it a step out where we step out and we actually put our trench here and we're able to use our drainage board it's that gray waffle board that you will see and have that go down the bottom part of the stone foundation and then across the soil that we left in the ground basically what we're doing is creating our own footing moving the drainage in and eliminating that probability or or likelihood of any kind of undermining pulling soil out from underneath a big old heavy stone foundation wall now the way stone foundations are originally made is that obviously they excavate an area and they try to get the larger stones down at the base to act like a footing because they traditionally don't have a regular footing that would be underneath like a block foundation or a poured foundation wall they sometimes they don't use actual mortar or cement old walls used to use a mixture of mud and horse hair and that was the the mortar they used and actually acted as a really nice mortar but as we go along here you can see the walls are in decent shape where they've you know re-pointed them in other words putting cement back in between where the rocks are and then you can see we've gotten some deterioration here they've gotten a lot more flow of water the the mortar has been washed out of the walls here and then they've gone back and tried to re-point and re-patch in order to hold that water back and water out something else about the construction of the old stone foundations is that they would lay their stone and then they would mortar from the the inside and then also they would mortar from the outside a lot of times the mortar wasn't continuous all the way from the inside to the outside so inside stone foundation walls there actually can be paths that are hollow that when water does get in it can follow through the and onto the basement floor from the outside everybody thinks that when they see this it's one solid piece of concrete and stone but oftentimes that's not the case there's a lot of empty gaps that allows water to travel between the stones behind where this is all mortared out [Music] we've taken the floor out we had here this is all part of the new repair this is much tougher concrete than than what we ran into just just past if you see that the difference in the uh the color of the two concretes this actually has some metal in it also so a much tougher concrete this is this was much easier to get through but going back to what we were talking about before this is all rock in other words underneath this big beautiful stone wall they put the biggest boulders down there to act like footings and this one has it seems to be set up very nicely like that so we got a lot of really good stability and we can work our drainage in around it now anywhere where we run into where it might get back tighter we'll see here it's still rock underneath there but if it gets to the point where we're getting down to some soil what we're going to do is we're going to leave the soil intact like along here and then do our trenching for our drainage out here and then this is going to act like a footing something that just other waterproofing companies have no idea about and can cause a lot of damage if they do have a lot of drainage down below where the bottom rock on a on a stone foundation is because that causes undermining work and the the flow of water can actually pull soil out from underneath this wall you don't want to do it that can cause movement in the wall cracking and things like that or even worse if we look along here we've created this footing all along here the entire length around the entire foundation so that we're never going to have any issue with undermining this big heavy stone foundation wall [Music] [Music] [Music] so we're recreating all the way along here we have our super great product on top of our stone on top of our pipe it all surrounded enormous amount of drainage that's pitched this way around in our our heavy duty commercial pump setup is down at the other end but if you can see our gray drain board here our waffle board another term is called flow channel what that does is allow any water that gets through the wall water to leak through if it does it's going to go right down behind our flow channel and across where we made that false footing so there's going to be no undermining and as we step out where our drainage is it's going to allow the drainage to be managed a foot away from the wall thus keeping the support underneath this big heavy duty stone foundation now we've super slurried the wall you can see where we've that gray mark that's up about uh close to three feet high on the stone foundation a couple things about our super slurry it's a product that has a crystal ingredient that grows into into concrete and actually eliminates all the porosity of concrete concrete by nature is porous it acts like a slow sponge and absorbs water when we use our super slurry it's most effective when the wall is completely pointed in other words it's all filled in with concrete around all of the openings of the stone itself because what the superstar is going to do it's going to grow in and strengthen the bond of the concrete around it and actually make it a much better seal to hold the water out so if you don't have the the concrete there and it's just an open hole that lets water through well that's when you're going to plan b which is it would it would go down and get behind our flow channel or we would have a vapor barrier up there or you'd go to the expense to repoint the wall and then that would block out all the water by just literally plugging each one of the openings around all of the stone [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] effectively waterproofing behind an oil tank is really tricky what we've done is we've gotten our drainage we've come across here we've left a big chunk of the floor intact we've tunneled underneath we left a big chunk of the floor intact and then we continued on on the other side with our trench of pipe and stone allows us to have the pipe to come through all the way through here and then continue down around the foundation what we're doing with our drain board here is we've run it across the wall behind the oil tank and this is all going to be covered with super crete and it'll it'll feather out and be nice and smooth and actually a real clean look to it and the super crete will actually grow into the existing floor so any water that would get through the part of the wall that's directly behind here would flow through our drain board and down into our pipe which is right below here and going right into our our commercial pump station here so it's going to be a really nice finished clean look if you found the video informative then hit that like button and the notification and if you could hit the subscribe so you'll get our next video as soon as it comes out but until then enjoy your dry basement [Music] you

Channel: American Dry Basement Systems

Views: 162,005

Keywords: basement waterproofing, basement, waterproofing, stone foundation, sump pump installation, sump pump, french drain, basement waterproofers, basement waterproofing installers, stone foundation repair in connecticut, sump pump installers, home improvement, rubble foundation, fieldstone foundation, stone foundation leaking, stone foundation waterproofing, rubble foundation waterproofing, contractors, Peter OShea, stone foundation repair in new york, american Dry Basement Systems

Id: wT-8sh6RyIo

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021