Hey this is Larry Janesky with the All Things Basementy video series. Basement waterproofing, basement finishing, foundation structural repair and nasty crawl spaces too. Today, we're going to be talking about how to waterproof a basement with stone walls. Let's take a look! When talking about how to waterproof any foundation a lot of people think automatically well, let's dig it up outside and waterproof the walls and put a drainage system on the outside. But the biggest problem is digging. I mean how, look at this beautiful landscaping and this porch. In order to do this right, this landscaping would have to go a giant hole is dug all that dirt is on the rest of the lawn. This porch really would have to come off of the house because the foundation is on the other side of it. You have air conditioning units, driveways, sidewalks, decks. That all would have to come off of the house in order to do that properly. And that just becomes a huge problem. Besides that, if you have a flat building lot and you put a drainage system in where's the drain going to go? Let me show you how we can do that on the inside of the house. You know, stone foundation walls can leak at any elevation off of the basement floor because they're porous and they have air spaces in between the individual stones and in the motor joints there's a lot of space. So, water can get through the wall and flow through these spaces in the wall. And it can leak through at floor level just below floor level and come up at the floor wall joint. Water can leak two feet off the floor or six feet off the floor. And so, what we need to do are two things. We need to install a drainage system in the perimeter of the basement floor to catch that water and drain it away to a sump pump And, we need to install a vapor barrier and there's a number of different options that could be installed on a stone wall so that this water when it leaks through the wall it runs down into the drainage system without being seen by the homeowner. If there were things leaning against the wall, they don't get wet. Nobody knows it's leaking at all. It's drained silently and easily away without causing any damage or any, even, increase in humidity in the basement. And this is a WaterGuard Drainage System that gets installed at the perimeter of the floor to take care of our drainage requirement. And let's take a look at the vapor barrier we're installing on these stone walls. So here we see the stone walls that leak. You can see the efflorescence which is minerals from the dirt that is brought through the wall and the water evaporates and it leaves the minerals behind but, this is our leaky stone wall and we've got this vapor barrier called CleanSpace that's installed on the walls in this area where the homeowner is going to finish the basement. And it's tucked into the WaterGuard System here you see. So this is tucked behind so if any water leaks behind this vapor barrier, it goes into this drainage system and this floor is going to be re-concreted so that no water can get from these walls onto this floor and this wall can't be wet either. We've run a four inch PVC pipe from the drainage system into this, little odd in this basement, we have this little room here with a dirt floor but we've run this four inch PVC pipe to the sump pump liner so that the water from the entire perimeter of the basement can run to the sump location and get pumped out. And here we have, actually, what's called a TripleSafe Sump Pump System. This will have three pumps installed in it. An AC-operated 1/3 horsepower primary pump, an AC 1/2 horsepower backup pump, and then a battery-operated DC pump in case the power goes out. This will pump the water out and that's the final path for the water that leaks into the basement to get back out without ever bothering the homeowner. I hope this video and how to waterproof a basement with stone walls was helpful. If you like this video, like or share it with your friends. See ya next time on All Things Basementy!
